Meritocracy, Legitimation and Belonging on the University of Cambridge’s Foundation Year

Widening participation spans the whole student lifecycle, from access through to success within higher education and progression beyond it, yet policy and evaluation have concentrated on the access stage alone. Far less is known about how students admitted through widened access routes come to understand the legitimacy of their place, and the terms of their belonging, once inside an elite university. Reporting twenty-one ( n = 21) walking interviews with students who entered the University of Cambridge through its Foundation Year, a one-year pre-degree programme for applicants whose educational opportunities have been constrained by structural disadvantage, this article examines a tension at the heart of meritocracy. Belonging is approached throughout as a relational and processual accomplishment practised in situ rather than as a psychological state to be measured, and the article asks on what terms it is made available along a visibly marked route. Participants recognized that admissions standards are shaped by unequal opportunity, though the recognition appeared not to weaken their commitment to meritocratic judgement, and they endeavored to suffuse their belonging with proof of deservingness. Such a pattern sits uneasily with Bourdieusian accounts of symbolic domination grounded in misrecognition, and points towards a compliance sustained through lucid perception of meritocracy and its ideological demands. Analysis of the walks suggests that the route organizes this tension by marking students publicly as different, by tying belonging to a competitive progression threshold, by collapsing heterogeneous experiences into a single administrative category, and by locating institutional judgement in everyday encounters with teaching staff. Belonging emerges less as a settled outcome of admission than as a conditional status that must be repeatedly earned. Widening access may therefore secure entry without securing the later stages of participation, so long as the legitimacy of membership continues to be organized through meritocratic evaluation that students simultaneously critique and reproduce.