What are the implications of the growth of programmes for high skills (at bachelor’s level) offered by vocational education providers?  Over the last twenty years, new and different forms of higher education have developed beyond the university sector to meet the expanded educational demand from new and different students for high level skills in Europe, the UK, Australia and North America, among other places (Teichler 2008; Knight et al. 2022). Accordingly, this expansion of higher education by the entry of institutions with a tradition of offering vocational education and training is leading to a more diverse system. Yet diversity can create tensions and challenges to homogenous systems.

The paper considers these tensions and challenges through exploring empirically how the bachelor degrees in vocational institutions have been understood and valued by students in the context of Australia. The paper asks: 1. Why are students choosing degrees in vocational institutions? 2. What do students, providers and others in the system (including those offering guidance to students and other providers) perceive to be the distinctiveness of these degree offerings? 3. What worth or distinction do these degree offerings hold for students in a hierarchically organised higher education system? 

The paper builds on the authors’ earlier work that has shown that the landscape of non-university higher education in Australia is different from that of university providers; the degree offerings are more like those found in the non-university sector or university of applied science provision in Europe, the UK and North America (Knight et al. 2022). These differences relate firstly, to which students and what courses they are following; secondly, the position of vocational institutions within a stratified field of higher education; and thirdly, the message system of higher education in non-vocational providers and its links to the notion of vocationalism. With more than 50% of the age cohort participating in higher education in its various forms the paper contends that there are important tensions and challenges for equity in such diverse mass systems of higher education, which appear unified in principle, but are significantly hierarchical and stratified in practice (Marginson 2016). The paper considers the equity question by exploring how institutions distinguish themselves in the competition for students and how students navigate and choose different institutional degree offerings. In other words, the paper’s focus is on what students in non-university higher education understand by distinction.

The paper’s starting point is that distinction is a term that is best understood through the concept of heteroglossia, that is, it can be understood in different ways (Bakhtin 1981) In applying the term in social science analysis, heteroglossia has come to mean recognising how different voices reflect and attach different meanings to similar linguistic terms. For example, Dorothy Smith (1998, 63) explaining why she draws on Bakhtin, rather than Foucault, states that heteroglossia enables her to ‘explore discourse as local practices in which people are active’. Bourdieusian analyses of distinction in education highlight a process through which tastes are ’markers of class” (Bourdieu 1984, 2). Thereby, the taste for the most elite universities in a globally differentiated system gives distinction to those dominant groups that invest in this form of education and ensures they retain their dominant position and the social reproduction of inequalities. In contrast, this study of non-university higher education in Australia shows that students and college protagonists’ understandings of distinction, were very different. Whilst they recognised the distinction or good taste associated with study at elite institutions, their taste was for the different form of higher education available in the non-university providers; that is a taste for a distinctive vocationally focused degree offering.

The paper draws on data collected for the Australian Research Council Discovery project Vocational Institutions, Undergraduate Degrees: Distinction or Equity? undertaken between 2017-2020. For the project as a whole, a multi-method approach was used to collect and analyse national quantitative data, qualitative case studies of TAFE institutes (the publicly funded providers of vocational degrees) and the perspectives of employers and education policy actors. A multiple-case study design was used, with deep case sites in Melbourne and Sydney and shallow case sites in all TAFE sites across Australia. In the deep case sites, data was collected through interviews and a survey with current students, interviews with recent graduates and employers, and with vocational institution managers and teachers, along with publicly available marketing messages and statistical data. This paper draws on data from the two deep cases studies. These data include narratives from 63 students and graduates from bachelor degrees in vocational institutions who outlined their decision making in following a non-traditional higher education pathway. Additionally, interview data from the institutional and teacher perspectives from these two sites and the perspectives of staff from three alternative university providers in each of the two geographical locations where the students studied are explored. These ‘line of sight’ data help to contextualise the decisions and accounts provided by the students particularly because for these students, choice to attend a vocational institution (as opposed to a university) is often positioned in relation to the university alternative in terms of what the qualifications and experiences are perceived to offer students.

When making sense of the expansion of degrees in vocational institutions the social equity problem is that students’ choices may misrecognise the differential rates of return on the educational capital associated with degrees in a diverse system. In a hierarchically stratified higher education system where access to the distinction attached to most elite forms of higher education is limited, those that develop a taste for the less prestigious institutions, such as the TAFEs studied in this paper, may simply be rationalising or accommodating themselves to the more easily obtainable because of their more limited navigational capacities (Gale and Parker 2015). A Bourdiuesian analysis would also suggest that the role different institutions play in enhancing the development of social, cultural and symbolic capital, rather than just human capital, are the elements that confer distinction. Yet, our data shows the use value to students of the baccalaureate is a function of the economic and social capital that an individual can employ to exploit it, rather than being a value signified by the low symbolic capital of the vocational institution. Our data reveals students who see a use value in the distinctive vocational pedagogical experience that supports their learning and they value the distinctive exchange value of a qualification that develops applied high skills that appeal to employers. In contexts where the baccalaureates are available in non-university institutions with a vocational tradition, close to people’s homes, and often at lower cost relative to a university degree, these offerings are attractive to some students. The offerings have the potential to disrupt habitual ways of acting; disrupt the meaning of distinction and overcome misrecognition. When disruption or a crisis unsettles taken-for-granted views, the doxa may be seen as an imposed orthodoxy and give rise to ‘the existence of competing possibilities’ (Bourdieu 1977, 169).

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