New Right students?: exploring high achieving British university students’ discourses of learning

This article describes the discourses working‐class students at a university in Britain have about learning. The discourses include ideas about who is a good student, education as an investment, and marking. Students incorporate, in part, both neo‐liberal and neo‐conservative economic and political views into their perceptions of who should succeed or fail in higher education, but these notions sit contradictorily alongside their more social democratic principles of social justice.