Choice, Information Inequity, and the Production, Legitimation, and Reduction of Educational Inequality

Abstract

Background: Choice is a key part of the culture of the United States. Americans believe deeply in the personal and social usefulness of being able to make many choices. Hence, all sorts of efforts have been made to increase students’ options, whether by creating many different kinds of schools and colleges, offering a great array of majors and degree programs, or allowing multiple modes of attending higher education. However, this proliferation of choices reproduces social inequality in two crucial ways. First, the provision of many options produces social inequality: people often make choices that do not serve their interests as well as they might wish, particularly if they are faced with many options and do not have adequate information. Second, the provision of many choices legitimates social inequality: the more one thinks in terms of choices in the context of a highly individualistic culture such as that of the United States, the easier it is for dominant groups to blame nondominants as creating their own troubles through feckless choices. Purpose: This paper focuses on one particularly important realm of choice—higher education—because it has come to play a central role in the transmission and legitimation of social inequality. Four higher education choices are of particular interest: whether to enter higher education, which college to attend, what major to choose, and what modality to attend college (for example, part time versus full time or in person versus online). Analyzing this choice-making process, the paper focuses on the impact of inequitable access to high-quality information. Beyond analyzing how choice proliferation and information inequity join to produce and legitimate educational inequality, the paper lays out detailed recommendations for what can be done to reduce this inegalitarian impact. Research Design: The paper draws on a wide variety of social science literatures including sociology of education, critical race theory, behavioral economics, and cognitive and social psychology. More particularly, the paper synthesizes sociology of education research inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and work drawing on critical race theory. Although there are major tensions between these two bodies of work, they can be fruitfully combined to both illuminate and overcome the ways information inequity produces and legitimates educational inequality. Recommendations: To reduce the role of information inequity in producing and legitimating educational inequality, the paper recommends four strands of change. One strand involves providing high-quality information more equitably through restructured and much more pervasive school counseling and other forms of information provision during middle school, high school, and higher education. A crucial component of this more equitable information provision is drawing on the community cultural wealth of nondominant communities. Second, it is important to design an “architecture of choice” that simplifies choice making and nudges students toward better choices by such means as simplifying the financial aid process, improving credit articulation for community college transfer students, and building guided pathways through college. A third strand involves reducing the harms of suboptimal choices by creating the means to monitor student progress and intervene when students might or actually do go off course. Finally, because suboptimal choices will still occur, it is important to enlighten student choosers and their observers about how choice making under conditions of information inequity produces and legitimates social inequality and to empower them to combat that stratified and stratifying process.