ABSTRACT
Alongside the commonalities and diversities of higher education’s institutional settings and the ways in which knowledge is organised within subject-based degree courses, commonalities and diversities can also be found among the students who populate these institutions and courses. We noted two sources of student diversity in Chapter 2: diversities reflecting the backgrounds of the students (diversities ‘imported’ into higher education) and diversities in the lives and experiences of students once in higher education (diversities ‘constructed’ within higher education). In this chapter, we explore both sorts of diversity and attempt to relate them to the diversities in institutional settings and subjects examined in Chapters 3 and 4.
