This article uses examples from the media debate on higher education in Sweden, as well as from a research project on independence in higher education, to discuss the significance of class and social background in relation to higher education. The article takes as its starting point how higher education in the media debate tends to be described as being in a severe crisis, and how the roots of the perceived problems in higher education are described to lie in deficits or incompetence of the individual students, but also within higher education itself. The discussion of what role class and social background may play in this, relates these examples to the assignment given to Swedish higher education institutions to promote widening participation and to the claims within the field of academic literacies that academic writing is not only a question of writing skills as such, but also a question of epistemological understandings, meaning making, and students’ background, identity and self-perception.