The paper seeks to understand the trajectories of students who defer entry to university. The study was conducted in Lithuania, a former Soviet Union republic. The phenomenon of a "gap year" is usually associated with young people, who decide not to enter higher education schools immediately after receiving secondary education, instead…

Recent decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the educational attainment and occupational opportunities of German women. Both the educational and occupational positions of the mothers and those of their daughters are continuously changing across cohorts. Our study aims to detect the probability of daughters to experience maternal-line…

This study attempts to explain a process of inserting global transnational elements into an undergraduate sociology course. After a review of global themes covered in introductory sociology textbooks, the author administered two projects (Global Multiculturalism and Sociology of Wal-Mart) in an undergraduate sociology course. The current study…

In the last two decades, higher education institutions have invested significant resources to internationalise, due to economic, political, academic and cultural pressures. Students play a dual role in this process: as customers, selecting institutions based on respective reputations (including the international dimension) and as outputs of…

I argue that 2011 witnessed a series of challenges to neoliberalism on a global scale perhaps not seen since the political upheavals of 1968, and that media spectacle provided the form of a series of global insurgences from the North African Arab Uprisings to the Occupy movements. Crises of neoliberalism also generated movements in Italy, Spain,…

In this article, we use interview data collected in a four-year longitudinal study of first-generation university students to answer the question: how might the ethnicity of first-generation students impact their university experiences? After briefly examining previous literature written on the educational achievement levels of ethnic-minority…

In the course of educational expansion, student populations have become more diverse. This paper represents an international literature review on the topic of first-generation students (FGS), i.e. students whose parents have not obtained a higher education qualification. On the basis of more than 70 research articles and reports on FGS from…

This paper's topic is the educational upward mobility of members of the working class. It seeks to find out what makes educational success possible and aims to build a theory of educational upward mobility. Data have been collected through biographical-narrative interviews of Austrian graduates from working-class backgrounds. Their narratives have…

This paper examines the stratification of the curriculum according to parents' education, gender, ethnicity and school sector in England, focusing on year 10 subject choices. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, we analyse both year 10 subject choices and the factors that may motivate these choices, such as liked and disliked…

Participation in the national exams is a very difficult task for Greek lyceum students as their access to higher education is highly dependent on their performance in them. This paper focuses on the students' preparation for the national exams and especially their resort to out-of-school supportive lessons in relation to their socio-economic…

Dominant conceptions of the world infuse educational experiences for young people in implicit rather than explicit ways--through becoming, as Stuart Hall argues, "the horizon of the taken-for-granted". In this article we explore these horizons as experienced by New Zealand's neo-liberal generation, currently "in transition" from high school to…

The paper addresses a number of issues concerning policy and curriculum in post-compulsory education and training (PCET). Firstly, it seeks to locate PCET within its socio-economic context as it is this that frames curricula within the learning and skills sector and serves to legitimate its particular form. Secondly, the paper addresses the manner…

This article focuses on the construction of dyslexia in higher education and explores the nature of negotiations between students, lecturers and academic institutions over diagnosis, support and assessment. Disabled students are now entitled, under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), to reasonable adjustments in assessment.…