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Higher education choice-making in the United States: freedom, inequality, legitimation. Centre for Global Higher Education working paper series #35.

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This paper is available from this source: https://www.researchcghe.org/publications/working-paper/higher-education-choice-making-in-the-united-states-freedom-inequality-legitimation It examines how the process of making higher education choices in the United States – whether to enter higher education, attend a particular college, or follow a particular route -- reproduces and legitimates social inequality. The paper’s central thesis is that a societal regime of many choices – while widely seen as serving individual freedom and producing social well-being – actually builds on and extends societal inequality but in a way that obscures that process of social reproduction to virtually all who participate in that regime. As the paper argues, the provision of many choices produces social inequality. People often make choices that do not serve their interests as well as they might wish, particularly if students are faced with many choices and do not have adequate information. Secondly, the incidence of those suboptimal choices is not random but is socially stratified. It is higher for less advantaged people, and societal factors – such as the unequal distribution of economic resources, unequal provision of good information, and unequal exposure to discrimination -- play a crucial role in producing those socially stratified suboptimal choices. Finally, the provision of many choices legitimates social inequality. The more one thinks in terms of choices the more one tends to blame the unfortunate, including oneself, for their circumstances. Seemingly offered many choices in life, both the winners and losers in society come to feel that much of the inequality they experience is due to their own actions and therefore is legitimate. The paper concludes by offering various prescriptions for reducing the socially stratifying consequences and ideological impacts of a high-choice regime. In making these arguments, this paper draws on the research literature in sociology of education, behavioral economics, and social psychology of inequality.
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... Choice is an important part of individual's life, in the process of growing up, individuals with similar trajectories will make similar decisions, while on the other hand, due to the diversity of growth trajectories, different social groups will have different choices when facing the same problem. In these heterogeneous and homogeneous choices, a great deal of social inequality is reproduced [7]. ...
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... Although higher education officials emphasized early major selection and often used the word choice to describe career exploration, students do not have as much freedom to choose as suggested (Dougherty, 2018) due to restraints such as stereotypes, anticipated discrimination, financial resources, loss of transfer credits, and time constraints (Ardoin, 2020;Fink & Jenkins, 2021;Fouad & Kantamneni, 2020;Quadlin, 2017). Often, student access to experiential learning is limited because it requires financial resources (e.g., for unpaid internships or study away expenses), time (both to locate and participate in such activities), and information about ways to locate opportunities (Strayhorn, 2015). ...
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... El incremento actual de la oferta de títulos universitarios viene acompañado de un mercado laboral cambiante y, por tanto, imprevisible (Al-Abri y Kooli, 2018). Cuando los estudiantes no tienen la información adecuada y, a la vez, se enfrentan a muchas alternativas, pueden tomar decisiones equivocadas alejadas de sus verdaderos intereses (Dougherty, 2018). La incertidumbre no solo conduce a mayores tasas de abandono, también afecta a la identidad profesional que los alumnos deben desarrollar durante sus estudios (Meijers et al., 2013). ...
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... Research on the choices made by university applicants continues to show the impact of social background and context. [9][10][11] In contrast, policy makers have largely followed the human-capital model that has dominated discussions of student choice in the USA 12 with students conceptualised as rational calculators primarily weighing the costs and benefits of Higher Education and the relative quality of institutions and courses. There is little understanding of how student choices are shaped by several other factors such as psychological traits, cognitive strategies (eg, heuristics and cognitive shortcuts), aspirations, sociopsychological identities and emotional responses, and how these might vary by social background. ...
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... does argue while many higher education applicants are fully informed, this knowledge is much less likely for students from poorer backgrounds. These behavioural constraints are evident in the US where low-income students and parents possess less knowledge about higher education and receive poorer information than advantaged students (Dougherty, 2018). These constraints include student and parent understanding of: the net price of selective colleges, after considering financial aid; the academic preparation and test scores sought by selective colleges; the importance of applying for Federal financial aid; the characteristics of different colleges and majors as well as graduation and job placements; and the mechanics of college acceptance including the benefit of applying to multiple colleges. ...
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