Unequal Choices: How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply to College

Yang Va Lor

Published by Rutgers University Press 2023

Unequal Choices

How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply to College

Yang Va Lor

In the series The American Campus

https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978827080

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Yang Va Lor is an assistant teaching professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, Merced.

Reviews

“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.”

— Elizabeth M Lee, Author of Class and Campus Life: Managing and Experiencing Inequality at an Elite College (Cornell U

"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."

— W. Carson Byrd, Author of Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Camp

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Frames of College Attendance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	24
2. Frames of College Preparation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
3. Schemas of Colleges Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
4. Narratives of Interdependence and Independence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146

Language: English
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 155
Illustrations
- Other: 1 table
Keywords: class; inequality; education; academia; college; college admissions; working-class; middle-class; Bay Area; San Francisco; university

eBook

Published: March 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781978827080