Keywords

Introduction

Although some commentators have asserted that the upending of traditional gender relations caused by second wave feminism has produced ‘a world split open’, gender inequalities ‘stubbornly persist across multiple arenas’ (Orloff & Shiff, 2016, p. 110). These ‘persistent and stark’ inequalities among women and men occur along multiple axes such as class, race, ethnicity and age, to which list can be added access to and successful engagement in Higher Education (HE). This gender disparity is noticeable across most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Van Damme, 2016). In the UK, research conducted by Hillman and Robinson (2016) asserted that the gender gap is greatest ‘among the poorest, and young white males from disadvantaged families [who] are performing worst’ (O’Malley, 2016, online). In 2016, Hillman and Robinson reported that ‘women outperforming men is a worldwide trend’ (p. 11), and this trend has continued with the most recent OECD report highlighting a ‘gender gap in educational attainment’ amongst the 25–34 age cohort (Encinas-Martín & Cherian, 2023). In this age group, an average of 57% of graduates are women across OECD member countries, whereas in the 55–64 age group the genders are more equally balanced.

In Australia, females have outnumbered males undertaking HE since 1987—three years after legislation was passed allowing nursing to move from hospital-based to university-based training in Australia in 1984 and the same year that NSW, the largest Australian state, achieved that transfer. In 2021, despite some dramatic gendered asymmetries within courses, out of 1.4 million domestic students, just over 57.6% of students were female (Australian Department of Education, 2023a) while females make up just over 50% of the population at large. This difference in HE participations amongst males and females has attracted some alarm that such disparities suggest a ‘problem’ for males (O’Malley, 2016). Ramsey (2015), however, has commented that the raw figures have to be examined in a more nuanced manner before conclusions can be drawn. She made the point that focusing on ‘total numbers of male and female students overlooks the differences in socioeconomic, disciplinary and institutional patterns, with large numbers of males more privileged on each of these dimensions’. Ramsey also noted, however, that there were some men missing from Australian HE and they were men who were Indigenous, from low socio-economic backgrounds and from regional and remote locations (Ramsey, 2015). Furthermore, females and males with these characteristics continue to be under-represented (Australian Department of Education, 2023b) and are most often first-in-family (FiF).

Since the turn of this century, a growing body of literature has examined women’s differential experience of attending HE (e.g. Stone & O’Shea, 2022; O’Shea & Stone, 2014). However, until recently, there has been relatively little attention paid to FiF males and their experience of HE in Australia. This chapter explores this terrain by presenting an account of the motivations, transitions and participations of 29 FiF male students as they intersect with the lived experience of gender and age, although other intersections and relational realities may be referred to as they potentiate or minimise gendered effects.

The Interview Group

All men in the study have been assigned pseudonyms and all were involved in Study B. The youngest man was 19 and the oldest was 56. All except five men (Ahmad, Sam, Nadir, Nick and Samir) were of Anglo-Celtic background. In terms of relationship status, while sexual orientation was not discussed, 15 or 52% of the men were partnered while 14 or 48& were single. None of the men were single parents and seven out of the 15 partnered men had a total of 18 children: two men had four children; one had three children; three had two children; one had one child. The fathers in the group were in the older age groups, aged between 29 and 56. The oldest six men in the group—David (34), Nick (39), Lance (46), Benjamin (47), Paul (47) and Roger (56)—had 17 out of the 18 children between them. The children’s ages ranged from Richard’s one-year-old to Roger’s ‘adults’ (ages not given). Lance’s two children live with their mother while he lives with his current partner.

In terms of secondary schooling, 18 or 62% of the men attained their high school leaving qualifications (including Stephen who matriculated from high school in the United Kingdom). Four of these men had already completed undergraduate degrees and were attempting other degrees in medicine (Ned and Neil), nursing (Stephen) and law (Lachlan). Five of the men reported leaving school before the matriculation year, one as early as Year 9 (Daniel). Seven of the men did not give details of their high schooling, four of them speaking about their trade certificate studies in Technical and Further Education (TAFE) certificate programmes. With regard to their current enrolment, and despite the variation in focus of their degree, the most numerous degree was Bachelor of Engineering with six of the men enrolled. These six men were all under 30 years. The majority of the men studying online were older, 29 and over, with only one man out of the 18 men under 25 an online student.

Gender and the Men

Gender is here understood as ‘structure and discourse, materiality and performance’ and that it is messy and complex in lived experience (Phipps, 2016, pp. 2–3), intersecting with other aspects of lived experience. It is agreed that:

Frames of gender and sexuality should be complicated with an intersectional appreciation of how they interpellate and affect different men and groups of men in different ways. (Phipps, 2016, p. 3)

In the stories of the FiF men’s HE participation analysed here, age aspects were found to be especially important intersecting factors with gender. It should be noted that this chapter is not arguing against the view that that there are significant gender inequalities with regard to women in HE, but along with Hillman and Robinson (2016, p. 12), it argues that attention to men’s inequalities should take place alongside those disparities that women continue to face.

Further, while much recent research on men and gender in the HE setting, takes a ‘masculinity in crisis’ approach (Roberts, 2014) and problematises ‘masculinity/ies’, especially ‘laddish’ masculinities (Phipps, 2016), this chapter regards the flexibilities of masculine gender performances in these men’s educational stories as a strength, as they responded to the changing educational, employment and interpersonal fields of post-industrial society. This strength allowed them in varying degrees to reach beyond the outworn gender and class, if not age, frameworks within which they were previously enculturated to find new futures for themselves and their families through HE participation.

