This paper explores the growth of higher vocational education in non-university college providers of vocational education (VET) in Australia. Demand-led growth, has allowed non-university college providers to enter the higher education system and offer Batchelor degrees normally associated with universities (Kemp and Norton 2014). As the growth of vocational institutions providing higher education is a major international development in the field of higher education (HE) (Trow 2006) answering questions about the effects of this growth on social mobility through the case of Australia has increasing wider relevance to the growing European field of scholarship on college based higher education (Kuhlee and Laczik 2015) because policy in Australia frequently refers to and draws on European systems. The conceptual framework informing the research design and analysis draws on both Bourdieu (1977/1990) and Bernstein (1990) who have each developed understandings of education as fields or sites of cultural and structural mechanisms that mediate the maintenance and reproduction of social inequality. The paper applies thematic and critical discourse analysis to the messages associated with the marketing of undergraduate degrees and the presentation of teaching, curriculum and assessment to students in the three largest publicly owned non-university providers. Data analysed from the three case studies include: semi-structured interviews with 9 senior college staff; media/marketing materials, institutional strategy and curriculum documents and government-collected enrolments data. The analysis explores how providers position themselves to support social mobility and who participates on their programs and whether the position these providers play is different from Anglophone or German speaking country models (Graf 2013; Powell et al. 2012). The data analysis shows tensions and ambiguities in the institutional missions and effects. New government owned non-university providers of Bachelor’s degrees present mixed messages by claiming to provide a distinctive form of applied higher technical knowledge and a mission to redress system inequalities for those from low-income families without experience of higher education. Participation data reveal a different account; the majority of students recruited are from a wider range of social groups, including international students and those from more affluent backgrounds trying to maintain their social advantages. This analysis of how vocational institutions are seeking to be distinctive providers in higher education is significant to understanding whether the system is becoming increasingly vertically stratified and stretched between providers (Marginson 2016, Wheelahan 2016) in different global contexts.

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