ABSTRACT

A key policy goal of expanding educational opportunities is social mobility, an outcome more recently linked with access to elite education. In Pakistan, elite universities, universities that enroll students from elite social, political and academic backgrounds, have expanded the access to include working-class students, students who otherwise could not afford to study at the elite universities, through outreach programs. This study is focused on these working-class students and their lived experiences in elite universities of Pakistan, examining how they navigate academic, social, and cultural life within institutions historically shaped by and for privileged classes. It investigates how class-based dispositions, aspirations, and challenges influence their university journeys, identity formation, and perceptions of social mobility, through in-depth interviews. Twenty-two (22) working-class students from two elite universities, who formed part of the sample, were identified and interviewed through purposive sampling, used in combination with snowballing to identity participants for richness of data, after establishing an inclusion criterion. Three faculty members were also interviewed to know how they experience and understand the arena of a classroom, whose members belong to vastly different social classes, educational backgrounds and cultural capital. The findings reveal a persistent mismatch between students’ inherited dispositions and the dominant culture of the university, resulting in feelings of alienation, emotional exhaustion, and symbolic exclusion. Key sites of this struggle include language, clothing, food practices, spatial dynamics, and peer interactions, where elite norms remain unspoken yet powerful markers of legitimacy. While outreach students often engage in strategies to fit-in, they are reminded of their place in the field through markers of class identity and lack of cultural capital. Instead, students experience a cleft habitus, torn between their working-class origins and parts of the elite habitus they now inhabit. The study argues that elite universities reproduce class hierarchies, through subtle and embodied forms of exclusion that privilege those with inherited cultural capital, even after providing access to working-class students through inclusion programs i.e., outreach programs.

By unpacking the emotional and symbolic costs of upward mobility, this research contributes to critical debates on meritocracy, inclusion, and inequality in higher education.