In the following analysis, the FiF men’s stories are read through the intersections of gender and age, especially privileging the idea of situated and relational masculinities (Hopkins & Noble, 2009, p. 815). The importance of age in their stories was that it structured their embodied life course; advanced the adoption of different masculine performances at various ages; and is, along with gender, one of the principal organising structures of the education sector and the labour market. Three main age and relational masculine performances emerged from these FiF men’s stories. The first was exhibited by the Fathers, men who, surrounded by their families, had been or were responsible as primary breadwinners for their family’s economic well-being; the second was related by the Self-Starters, men who had left their families of origin, sometimes living with a partner, sometimes not, and who were acting autonomously to pursue their interests; and the third was exhibited by the Sons, very young men whose motivations were supported by and often flowed out of their families of origin. The following analysis deals with each of these three groups through the lens of their motivations, their experiences as FiF and the outcomes of their efforts.

To begin, the Fathers related tales of how their fathering in one way or another inspired them to imagine different futures for themselves and their families through HE, and to risk the FiF journey into the relative unknown of HE. Their efforts to break out of previous gendered ways of being, grounded especially in age and the male life course, are palpable in their motivations to enter HE studies.

Motivations

Fathers

The fathers were driven by considerations arising out of their familial role and their stage of life. The oldest of the men, Roger, aged 56, with a wife and two (now adult) daughters, had been a postman, a prison officer and was currently working as a parole officer. Roger observed that it took him a few years to decide on undertaking degree studies; however, in looking toward the end of his paid working life, he felt he could now contemplate pursuing his interest in psychology. He said:

I’ve long been interested in psychology and in how the mind works and then helping people. … At this point in my life, I guess that, because I’ve probably only got about ten years left in the workforce …—maybe a bit more—I just wanted to spend the last few years of my working life doing something I enjoyed more than just for the money. (Roger, 56, married with two children, Arts, online)

Breadwinner masculinity is a historically powerful performative norm for married men with children in Australian culture and society (Lake, 1986). It is also a form of masculinity paradoxically taken up by the state in the past to both enshrine men’s power as well as to imprison them within its disciplinary structure. The historical patriarchy, still strong despite gender and labour market transformations, has demanded that ‘good’ fathers in Australia work hard and provide for their families. Male-breadwinner culture is much stronger in Australia than in most other OECD countries (Baxter & Hewitt, 2013, p. 48). Roger’s commentary here shows that his primary concern in the workforce was as breadwinner to make money for his family. Freed somewhat from this burden in his later years, with his children having left home, he could begin to think about his personal ambitions. His trajectory supports the view put by Reay (2002) that: ‘If class is a “fixing mechanism” for masculinities then age and experience can be thought of “loosening mechanisms” for gender performance’ (p. 224). Lance, 46, also exemplified this phenomenon. He observed ruefully that he was combining his ‘midlife crisis’ with his HE study and that:

I’ve been wanting to do it [university] for a long time. I enjoyed accounting at high school but once I got married and had kids it was a bit impossible to do it. Once the kids finished school I just thought it was time to take the time and have a go at it, [attempt a] change of career and get some qualifications. (Lance, 46, married with two children, Accounting, online)

As in Lance’s comments above, the FiF fathers’ stories also showed that the advancing credentialism in the Australian labour market arising from mass HE had bitten deeply into men’s lives. The fathers often felt driven by circumstance to improve their breadwinning ability by gaining a university degree, thus improving their marketability to employers. Paul, 47, father of four children ranging in ages from 19 to four years, resigned from his position in the Federal Police to look after his wife, also a Police Officer, who was invalided out of her position. On seeking other work, however, he found immediately that, though he ‘had a lot of street credibility and street smarts and a lot of investigations experience’, he had ‘basically been beaten by people with virtually no experience but with a degree’. David, 34, married with two pre-school-aged boys for whom he is the full-time carer, had come to the realisation that ‘to get anywhere and to have a decent job I think you need tertiary education’.

Men who were tradesmen were aware not only of credentialism, but also that their bodies were under pressure in their physically demanding work. Benjamin, 47, married with three teenage children, left school in Year 10 and became a plumber. He wanted to move into work that was not so hard on his body, and he realised that in order to be ‘recognised as a professional’, he would need a tertiary qualification in the changing labour market. He commented that his entry into HE was ‘forced’ on him ‘by necessity’:

Human Resources, as they are, ticking the boxes, if you don’t have that tertiary qualification, bang, you’re off [the list]; you’re not even in that next part of the consideration. The first box they tick these days is tertiary qualifications. It made it almost impossible to find a new role. … It’s a big decision … but when you have to do it, you have to do it, and there’s no gain without pain. (Benjamin, 47, married with three children, Applied Sciences, online)

Richard, 29, married with one child of six, was undertaking a Bachelor of Information Technology because as a chef, the work was ‘quite hard on the body’. Richard also wanted to escape the boredom he was beginning to feel as a chef; pursue his old interest in computers; and was seeking to create a ‘better future’ for his family. He also had wider aspirations. Richard wanted to ‘live’ as he put it: ‘I’d like to get around and travel and see new things, do new things.’

