ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the narrative, highlighting the way in which an emphasis on mainstream practices and conformity ‘promoting tacit assumptions that a typical higher education (HE) student is full-time, young, time-rich and at least initially, resident on or near campus’. This simultaneously positions in deficit those whose characteristics and modes of engagement with university study differ from that norm. Since 2010, the increasing exposure of UK HE to market forces and the switch to a funding system relying primarily on fees paid by students have markedly increased retention’s significance to an institution’s reputational and economic health. Systems of HE in the US and UK are profoundly different. Not only is the US system substantially larger, but it is also decentralised and mostly independent. It has the highest rate of student attrition in the industrialised world. The UK HE sector is complex and stratified. Its student population is socio-economically, ethnically and educationally diverse, engaging with higher-level study in multiple ways.
