Institutional exclusion: the cultural production of educational inequality through college narrativesMichelle Jackson and
Christof Brandtner ()
Post-Print from HAL Abstract: Explanations of socioeconomic inequalities in college enrollment focus on college readiness, financial constraints, and information deficits. We provide a cultural explanation of educational inequalities, arguing that disadvantaged students are deterred from applying to high-status colleges because of the shared cultural narratives employed by those colleges—a mechanism that we label "institutional exclusion." Computational text analyses of college mission statements show that community colleges, for-profit colleges, and four-year colleges draw upon distinctively different cultural narratives. To gauge the causal effect of these narratives on student responses, we designed a survey experiment for a sample of high-school seniors. We find that the career-focused narratives of for-profit colleges are most appealing to disadvantaged students, whereas advantaged students prefer the post-materialist rhetoric of four-year colleges. We conclude that institutional exclusion should be included in sociological discussions of college inequalities and the promotion of diversity in organizations. Keywords: institutional exclusion; cultural narratives; educational inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Social Forces, inPress, 22 p. ⟨10.1093/sf/soaf099⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05196644 DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf099 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.