Nick (39, married with four children, Education, on-campus) was concerned about his ability to sustain his physically demanding work as a carpenter as well as expressing other motivations. Like many FiF parents who attempt university, he wanted to be a role model for his daughters as well as be able to generate more income to cope with the inevitable increases in expense they would need as they aged: ‘by taking the direction I’m in now, I might be able to assist them, provide for them and that’s part of the reasons too is, yes, to set them an example. As well as having been told that he was ‘reasonably good with kids’ and not wanting to work with adults anymore ‘because they’re more childish than the kids’, he pragmatically chose a Bachelor of Education because he believed that there was a demand for male teachers and that there would be ‘higher prospects of me getting a job at my age in the education area than probably in a lot of other areas.’ There was the added inspiration from his wife’s family who ‘were all school teachers’. Having been adopted as a baby from Vietnam, Nick had a dysfunctional childhood whereas he commented: ‘My wife and her family, they’re all functional, loving, close knit clan and they sort of inspired me as well to go in this direction as well.’ The findings here for the FiF fathers’ motivations to go to university resonate with Stahl and Loeser’s intersectional study of FiF man, Deo, a tradesman, whose motivation to achieve a university degree was encapsulated by his statement: ‘I’m here for myself and my family’ (2018, p. 612). Further, this support of their created families was remarked on by the fathers as they negotiated their experiences of being FiF at university, a theme which is explored later in this chapter. However, those men who were younger (20s and 30s) and without dependents, called here the Self-Starters, were not so motivated relational factors but instead narrated more intrinsic and self-propelling reasons for desiring a university degree.

The Self-Starters

The motivations of the seven FiF self-starters show how a growing maturity in their 20s and early 30s led these men to experience some kind of ‘epiphany’ as Graeme, aged 31, put it (see also Chaps. 4 and 5), or realisation, in order not only to fulfil their own potential but also to explore their interests toward a more satisfying career. In striving for a better life, their stories underscore self-determination as the deciding factor in taking up university studies. Their narratives are thus less complicated by external relationships than the fathers but are characterised by an awareness of labour market segmentation, especially along the manual/intellectual axis; class factors relating to habitus; and some gender awareness around previous ‘blokey’ masculine performances. For example, when asked about his motivations, Daniel (30, partnered, Engineering, on-campus), a former motor mechanic of divorced parents, said that ‘pretty much my own reasoning brought me here’. Phil, 29, ‘always felt like I had to do something. I suppose it was really motivated out of wanting to reach my own potential. I knew I could; I knew I was capable of it really.’ He wanted to pursue his long-standing interest in psychology, and he was encouraged to do so by his partner. For Stephen, 31, ‘it’s just realising that I could … you have a chance to do something completely different, what is it that you’d like to do, so I chose health’.

Credentialism was also factor for the self-starters as it was for the fathers and, as will be shown, was for the sons. While Marcus (27, single, Enabling Programme, on-campus) had been in the workforce as a plumber for over a decade and had decided by himself to start university because he had been craving to ‘really get out there and start learning more’ and to fight injustice. He was also aware that ‘academic qualifications’ were necessary if he was going to ‘advance himself’. For 29-year-old Evan (partnered, no children, Arts, online), it was a case of career development. He said that it was ‘something I’ve thought about for a long time and I’ve just been unsure of but just had a little bit of encouragement from some people in my current job’. Stuart (24, partnered, no children, Behavioural Studies, online) also wanted ‘to get a better job and have better prospects long-term’.

On taking this step into the relatively unknown world of university study at a slightly later age to the traditional student, many of the FiF self-starters showed an awareness of age as part of their decision-making with ramifications for their relationships. Daniel, for example, knew that his decision to study at university meant that he would have to postpone important milestones in an adult man’s life. In ‘a parallel universe’, Daniel said that he would have stayed on at school and come to university much younger:

You know, I’m 30 years old now. It’s tough because you can’t work full-time and … like I did my trade when my mates did trades and we all finished our apprenticeships together and now, they’ve been in there for so long now and you see the fact that you get stuck behind in the sense because you can’t work full-time so you can’t have the assets, you can’t buy a house, you’ve got to wait to have kids and stuff like. So, if I was in a parallel universe now and I could have changed something I would have done my degree earlier and I would have been graduated by now and settled into a job so I could have these asset things at my age. (Daniel, 30, Engineering, on-campus)

His age also made it more difficult for him to make friends at university because a lot of his fellow engineering students came out of school together and were in the age group 18–21. At 26 when he started university, Daniel found he just had different interests.

The Sons

The 15 FiF sons, aged 19–25, constitute the largest group of men. Unlike the fathers and the self-starters who were enrolled in a wider diversity of degrees, most of the sons had chosen to study degrees traditionally associated with masculine gender performance: four took Engineering degrees, two were studying Medicine, two in Business and Finance degrees, three in IT and Communications, one was in an entry-level enabling programme and one each in Law and Science. All of the sons were studying in face-to-face mode on campus. As their stories demonstrate the sons were concerned with their emergence from their families of origin into the greater freedom and responsibilities of young male adulthood.

There were four main motivations for the sons in applying for university: direct guidance from their parents; personal ambitions; direct school-based encouragement; and to a lesser extent, the influence of friends. By far the most numerous motivators were the parents, especially mothers. The parents’ educational biographies sometimes acted as both stated and implied factors in their son’s decision: and their fathers’ working lives were sometimes viewed as object lessons for achieving a different, less physically onerous, better remunerated form of occupation. The sons were aware of credentialism in the labour market, especially through high school careers counsellors.

