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The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of university undergraduate students who originate from disadvantaged South African schools. The perceptions probed are those that relate to their material circumstances, learning and teaching environment and academic progress.

The paper draws on a theoretical framework that underscores the primacy of the environment blended with transition theory to explain environmental influences on disadvantaged students’ academic progression at university. Data were gathered through detailed face-to-face interviews with eight participants and from the open-ended section of a questionnaire administered to 41 students from which the 8 students were drawn.

The findings demonstrate that disadvantaged students require both physical and socio-psychological support in order to succeed at university.

A university in South Africa and the students from low quintile schools provide the case study for the explication of the findings of this study. Ethical issues such as seeking the informed consent of the participants to access their academic records weighed against the potency or robustness of the results of this study, because few of the participants allowed this researcher to access their results. Thus, this study focussed on potentially sensitive areas such as the academic records of students and poverty. As such it was extremely difficult to persuade disadvantaged students to participate in this study.

The study is thus useful for the school system, families and higher education institutions in the quest to provide the much-needed socio-psychological or “empathetic infrastructure” that acts as the cytoplasm for disadvantaged students’ academic progress at university.

By invoking the primacy of the environment under the rubrics of epigenetics, this study also sought to contribute to the debate around the human genome – a grand ambitious global scientific project launched in the late 1980s to generate a catalogue of all the genes present in humans. However, this was a smokescreen because there are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of the human life or human disease. By invoking the theory of transition, this study sought to fathom how to promote a favourable teaching and learning environment for poor students at university in a holistic manner.

This study utilised an empirically supported definition of disadvantage: that of students coming from no fee schools, as classified by the Department of Education based on Household Expenditure statistics of 2002 using the quintile system. The quintile system is based on average measures of income, unemployment rates and educational levels. To date, there is no published research utilising the school quintile system to define disadvantaged students in higher education in South Africa. This paper, which investigates such a sample from a university, is therefore ground-breaking and novel.