Dr Richard Budd has received an SRHE Research Award to examine how students’ experience compare according to their student populations, organisational cultures, and geographies. In some ways we know a great deal about students’ experiences of universities. Sociologists of higher education have documented for some time that who you are, and where you study, has significant implications for what being a student is like. More specifically, it is clear that minority or marginalised groups can be made to feel less welcome in universities as social attitudes such as racism, snobbery, and misogyny are likely to be present. This means that they are less able to engage fully with, and enjoy, their academic or other activities. Some perspectives, though, are less well-represented in the literature than others. We know less about the experiences of disabled and/or LGBTQI+ students’ experiences or of how majority/dominant groups perceive their position within the student body. Outside ‘the social’, there is far less research around how universities vary according to their organisational culture (history/age, teaching and research orientation) and their geography (location, layout, architecture). What is clear is that all of these things make a difference, but as yet we are less sure of how.

The project aims to extend and combine different disciplinary perspectives, examining how students’ experiences vary according to the intersecting elements of their identity/background, as well as their universities’ cultures and geographies. This is important as public information on universities such as league tables and the National Student Survey promotes very limited views of how universities compare. Alongside this, government policy is increasingly focused on how university degrees vary according to the highly problematic notion of ‘value for money’ (i.e. graduate earnings).

The findings from The 3-D University project will broaden our understanding of how where someone studies study mediates their experience as a student. In the longer term, it is expected that this work will be extended by integrating multiple methodological approaches to this topic, most likely internationally. The research is funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE).

Richard Budd is a Lecturer in Higher Education. He teaches on the Department of Educational Research’s PhD in Education and Social Justice and PhD in Educational Research – Higher Education.