Individual men’s striving for respectability through HE has been noted by Burke (2009), but such striving could also be a family, and even a community, project (O’Shea et al., 2016). For example, the oldest of the sons, Nadir, 25, said his mother had forcefully put the case for his university education as part of his family’s ambition, and his responsibility, to achieve and maintain respect within their community:

Well she’s always told me that you have to finish your HSC, you have to go to uni, you have to get a degree, then you get a good job, you have to be respected in the community, family and [your] culture: if you get a good name, the family gets a good name and everyone will look up to us or you won’t bring down their [good name] or anything like that. (Nadir, 25, single, Information Technology, on-campus)

At first, Nadir took the degree his parents wanted him to take, Accounting and Business, but after six months he moved into the degree he was interested in, Information Technology. To a lesser extent, Nadir had a few friends from high school who were influential in his decision to go to university. Ned’s parents ‘sort of not pushed’ him but were ‘extremely supportive’ of him to consider university. After some work experience in rehabilitation, Ned discovered he ‘really liked helping people’ so he decided on Medicine. For Ray (22, single, Engineering, on-campus), having been woken up early in his school career by a primary school teacher who ‘got the best’ out of him, it was basically his mother and father who supported him toward his goal. When it came time to choose his degree path, Ray’s mother’s influence about Engineering Studies was decisive. Sean’s father, a Civil Engineer, had been badly burned in the Global Financial Crisis and his mother persuaded him to think of Medicine in Year 11 rather than following in his father’s footsteps as he originally intended, saying: ‘Don’t go in for what your Dad does, it’s very dependent on the economy’ (Sean, 19, single, Health Sciences, on-campus).

In Lachlan’s case, parental desires for their son’s university education overruled his own wishes. Lachlan had never really imagined going to university and was very keen to join the army to be a ‘foot soldier’. As he explained, this ambition was met with ‘outrage’ from his mother and his teachers. He eventually conceded to their wishes saying: ‘That’s what you do. Everyone else is doing it and mum and dad and the teachers think I should do it so I’ll do it. That’s how it came about’ (Lachlan, 24, single, Law, on-campus). While his mother’s main motivation was to keep her son ‘out of a war zone’, Lachlan’s father’s experience, expressed as a class issue, was important in the family’s support for HE:

Dad always tells me the story [that] back in his day you didn’t get to choose, you did what you were told. He never wanted to be an apprentice mechanic; he wanted to be a pilot but only rich people could become pilots and he wasn’t rich. He was just an ordinary kid from the suburbs. … So, the way he thinks about it … university is a good opportunity, it can open a lot of doors and for that reason alone if you’re good enough to go to university you should; desires and that kind of thing kind of go out the window. (Lachlan, 24, single, Law, on-campus)

Eric’s parents, his school teachers, and others hammered home the value of university. While he made the final decision himself, he acknowledged that it was the result of a combination of factors including his parents’ educational biography:

You hear it from a lot of people … if you want a higher level job then university is pretty much the prerequisite for that at the moment. That impression comes from family, friends, career advisers, parents—that just was the general consensus at the time but also I think my parents … because they only did Year 10 in high school—and they said, “Things have changed now and it’s better if you can got to university”. (Eric, 22, single, Engineering, on-campus)

A few of the sons echoed the experience of the self-starters in that they were propelled to university studies by their own initiative although their context was, unlike the self-starters, intra-familial. Like Lachlan, Liam had really wanted to go into the army but was ruled unfit. He had been self-reliant from an early age due to his brother and sister’s serious health issues. At that time, Liam recalled his father saying that he was going to have to grow up and look after himself: ‘so from about Year 4 onwards, I’ve been doing my own thing, being more and more independent each year.’ He explained that by the time he had finished his Higher School Certificate (HSC) he ‘was leaning towards university but that he ‘had no idea what course I wanted to do’. Since he had a love of cars and all sorts of machinery, he used this to guide his choice and eventually settled on Engineering because ‘I want something that challenges me, I want something I can build and design and just have fun with’. The example of his father’s working life had been a very powerful object lesson in this choice. Liam had watched his father struggle:

I’ve seen dad struggle like when he was in the trucks, that impacted me. … He was just trying to keep food on the table … and he’d come home tired and grumpy and have to go back to work the next day. So, I’ve watched him do that [and] it’s always a job that’s been beneath him in terms of creativity and ability. (Liam, 20, single, Engineering, on-campus)

Ahmad also brought himself to university. In Year 10 he realised he was ‘tired of being the kid that never really cared about school … people could call it “maturing” maybe. I don’t know … it just hit me that I should probably go good at school, try and go to uni, try and get a degree’ (Ahmad, 19, single, Business, on-campus). Neil (23, single, Medicine, on-campus) who had always enjoyed science, focused on Medicine from about Year 10. For Seth, school led him to understand that university was ‘just expected’: ‘It was definitely school that pushed me towards uni as opposed to any other sources’ (Seth, 21, partnered, Science, on-campus).

Being First-in-Family at University

Fathers

Without exception, the FiF fathers experienced positive support from their immediate nuclear families, although there was dissension at the start from others. For some, ageism was a factor. The oldest father, Roger, 56, was supported in his studies by his wife and daughters so that he could work in a role that he enjoyed for the remainder of his working life even if it attracted a lower salary. However, while most of his friends understood that ‘it’s good to study; you’re using your mind more and developing new skills and things which even late in life could lead you somewhere else’, a couple of people thought that he was ‘too old to bother with it and it was a waste of my time’. Benjamin’s teenage children found his decision to take up university study difficult to understand at the start because: ‘It was an unheard of, [an] unknown concept for a parent to be going to university’, but over time they have come to accept it. If anything, Benjamin thought, it had brought them closer together as a family.

For other men there was full support, especially and crucially from wives. Lance’s partner had been his ‘rock’ while his children and friends were supportive. This was also Nick’s experience, especially of his wife who supported him ‘in every way’. Richard’s wife was ‘very happy’ for him. While David’s wife and her family had also been his ‘rock’, she had supported the family financially and had been ‘looking forward to the end of my studies for quite a while’ because of the disruption it caused to family life.

