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This paper explores students' seemingly puzzling engagement with what I call "processes of classification." Whilst most students on the Social Identities module I taught between 2005-2006 and 2008-2009 claimed that "class didn't matter" to them, during 2009-2010 more students engaged with classificatory processes. Using the poststructuralist sociological and Marxist literatures, I suggest that as the former argues, student dis-identification with such processes occurred during the first four years I taught the module. Students' greater engagement with classificatory processes during 2009-2010 may indicate some ways that the deepening economic and political climate of polarisation separating the wealthy elite from all others was impacting student engagement with this aspect of their identities. I conclude by suggesting that in such a climate, Marxist and other progressive academics should seek to realize Mills' sociological imagination more fully. (Contains 10 notes.)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]