"What does your father do?"

Before the most recent expansion of higher education, the era when universities first opened their doors to large numbers of working class students was the late 1960s: not quite between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, but near enough.

For the first time, significant numbers of students from what we’d now call Widening Participation backgrounds began enrolling for degrees. It was an experience many would never forget.

Fortunately for us, they recorded their experiences in some of the most evocative books, poems, plays and movie scripts ever written about higher education. From these, a shared sense of never quite ever fitting in emerges, of living with the constant dread of being ‘caught out,’ or being ‘unmasked’ as a fraud. 

And often, all it would take was a certain innocuous-sounding question from a lecturer or fellow student: 

“What does your father do?”

Try for a second putting yourself in their shoes. It’s your first day at university. Around you are pipe-smoking, tweed-clad, Brideshead Revisited types (or so they appear to you). You’re alone, homesick, and beginning to feel that you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life. And now they wans to know about your dad’s job. You can’t help think that how you answer might just determine the rest of your university life. Perhaps even your future career.

Because what this generation discovered on arriving at university was the one thing they thought they’d escaped: social (and sexual) discrimination. And it didn’t stop at graduation. Similar levels of discrimination were also thriving in the nascent graduate recruitment industry, where social and cultural capital were often a key factor in deciding who got which jobs.

Fifty-years on, what your parents do, or don’t do is no longer relevant. Partly this is because universities have become more representative of wider society. But it’s also because traditional ideas about ‘middle-class’ and ‘working-class’ jobs are becoming redundant. How do you gauge the social class of a computer coder, a web-designer, or a cloud consultant? Re-wilding specialist, anyone?

The poet Roger McGough, himself one of the first working-class students to enrol at Hull University (tutored by Philip Larkin, no less) has written about the terrors he experienced whenever “some bright spark, usually Sociology” asked him what his father did. McGough’s father was a Liverpool docker – information his son was anxious to conceal from professors and certain head librarians. So he’d mumble ‘docker’ in the hope that it might sound like ‘doctor’ (“There he goes, a doctor’s son, and every inch the medical man.”) Or he’d try injecting a touch of Hollywood glamour: “He’s a stevedore, from the Spanish, ‘estibador.” But this sounded too ‘On the Waterfront’ and as he noted, “Dad was no Marlon Brando.”

Eventually he opted for, “He works on the docks in Liverpool,” which was technically true while leaving the door open to numerous middle-class possibilities: customs and excise officer, clerk, Chairman of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board.

In later life McGough would cringe when recalling how embarrassed he’d been when talking about his father’s job, a job his father had been exceptionally proud of. At night, the poet would dream he could hear his father’s voice proudly reciting the names of the great docks that he’d known and loved:

“Gladstone, Hornby, Alexandra, Langton, Brocklebank, Canada, Huskisson, Sandon, Wellington.”

This year, as universities prepare to welcome the Class of 2019, let’s recognise and celebrate the overwhelmingly positive influence parents have on our students’ lives and careers. Let’s welcome them all to our campuses, dockers and doctors united.

Because despite what Larkin said, they don’t f*** you up, your mum and dad, they make us who we are.

 This article first appeared in the Institute of Student Employers magazine, August 2019