Exploring Sports Students Orientations Toward Volunteering In A Post-1992 University

This paper explores the orientations and expectations that students enrolled on sport degree programmes at a post-1992 higher education institution (HEI) in the UK hold towards volunteering.

The massification and increased marketization of higher education (HE) in the UK has unfolded in parallel with a widening participation and social mobility agenda (Hayton, 2018; McLaughlin, 2024). In conjunction, and reflecting neoliberal ideas of citizenship, individual responsibility and personal engagement with the market economy, in-built volunteering, service learning, and work-related components have become commonplace within HE curricula as HEIs have sought to a) gain a market advantage when recruiting students and b) boost graduate outcomes such as employability (Hayton, 2017).

Indeed, Green (2018) notes that ‘post-1992’ universities in particular feel pressure to prioritise graduate ‘employability’ given that working class students are more likely to attend post-1992s than pre-1992 universities and because the uneven labour market has typically favoured students from pre-1992 institutions. For context, former polytechnic colleges in the UK (most of which were established in the 1960s and had a vocational focus) were transformed into universities under the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, with the aim of increasing the level of participation in HE by those groups who, until then, had been largely unrepresented in the HE system. The role of post-1992s remains as pertinent today as McLaughlin (2024) iterates that working class students continue to exclude themselves from, for example, ‘elite’ HEIs due to a perception that they may not belong in them.

Yet, whilst there appears to have been a closing of the gap in university enrolment by students from socioeconomic backgrounds (SEBs) traditionally underrepresented in HE, earnings gaps between young people from different SEBs have largely remained the same over the past decade - illustrating that although expanding access to HE may have improved educational mobility, social mobility has remained stagnant (Social Mobility Commission, 2024). Although volunteering, if not an obligatory facet of university curricula, is strongly encouraged as part of HEI employability discourse, students can be resistant to such impositions if they lie out of kilter with their own expectations, aspirations, and dispositions (Holdsworth & Brewis, 2013). Threadgold (2020) demonstrated that while HE students from relatively low socioeconomic backgrounds (and often first in their family to go to university) commonly think that a degree alone will be enough to get them a job, students from more middle-class backgrounds more vigorously pursue additional activities, such as volunteering, to ‘lubricate’ their success.

This paper therefore draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s logic of practice to examine students’ behaviours, dispositions, and values in relation to volunteering (Bourdieu, 1992). In doing this, Bourdieu’s cornerstone concepts of capital, habitus, and doxa, in combination with his lesser applied ideas of illusio and hysteresis are used to unpack students’ orientations and commitment to volunteering as well as the logics underpinning their (mis)alignment with such practices (Bourdieu, 1992; 2000).

The paper reports on the qualitative findings of a broader research project to understand student volunteering, particularly of those from non-traditional backgrounds. It does this by drawing on data from 14 semi-structured interviewees with Foundation and First Year students enrolled on sport-based degrees at a post-1992 university in England wherein over 40% of its undergraduate students hail from traditionally under-represented (widening participation) backgrounds. Adhering to Bourdieu’s theory of practice – which has proven influential in non-sport focused studies into educational inequalities, student aspiration, and social mobility – the data were reviewed and analysed separately then collectively by each member of the research team to identify dominant and repeated themes in line with Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus.

For many interviewees, volunteering and the formation of a volunteer habitus developed from their active participation in organised youth sport. The paper discusses participants’ cultural orientation towards volunteering, if and how this is geared toward their future employability and career aspirations, and the implications of such findings for HEIs that embed (often obligatory) volunteering in and across their programmes of study.

Participation in organised youth sport served as a gateway to volunteering for those sport students presenting with a volunteer habitus. Tensions between necessity and freedom from it govern students’ inclinations towards and engagement with volunteering – and this suggests that the cultural capital and symbolic value attached to such practices by interviewees does not match those of contemporary employability discourse nor strategic middle-class career investment behaviours, even in those participants who exhibited an established volunteer habitus. This research contributes novel applications of Bourdieusian theoretical tools to our understanding of the nexus between HE students, volunteering, employability discourse and social mobility. Implications of this research are that structural mechanisms reproducing social practices advantage or disadvantage students according to their socioeconomic background and stocks of capital (Threadgold, 2020) – the paper will therefore close by considering how volunteering might be more effectively broached and scaffolded by HEIs for students from relatively low SEBs.