Rationality Reconsidered: How People Think about Education and the Opportunity Structure

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. Processes of Privilege and Mobility

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the pursuit of education occurs in a means-end rational way in which people make decisions based on cost-benefit analyses about how education will maximize their later life chances. By analyzing data from a diverse sample of 69 interviews, I find that people do not necessarily formulate career/future plans and then strategize their educational choices to facilitate those outcomes. The current educational and inequality literatures assume that educational decisions are made in such a way. Achievement gap scholars have attempted to highlight the fact that blacks and poor people are ‘rational’ in their choice of schooling and career options, arguing against entrenched stereotypic notions about the inherent “pathologies” of these populations. I find that while it is true that the educational decisions of blacks and the poor are not always logical in accordance with means-end rationality, neither are those of whites, middle class people, men or women. People not only see education as a means to an end, but also as the ‘right’ thing to do in order to be a ‘better’ person. Indeed, many people speak of education in moral terms, suggesting that those who do not pursue education face a social stigma – despite, in some cases, having obtained the ‘ends’ of education (e.g. stable, well-paying employment) without a degree. Thus, I suggest that value-rationality is an important conceptual tool for understanding educational trajectories and inequality more generally

Author

• Lauren Valentino, Duke University