Families of origin, however, could be indifferent or even negative to the FiF fathers. David’s family of origin didn’t really care about education and had not asked him about it nor expressed their view about it one way or the other. Because he had moved around a lot, he didn’t have a lot of contact with his friends who likewise had not expressed any interest. Richard said his family of origin were all tradesmen and they didn’t ‘put a premium on education because all they care about is existing, so to speak, rather than living which is what I want to do’. He commented of them:

They don’t really have much of an opinion of uni per se. They just find it strange that someone would want to work full-time as well as study. They don’t see the outside life of what I do at home; they know me as a family man who’s studying and working. They think that my plate’s too full and they think that I can’t do it all whereas they don’t realise that because the study is only part-time I can squeeze it into my breaks for the most part. They think I’m a bit of a workaholic. (Richard, 29, married with one child, Information Technology, online)

Richard said that he felt they were happier when he told them about taking up his training as a chef than they were when he said he was going to take a degree in IT. He felt that they were perhaps threatened by his studies and that he was getting above himself. Likewise, his workmates thought that: ‘it’s weird. They go: “Why would you want to get out of hospitality?”’ As a FiF student, Richard said that he ‘had no idea what I was getting myself into’ when he took up his university studies.

The fathers discussed this ‘unknowingness’ about the university context for the FiF student. Paul, 47, explained that going to university in his family of origin would have been like asking ‘Do you want to go and fly to space?’ Even enrolling in university was a journey into the unknown: ‘And it was so difficult, like having absolutely no university experience at all, it was really difficult to try and find my way.’ He explained the foreign nature of university to the FiF student like him in gendered terms:

I started life as a mechanic and it would almost be like … if I worked on a vehicle at home and my wife goes to an auto parts place [for me and] because she doesn’t talk the language, she struggles [to make herself understood]. (Paul, 47, married with four children, Business, online)

Lance, 46, thought university would be hard and that it would take him out of his ‘comfort zone’. The hardest part for him had been that it was nearly 30 years between high school and his university studies. He explained:

I’d never set foot on a university campus. My mum didn’t finish high school and neither did I and dad sort of left high school and went straight to the army and Vietnam not long after. (Lance, 46, married with two children, Arts, online)

The norms and practices of academic writing were particularly an unknown area. Roger said that in his degree so far, he didn’t learn anything new about human nature but:

[I]it has taught me how to research properly and how to reference and some of the terms that they use in uni of course I’d never heard of them a year ago like “peer reviews”, I wouldn’t have had a clue what that meant. (Roger, 56, married with two children, Arts, online)

Benjamin (47, married with three children, Architecture, online) said that ‘academic writing was just inconceivable’ for him while for Richard, the experience of learning to write in an academic manner was frightening at first. Coming up to his first assignment, he considered pulling out of his course because he was afraid he was going to fail. He took some extra tutorials and discovered that: ‘It wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be’ (Richard, 29, married with one child, Information Technology, online). Nick found mastering the new online technologies the ‘most daunting’ challenge, especially ‘knowing that primary school teachers [need to be] fully integrated with ICT [Information and Communications Technology] and everything now, [so] I know I’ve got to embrace it.’

The stories of all these FiF fathers show that their immediate families, that is, their partners and children, were central to their aspirations and experience of HE. David, challenging Australian breadwinner masculinity as full-time carer at home, explained the impact of his studies on his ability to parent his children, especially during assessment periods:

During assessment period, essays particularly, not so much exams, there’s a lot more stress in the house because I’m worried [about] having the time to get things in. With kids it’s unpredictable; I might plan for two to three hours in the day but I might get 30 minutes. Also I think the biggest factor is recently I haven’t been able to really enjoy the time with my kids. I’m looking at ways to manage them and get them out of my hair when I need to study instead of being able to sit down and spend time with them and watch their development. (David, 34, married with two children, Business, online)

Benjamin also showed how central his family was to his experience of being a FiF student and father of three, especially on his role as provider. Having been previously on a ‘six figure salary package’, he found it ‘very very humbling’ to come back to being on government assistance (called AUSTUDY) to study full-time. He explained how his studies impacted his family’s lifestyle and that financially it had been ‘a negative for all of us’ (Benjamin, 47, married with three children, Architecture, online). Finally, Nick quantified how he managed to balance family, work, and study: ‘the way I looked at it, like, I put 30 per cent into work, 30 per cent into my study and 40 per cent into my family and that’s how I maintain a balance’ (Nick, 39, married with four children, Education, on-campus). Through saving, he planned to stop working so that he could give more time to both family and study as the latter became more demanding.

The Self-Starters

For the self-starters, awareness of their need to acquire the academic knowledge to embark on their university career was central to their experience as being the first in their family to do so. Before he came to the university, Stuart (24, partnered, no children, Behavioural Studies, online) said he knew ‘nothing’ about it. He continued: ‘No, I didn’t know the difference between a bachelor degree and a diploma (laughing). I really had no idea. That was all a foreign language to me.’ He explained that before he came to the university, he had been engaged in a lot of regional labouring work where no-one was qualified. In this world ‘university is for city people, not for us. … So people that I used to know … [had] no interest in higher education whatsoever.’ Even when he was trying to decide in which university to enrol, Marcus (27, single, Enabling Programme, on-campus) found that the academic language of how courses work was ‘actually its own language’ and he was starting to ‘get the hang of it a little bit’. Daniel, who did a lot of research before he started, explained the predicament of the FiF well when he outlined what he didn’t know upon starting university:

