Aspirations for higher education by people from low socioeconomic status backgrounds are now a focus of government policy in many OECD nations. This is part of a global trend emphasizing the perceived benefits of ‘raising’ aspirations among under-represented groups as a social inclusion strategy to widen university participation, but also ultimately as a strategy to increase national competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. Yet despite its importance, aspiration tends to carry simplistic meanings in much higher education policy and practice. This paper attempts to craft a more nuanced account of the term, informed by four concept-clusters derived from sociological and philosophical literatures and research, and with a more mutual relation of public and private interests. These clusters are: social imaginary (drawing on Charles Taylor); distinction (from Bourdieu); possibility/desire (derived from a range of theorists including Berlant, Butler and Elster); and navigational capacity / archives of experience (inspired by the spatial theories of Appadurai and de Certeau). The paper complements this ‘intellectual craftsmanship’ or ‘systematic reflection’ (Mills in The sociological imagination, 1959) with data drawn from a small-scale future-focused survey of secondary school students from low and low-mid socioeconomic status backgrounds in regional Australia. Approximately 250 students from 14 schools completed the online survey and indicated the nature and extent of their aspirations for the future, including their desire to attend university. Results from the survey provide illustrations that help expand understandings of student aspirations for higher education, from a group presumed to be deficit in aspirations. We conclude by arguing that more equitable and socially just university access policies require a much greater appreciation by governments and society at large of the aspirations held by people from disadvantaged communities. This entails a change in the terms of recognition requiring recognition from the dominant of the legitimacy of subaltern aspirations, worldviews and preferred ways of being.

Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and public action (pp. 59–84). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Butler, J. P. (1987). Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth century France. New York: Columbia University Press. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Elster, J. (1983). Sour grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.