I Just Heard It’s Good: Student Perceptions of the Higher Education Status Hierarchy and College Choice

• In Event: 083 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Inequality, Race, and Social Structure

Abstract

We know that high-achieving disadvantaged students are less likely to enroll in selective colleges than their more advantaged peers. This paper considers the mechanisms of this “undermatching” process. Based on an ethnographic study in two urban, under-resourced, selective, public high schools, the paper examines the college choice process of high-achieving students from poor and working class families. My findings suggest that students had only a vague sense of the variation among schools. Students did not understand what it meant for a college to be elite or why elite credentials might be valuable. Students’ unfamiliarity with the higher education status hierarchy was reinforced by teachers, themselves first generation college graduates, who did not see benefit in attending expensive elite colleges. As such, the standard of excellence put forth by school staff was adequate for gaining admission to non-selective colleges, but did not match the admissions requirements of highly selective institutions.

Author

• Shani Adia Evans, University of Pennsylvania