I didn’t even know what a PhD was when I started here; I didn’t know what a Masters [was]; I didn’t know what an Honours was; I didn’t know anything. To be honest I didn’t even know how the whole scheme worked, how the university life [went], I knew nothing about university … like I’ve had no-one in university in my family, friends, I’ve never spoken to anyone about it. You’re running blind when you come here. (Daniel, 30, Engineering, on-campus)

Phil (29, partnered, Behavioural Studies, online) eloquently explained that he had come to see that there was ‘a whole academic world that you don’t really know is kind of happening behind the normal world’. In terms of his family, Phil thought that they didn’t really understand what he was doing: ‘They pretty much say that they’re proud of what I’m doing and that’s pretty much as far as it goes really.’ He believed that his own motivation was the biggest factor in his perseverance through the stressful times in his studies. Indeed, for Phil, the biggest hurdle at university was the stress of studying that he experienced as the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life.

Like Phil, many of these self-starters mentioned that they had experienced stress in their studies, but also demonstrated great determination and resilience. Graeme commented that he was very glad he had taken an enabling programme before he went into his studies because it would have been ‘more stressful’ without it as university study ‘very quickly ramps up’. When he experienced stress in his studies, even in his final year, he explained that he could not go to his parents:

I can’t ask them anything to do with university ‘cos they’ve got absolutely no experience. They’re not unintelligent people but … yeah, I don’t want them to know that I’m stressed either. As far as they’re concerned university is a giant goal for me and I’m just walking through it. I’ve got a couple of friends that I text when I’m stressed and the idea of them being happy with my graduation gets me through. (Graeme, 31, single, Education, on campus)

Stephen, 31, thought that though ‘it might get stressful and things’, he always gets there in the end. Being FiF for the self-starters was about launching into the unknown with all of the stress that this entails.

The Sons

All 15 of the FiF sons had the support of their parents for their university studies. Almost without exception, it was unqualified support and parents thought of university as the way for their sons to achieve a better life as well as provide necessary credentials in the labour market. Most parents tried to help with limited economic resources, and their sons in turn tried not to ask for this support if they could help it. However, the support of parents who have not studied at university, while important to the success and perhaps well-being of their sons, has its limits as they do not possess the academic capital that can only come through university study. As Ahmad conveyed of his Middle Eastern parents, while they were ‘all very proud’:

It’s just hard because they don’t understand at all obviously because they’ve never been through uni or anything like that, but yes, they’re proud of me, you know “Good on you”—they’re happy for me. … [But] if your parents don’t understand there’s no support for that. You know, you’re on your own really. (Ahmad, 19, single, Business, on-campus)

Liam noted how some students from families with tertiary backgrounds had their parents work out their university timetable for them as well as paying all of their bills. This was not available to him: ‘My parents help me where they can or if they can. It’s more a case of if they can, not when they can.’ They paid for Liam’s first session and then he was on his own.

At the start, some of the FiF sons relished the idea of the freedom they would have from the restrictions of living at home and the social opportunities they would encounter. Nadir chose his university because it was far enough away from his parents to loosen the surveillance they exerted over his activities. He said that he and his friends ‘matured on our own a bit, through our own freedom’ (Nadir, 25, single, Information Technology, on-campus). Ahmad guessed that ‘it was going to be hard, a new world [but] I thought it would be very fun’. On a University Open Day high-school visit, Eric had formed an iconic image of university life when he had seen a student working on his computer in the university bar with a beer in front of him. Eric recalled thinking: ‘Oh that’s so cool. I can’t wait to go to uni. What a cool life.’ Although excited ‘by the freedom of it all’, some things came as a ‘surprise’, such as ‘the size of lecture theatres and how quickly some of the professors will go through stuff and you’re not able to interact directly with them which I sort of knew but it just threw me off a bit’. He decided to ‘see how it went’ and enjoy himself:

I just think it’s going to sound like I’m an alcoholic and just a party animal which I’m not now but I just really wanted to have an awesome time with meeting new people and stuff … I pushed myself maybe a little bit too hard to relish the first years of university. (Eric, 22, single, Engineering, on-campus)

However, Lachlan, ‘the first person I think in my entire bloodline to set foot in a university’, said that he found that ‘a lot of people look at uni and say “It’s a big social, fun time” when really, I don’t think it is’. Kaleb, who did not like to drink ‘that much’ and is ‘not a huge party person’, agreed. Indeed he was annoyed by what he called the ‘stigma thing’ that university was not a serious occupation, and that all that students do is drink and party, held by his father and his co-workers. Ahmad (19, single, Business, on-campus) from within a different cultural framework also articulated this problem when he said that his parents ‘don’t think studying is hard … like, you know, stereotypical old Middle Eastern man would think kind of thing, like uni’s easy … It’s the people that are breaking their back like bricklayers [that] it’s hard for’. The absence of knowledge about university at home, the manual/intellectual fault-line in masculine performance, as well as the anti-intellectualism of conventional larrikin masculinity in Australia combined to make it difficult for some of the sons to have their academic efforts and achievements understood and taken seriously by their families.

