CARE AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION Figure 9: Proportion of applicants who said they would be confident doing the following activities tomorrow 81% 85% 76% 79% 70% 71% 68% 71% 71% Cooking a meal Washing your laundry Cleaning your living space Care experienced Estranged Overall Source: Unite Applicant Index 2023-4; SMF analysis. Overall, care experienced and estranged students are more ‘marginal’: their position within higher education is more likely to be on a knife edge Putting this all together, one way of summing up the position of care experienced and estranged students is to describe them as more marginal than the rest of the student cohort. Their decision to enter higher education is more cautious, ambivalent and uncertain. Their attachment once within higher education is weaker, and they are at risk of being pushed to the periphery. The evidence we have presented in this chapter helps to explain these facts: weaker academic attainment, material challenges, psychological needs and tricky transitions all conspire to make care experienced and estranged students’ places more precarious. Despite the impressive grit and determination displayed by many care experienced and estranged students, they may be more ambivalent about higher education than their peers. In the Unite Applicant Index, care experienced students display weaker intrinsic motivation – only 17% say they are going to university out of interest in their chosen subject, compared to 35% overall. Paradoxically, they also show lower instrumental motivation – 22% say they need a degree for the job they want, compared to 37% overall. Instead, they are more likely to offer reasons that suggest they are being carried by inertia: more of them say they are going to university because it is what their friends are doing or what their family expects. Now, this question was only asked in the 2024 edition of the survey, so should be treated with even greater caution because of small sample size, but it is suggestive and intriguing and warrants further study. 31