Abstract

This presentation details key findings from a relatively underutilised source of data in Higher Education (HE) research – correspondent data from the Mass Observation Project at the Mass Observation Archive in Sussex, England, as part of a holistic study of public views and experiences of HE. In January 2003, the Labour government released its White Paper, The future of higher education where Charles Clarke, then Secretary of State for Education and Skills’, unveiled plans for universities in England and Wales to introduce ‘a new Graduate Contribution Scheme’ in 2006 known as ‘top-up fees’ where universities could seek contributions of between £0 and £3000 per year for each course. The government proposed abolishing the upfront annual tuition fee of £1000 which The Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 had already set and instead allow students to defer repayment until after graduation. Students would be loaned the funds by government and make repayments from their income once they pass a specified earnings threshold. The White Paper also proposed increasing the proportion of students aged 18-30 in HE to 50 per cent by 2010.
This shift from public to private financial sources for HE (Antonucci, 2016) and widening participation in HE in the early noughties is explored using life writing data from the Mass Observation Project at the Mass Observation Archive in response to its Spring 2004 Directive, Part 3: ‘Going to University’ (March 2004 Dir. No. 71). It gathered correspondents’ views just before the HE Bill - criticised by some commentators as a step towards the privatisation of HE at the time - received royal assent. MOP correspondents were asked to share their views on who should have access to HE and who should pay for it and this paper will use the Directive responses to explore attitudes to paying for and widening participation to HE. My presentation will also explore the views of the MOP correspondents in the context of contemporaneous discourses of HE and reflect on correspondents’ gender, age and prior experience of HE. The paper will also reflect upon the author’s experiences of using MOA data in HE research which, although widely used in History, is not as common in the Social Sciences.