Outcomes

Fathers

Despite the pressures on their roles while they studied, the fathers were convinced of the positive impacts of their HE participation on their families, especially on their children. Richard, 29, said that he would certainly be encouraging his daughter, for whom they had provided private schooling, to make a wise choice when she finished school unlike himself at that time who was not encouraged to think of university, but to ‘just wing it’. Paul, 47, said that ‘I think I’m happier which is good. It’s always good to have a happy father and I think also that it is some positive feedback to our kids’. He and his wife had raised their four children to expect that they would go to university. He wished he’d known that the idea that ‘to go to university you have to be smart and maybe upper-middle class’ was not true. Benjamin, who successfully encouraged his wife to take up university study, underscored the positive impacts for FiF parents who would be able to mentor their children through university ‘and give them ideas of study streams and what’s involved and what to expect’. Richard summed up the centrality of the family to his engagement in university studies and to the other fathers in this study:

Just the knowledge that there’s a goal at the end, knowing that I’m actually working towards a goal which is both having a degree in the end of it as well as providing more for my family. My family is probably my biggest motivator because I come from a not well-off family and to be able to provide more for my own family will be fantastic. (Richard, 29, married with one child, Information Technology, online)

The stories of these FiF fathers show that they are undertaking HE studies as a response to the creeping credentialism of the Australian labour market. Not only are they seeking to improve their competitive advantage and employability, however, they are also seeking work that has a higher remuneration and status, is more enjoyable, less physically demanding and capable of securing their families’ futures. The support of their wives was always present and gratefully acknowledged. While gender was not consciously a factor in the articulation of their stories, their masculine roles as breadwinners and fathers were crucial. Age was also clearly a factor for some of them in how their studies were viewed by their relationship circles. Being FiF meant that on enrolment they were facing alien territory equipped only with their powerful family-centred motivations and their nuclear support network to assist them as they faced the unknown. For the next group of FiF men, the self-starters, a different set of gendered concerns centred on their own self-actualisations led to their risky entry into HE.

The Self-Starters

The self-starter men outlined how their lives had changed through their engagement in HE mainly for the better. Other changes, particularly loss of contact with people, were construed as the unavoidable cost of improving their lives through HE. Class consciousness was a notable feature of these men’s accounts. Daniel, one of the most forthcoming of the male interviewees, discussed how different his life was now from the absence of expectations about university during his high school years in the public housing area where he grew up:

I went to [School], let’s just say I could only picture a handful of people who went to university from that [school]. It was a housing commission-based suburb and, you know, a lot of welfare and all that … I don’t even think I heard of university at high school, no-one spoke about university. If you got an apprenticeship you were doing well so, you know, university was just something that we were never really educated about I guess, especially with me and my friends and stuff. (Daniel, 30, Engineering, Final Year, on-campus)

Daniel had also experienced great changes in his relationships as a result of his studies, not only with people he used to know but also in his family of origin. He explained how these relationships had ‘fallen apart’:

I had a fall out with my father that was due to the whole me coming to university [thing]… I was close to my sisters then and then as time’s gone by, I haven’t contacted them and yes, due to university and working … you know, they’ve obviously got frustrated with me and we have fallen apart, we hardly see each other, we hardly talk to each other. Friends is the same thing … that’s changed a lot but you’ve got to prioritise and, you know, that’s what you’ve got to sacrifice I guess to actually do a degree. (Daniel, 30, Engineering, Final Year, on-campus)

This exilic effect of HE on working-class students from their class origins and culture has been noted in the literature (Hughes, 2002). But Daniel also believed that his maturity had been part of this change, especially his departure from previous masculine norms, and had helped him in his university studies. He had left behind the ‘blokey’ (laddish) masculine performance associated ‘naturally’ with youthful partying and drinking alcohol, to be able to prioritise his studies. At the end of his studies with his graduation in sight, he could say: ‘Yes, it’s been a good experience; never forget it.’ He hoped that when he had children ‘they can continue on the trend and come to university’.

The ripple effect that flowed from FiF men to others in their circle, hoped for by Daniel, had already happened in Phil’s experience. His employer had told Phil that he had inspired him to undertake HE studies online. Phil had also experienced the loss of contact with this family, especially with his father. He used to dine with him every Sunday night but over time, as Phil made time for his study, it was ‘just assumed’ that he was not coming. Phil’s life after going to university is very different from before because his direction has changed:

This stage of my life is much different to any other time I guess … it’s chalk and cheese really. If I’d never studied, I’d still be working those back-breaking labouring jobs and just scraping by. Now I’m making good money, I’m not breaking my back. You know, this is something that I can do for the rest of my life so it’s totally changed my whole future. (Phil, 29, partnered, Behavioural Studies, online)

Stuart, 24, has ‘never been quite so hopeful ever before’. Prior to working in the community welfare sector, he was a member of the labouring class, as with Phil, breaking his ‘back every day to make somebody else lots of money’. Now his life had ‘changed completely’. Graeme, about to graduate as a high school science teacher, said ‘This is the happiest I’ve ever been’ and he charted the re-contouring and opening up of his internal reality created by his university education:

I’m happier at university than I was in high school. [I] was heaps more highly strung four years ago. Like, definitely more closed minded and I’m definitely, like, anything’s possible now. … I’m more acceptable to outside ideas, heaps smarter now, I’m more tolerant, poorer (both laugh). (Graeme, 31, single, Education, on-campus)

As with Daniel, alcohol had been a big part of Graeme’s life but he ‘hardly’ drinks ‘at all now for some reason’. He said: ‘I can’t even remember the past when I’d get black out drunk. That would happen every weekend before that at least. Yeah, [it was a part of] work culture plus football culture.’ The university experience was important to Graeme on many levels, ‘not just for the bit of paper’. His relationships had changed, and as Daniel had noted previously, he had lost ground compared to his friends who had established families of their own. For Stephen (31, partnered, Nursing, on-campus) coming to Australia from England, marrying his Australian wife, had given him the opportunity to put the past behind him, including the commencement of a first degree that he regretted. He also mentioned letting go of drinking as part of his transformation. Stephen’s nursing studies have given him a sustainable pathway around helping people. He concluded that he now had ‘real direction and who knows where I’ll end up. You know, now I’m thinking about being a doctor. It’s immense, like huge, really.’

