Unequal Choices
156 pages, 6 x 9
1 table
Paperback
Release Date:17 Mar 2023
ISBN:9781978827042
Hardcover
Release Date:17 Mar 2023
ISBN:9781978827059
Unequal Choices
How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply to College
By Yang Va Lor
SERIES:
The American Campus
Rutgers University Press
High-achieving students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to end up at less selective institutions compared to their socioeconomically advantaged peers with similar academic qualifications. A key reason for this is that few highly able, socioeconomically disadvantaged students apply to selective institutions in the first place. In Unequal Choices, Yang Va Lor examines the college application choices of high-achieving students, looking closely at the ways the larger contexts of family, school, and community influence their decisions. For students today, contexts like high schools and college preparation programs shape the type of colleges that they deem appropriate, while family upbringing and personal experiences influence how far from home students imagine they can apply to college. Additionally, several mechanisms reinforce the reproduction of social inequality, showing how institutions and families of the middle and upper-middle class work to procure advantages by cultivating dispositions among their children for specific types of higher education opportunities.
This book provides an engaging analysis of how students from different class backgrounds think about college, focusing not on the information available but how students make sense of it. By analyzing students’ college choices in terms of their own meaning-making, Lor provides important insights into the opportunities and constraints that shape those choices. People interested in the divergent college pathways of students from lower- and upper-socioeconomic status students, and in supporting students as they embark on college search processes, will find much to learn from here.’
Yang Lor’s Unequal Choices necessarily complicates how we understand the college choice process and the role social class plays in shaping students’ perceptions of themselves, the options available in the vast higher education landscape, and how they ultimately arrive at choosing one college over another.
Yang Va Lor is an assistant teaching professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, Merced.
Introduction 1
Frames of College Attendance 24
Frames of College Preparation 48
Schemas of Colleges 71
Narratives of Interdependence and Independence 97
Conclusion 119
Acknowledgments 131
References 133
Index 000
Frames of College Attendance 24
Frames of College Preparation 48
Schemas of Colleges 71
Narratives of Interdependence and Independence 97
Conclusion 119
Acknowledgments 131
References 133
Index 000
