Class Mates: Former students recall how the London School of Economics changed their lives

In his foreword, David Willetts says: ‘This is a wonderful collection of personal memoirs of a group of students at the LSE in the 1970s – and shows how that intense experience has shaped adult careers. There are vivid accounts of the journey from a working class background and the other journey, closely related, to London, a city most of them hardly knew. It is also a celebration of lasting (mostly male) friendships forged at university. As the LSE is at the heart of the story it makes sense also to treat these essays as a case study in social science. They may not be the sophisticated quantitative analysis which LSE graduates produce now. But they are vivid accounts of experience – qualitative social science – with the LSE itself as the subject matter. And even just a few personal accounts provide significant evidence of what education was like then and what the reality of social mobility can feel like.’ These are the stories of 14 young people who became friends at the LSE in 1976 and had their lives re-shaped by the experience. – ASIN: B0D6MW5BH4 | ISBN13: 9798327856608 | ISBN-13: 979-8327856608