This paper examines the take up of Bachelor degree offerings from government-owned vocational institutions in Australia within a heavily marketised, high-participation context and how this compares with the UK context. In contrast to established, often well-regarded higher vocational education settings in many parts of Europe (Graf 2013), Australian vocational education has a historically lower status than higher education. These colleges of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) have traditionally been concerned with sub-degree qualifications with a particular emphasis on skills for employability. More latterly however, there has been an increase in these types of institutions providing bachelor degrees – a field that has become known as Higher and Vocational Education (HIVE) (Webb et al. 2017). In contrast to similar offerings in the UK (e.g. foundation degrees; Bathmaker et al. 2008; Parry 2009), in Australia HIVE degrees constitute only a very small proportion of both vocational education and bachelor degrees (Gale et al. 2013).

Given its small but increasingly important part of the sector, and given the intersection of VET and HE, very little is known about who takes up these new degree offerings, and the aspirations and archives of experience (Appadurai 2004) that lead them to do so. This is in contrast to the large body of research on HE and career aspirations in Australia, the UK and other European nations (e.g. Gale & Parker 2015; Spohrer, 2016; Baillergeau & Duyvendak 2017).

Using the theoretical contributions of Appadurai (2004) and building on existing work in the field (Henderson 2018; Bathmaker 2016), in this paper we identify a new emerging group in relation to aspirations for higher education (HE). Traditionally, the literature tends to consider two aspirational groups: those with ‘high’ aspirations for HE who seek out high status institutions and courses, contrasted with those from disadvantaged backgrounds often positioned as having no aspirations for HE (e.g. Archer, Hollingworth & Halsall 2007). We identify a third group that draws on a different ‘archive of experience’ and aspirational capacities (Appadurai 2004), privileging subject content over positionality in pursuing HE and the careers that flow.

While the extant research associates HE participation and socioeconomic status, drawing on a current project involving researchers from both Australia and the UK and focused on college-based HE, we argue that this association is less clear. Our data suggests that students who choose HIVE as their first preference draw on different archives of experience and as a consequence tend to privilege the subject content of their degrees and their utility in the labour market, over the positional value of the institutions they attend. This line of argument challenges the view that vocational education is often regarded as a last resort if aspirations for university are thwarted. It also questions the view often espoused by governments (in the UK, Australia and elsewhere) that vocational education is an alternative to university or is a pathway to university for those from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g. Kemp & Norton 2014).

This paper draws primarily on three related and complementary data sources from an ongoing Australian Research Council project involving researchers from both Australia and the UK: 1. Groups interviews with a total of 42 domestic and international students enrolled in eight different vocational degree courses at two different institutions in two Australian cities; 2. An online questionnaire of 463 domestic and international students, which enquired about their reasoning for choosing a vocational degree. This survey was an adapted version of the Futuretrack survey used in the UK (Purcell et al 2008); 3. Applications data from people who applied for a higher vocational degree in one Australian state as provided by a central tertiary admissions centre. These data include the range of applications for a variety of institutions and subject areas, and indicate patterns of preferences. These three sources of data cover different but complementary aspects of the higher vocational sector in Australia. The broader project itself is interested in the new tertiary qualifications being offered by Australia’s TAFE institutions and explore how these awards compare with those offered in the UK and how they are contributing to social equity and to a knowledge-based workforce. The project intended to discover how these degree offerings are being presented through institutional practices and how they are being received and responded to by prospective and current students, employers, other tertiary institutions and feeder schools.

We argue that the association between HIVE participation and familial traditions of higher education for people studying higher vocational degrees is less clear than it is for traditional university participation in Australia and different to patterns of participation in the UK and European contexts. Specifically, we identify previous experience with post-secondary education and particularly an expressed interested in the subject matter drawing on conceptions of occupational outcomes as particular characteristics of their archives of experience. We conclude that students in the research are ‘cartographers’ in that they are not following an established map but working out their own routes to known destinations.

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