I would think the mature student thing in the UK is practically dead in the water now. It would certainly require a lot of guts and commitment to do it.
I went back into education around about the age of 28. I had a wife a baby and a mortgage. I also had a £2500 redundancy pay off from my last job, not even 12 week's wages. I knew that by legitimately claiming benefits, I could keep things going for a year whilst I went to the local FE College did an Access to the Humanities Course and applied to University. The benefit system allowed me to do this, I didn't have to pretend I was looking for a job, I was allowed to return to education and get enough in benefits to make ends meet, and because I was returning to educationy wife was allowed to work, she made a modest amount of money working for Clarks selling shoes.
I probably wasn't unusual in those days that my only debt was my mortgage, I only had a building society savings account and nothing else. With any other trappings I wouldn't have been able to do it. I ddin't drive.
I also knew the finances of university would make this doable. At the end of my access course I sold my house in halifax and bought a modest two bedroom in a rough area of York (it wasn't rough by West Yorkshire standards). I knew I was going to get a grant from my local education authority that would cover my living costs, there was an additional element that gave a little bit more because I was supporting a family, My wife wasn't able to work as we had lost the family support who would mind our daughter in the relocation. I didn't need her to work, as it happened she got a couple of hours cleaning a local college at 6am five days a week. This with the new student grant £1300 pa, and the summer jobs I was confident I would get in York meant I could keep everything going quite easily. No car, i'd never had one, and only the mortgage and two new debts, the student loan (very manageable in those days) and a student bank overdraft of £1000. The reason I say all of this is to say to Mitaman, I wouldn't have been able to go back to Uni around the age of 29 without the brilliant state support. That's all gone now. Affordable housing, that's all gone now. Whilst I get that there are other barriers in Japan, there are now financial barriers in the UK that mean a lot fewer people will be able to do it these days.
To add what I wrote earlier defining being working class as this notion of not knowing what's possible, what your potential is, there is another element, or there was for me. At school there were things I was good at if I applied myself, things that came easily to me. I suppose a difference between being truly working class and the middle class is that I didn't recognise I had anything, a talent that could give me a leg up, To do that would have been to assume a superiority, a superiority over my friends, my family, my community and my class; and I suppose it's this that other classes had back then, a belief that they were superior, there was something that differentiated them from the working class. What I'm saying is without this sense of difference or superiority nothing was compelling me to kick on at school or in my first entry to the job market. The last part is a half formed idea.
Obviously some people did have the drive and the sense that wanted more, such as Flaneur and how does he fit into the above. It's time I took the dog out so I'll leave this here for now. But to summarise some working class kids are held back by their class,, some working class kids weren't and explaining why not will be fun, it will give me something to think about whilst out with the mutt.
One last thought, and Travis might be able to answer this. I'd thinking that working class kids with a passion would still achieve after education opened up in the post war years, that passion could just be a real passion for learning. So when did Travis senior realise a different life and a wider world was possible? Was he initially driven by a passion for learning or by a desire to achieve a life markedly different to his upbringing.
One last thought, did able kids who had something to escape, say mining areas, real poverty (Flaneur) have a different impetus to someone like myself who had a comfortable working class childhood in Halifax, where a lot of the work was machine tool engineering, not horror inducing by any means.
Ruby let's go for that walk.