The perceived inherent vice of working-class university students

This article employs a psychosocial analysis to discuss ways that working-class students interpret their struggles at university as personal inferiority rather than as disadvantage. Using life-story interviews from a qualitative study of Australian university graduates, it examines working-class students' negotiation of university culture and their own identities. The article makes use of a legal term, inherent vice, to describe a process in which individuals and institutions are disposed to viewing lower levels of cultural capital in working-class students as an indication of their 'natural' inferiority, rather than as disadvantages of inheritable, symbolic resources. Working-class students employ significant forms of 'resistance' to develop their own resources and resourcefulness. However, they do not have equal access to what Skeggs refers to as techniques of selfhood required by the dominant symbolic in the field in which they are engaged. Building on Bourdieu's development of cultural capital, habitus clive, and symbolic violence, these findings challenge deficit views of working-class students. They also raise questions about the responsibility of higher education institutions in understanding and equipping working-class students with the necessary resources, rather than relying on students to have been born with the 'right' background.