The Sons

Once at the university, some of the sons settled down to their new freer lives and made new friends. Sean (19, single, Medical and Health Science, on-campus), who achieved a place in a prestigious programme and came with firm ambitions, never felt alone from his first day because he had friends there with him. At the same time he recalled that he found the teaching style ‘very challenging’ because it was so different from his high school experience. Ray, having finished his degree, felt that ‘second year was when I sort of really started going to uni.’ Before that he was ‘still living a life of being back in [his home town] because I was coming up the weekends; I didn’t experience the proper move and then sort of gave uni a proper go wholeheartedly and that’s when I got all the benefits from it and put more into it and got more out.’ He’d really ‘come out of his shell’ (Ray, aged 22, single, Engineering, on-campus).

Others experienced bumpy transitions into the new way of life offered on campus. While they had anticipated freedom, these sons found that they needed to be more disciplined if they were to succeed in their studies. Because they had no previous frame of reference, they also could experience ‘shock’, starting with the large size of university campuses as disorienting. Seth said that for him starting university was ‘a bit of a shock’: he felt great ‘foreboding’ and when he first arrived ‘it was a massive campus’. Nevertheless, he expected university ‘to be quite easy’ but it turned out to be ‘very different’. University required him to be more independent: ‘you have to just work it all out yourself’ (Seth, 21, partnered, Science, on-campus).

For Lachlan, first year was the ‘biggest crisis point only because I just couldn’t cope—the sheer workload was a shock’. His crisis wasn’t helped by the fact that his friends who went into the army, as he had wanted to, were going overseas and writing to him ‘wish you were here, you’d love this’ (Lachlan, 24, single, Law, on-campus). Sam also explained that university was a ‘shock to his system’ and he suffered acutely, experiencing anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide. Coming from a close Greek community, he had told only his mother, no-one else, that he would be deferring his studies for a short time as ‘the community will not understand why’ (Sam, 19, single, Finance, on-campus). Neil said entering into his new degree was ‘all very foreign … foreign university, foreign degree, foreign friends—just a whole big new world, focusing on end-game but trying to experience everything around me because it’s new’ (Neil, 23, single, Medicine, on-campus). The maturation challenge for these FiF young men, away from their families, could be exacting as they worked to find their feet in the new independence of campus life.

Conclusion

In this chapter, stories of university participation given in the stories of a group of 29 FiF men were explored using a narrative gender framework. It was argued that such a framework in this instance could best be explicated through three age categories based on distinctive masculine performances across the male adult life course. The three groups that emerged from the stories were the fathers, the self-starters, and the sons, each having a differently situated relational gendered performance.

The masculinities exhibited by the FiF fathers demonstrated that their reproductive family was central to their entry and experiences in HE. The fathers construed their studies within the domestic fathering framework around their role as breadwinners. They were also aware of, and seeking to respond to, the advancing credentialism of the labour market. For some of the tradesmen-fathers, concerns about bodily competence into the future led them to seek work that would not be so physically onerous as well as be better paid and more interesting, a finding echoed in a recent Australian study on male students transitioning from enabling education into university degree programmes (McNamara, 2021). For the older fathers there is evidence that advancing age acted as a loosening mechanism for gender performance where they are able to consider pursuing their ambitions and interests surrendered earlier to the fathering project.

The self-starters were positioned at a time of their lives when personal autonomy was most apparent, and they made the decision to go to university on their own. Families were peripheral to their narratives although partners, where they were present, were important supports. Some of these men had experienced rupture in their previous family and friendship networks. They also charted significant behavioural change, such as moderating their alcohol consumption, in response to the needs of studying at university. Many of these self-starters mentioned also that they had experienced stress in their studies, no doubt a component of which was caused by the universities’ assumption that its students are in possession of the requisite knowledge and language to negotiate the systems, processes and content of academic life. This stress was shared by the FiF sons.

While the FiF fathers and the self-starters had some difficulties in their transitions to university life, their more established identities as men appeared to make their experience more manageable. The presence of partners where they existed also acted to support and stabilise them. The FiF sons, however, at the start of the identity journey away from their family of origin reported greater dislocations and stresses. They often experienced shock at the university workload, and they took some time to adjust to the need for greater self-discipline in their studies.

Nevertheless, there were common factors, often expressed through the language of metaphor, across the stories related by three groups of men around their FiF experience in HE. Each was aware that they did not possess at the start of their studies the requisite academic capital and that they had to work hard to learn the ‘new language’ of the ‘foreign land’ they were entering. Each was aware that to have a more satisfying, better paid and less physically demanding work they needed to acquire a university credential. Each was prepared to make the heavy financial, personal, and social sacrifices that such study entails. In addition, the men, with the exceptions of some of the sons, were transformed by their studies for the better, made more hopeful and optimistic about their futures. Further, there is evidence in the FiF men’s stories that, just as the extension of mass secondary schooling opened up a ‘generation gap’ at an earlier time, for some FiF students, a new generation gap appears to be opening up between men’s families of origin and themselves around the extension of mass HE and the widening participation agenda. Finally, there was no evidence of a ‘crisis in masculinity’ nor a radical transformation in men’s gender performances (Ingram & Waller, 2014) demonstrated in these stories. Old patterns of being, and becoming, breadwinners were evident, softened by these FiF men’s demonstrated willingness to challenge themselves within the new and strange university environments.