Overview

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.

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9781978827042

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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 *"

"“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 *"

Author Information

YANG VA LOR is an assistant teaching professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, Merced.

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