Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education (review)

In the 1960s, higher education in the United Kingdom shifted from a previously elite system to a system of mass public education. Participation and access to colleges and universities widened, providing students with numerous choices in the types and locations of institutions of higher education to attend. In Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race, and Gender in Higher Education, Diane Reay, Miriam David, and Stephen Ball assert that the rhetoric of equity and fairness accompanying this increased access in the United Kingdom has hidden "a deepening of education and social stratification" (p. vii).

The expansion of higher education has generated social inequities exemplified in the types of institutions that students from different social classes choose to attend. The aim of this book is to problematize the long-standing notion that students choose college using a rational choice theory model and to draw attention to how social justice and equity are factors in college choice.

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundation for this empirical study. Chapter 1 describes the U.K. trends of student enrollment disaggregated by race, gender, age, and social class and details the study sample, including the students and the institutions, in the analysis. The authors employ qualitative methods, emphasizing student and parent narratives to illustrate how an individual student's knowledge and use of resources during the college choice process is heavily based on social class.

Chapter 2 presents Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social and cultural capital, paying particular attention to the concepts of habitus and field. The authors define habitus as a conceptual tool that combines individual choice, dispositions, and contextual expectations. However, they take a novel approach to Bourdieu's concepts and introduce a hierarchy of habiti—individuals, institutional, and familial—that affect college choice. Each of these habiti, together and separately, mediate the process of college choice and create a framework for examining how social class impacts college choice. The remaining chapters capture the reader's attention with vivid reports of students' thoughts while considering college going. The remaining chapters are divided into familial, habiti, and intra-class differences among working class students, race in college choice, and class differences in gathering and using information as they make their college choice.

The student and parent narratives most accurately represent the complexities of college choice and how multiple student identities (gender, race, class) intersect with cultural and social capital to reproduce inequities in higher education. Here the authors provide rich descriptions of how institutional, familial, and class habiti work together to limit the capital of working-class students. For example, the authors present convincing data of familial habitus in middle- and upper-class families. These families, with multiple generations of college attendance, are involved in the college choice process. They take their children to visit campuses and help them conduct research. These same students benefit from institutional habitus as they receive coaching in their private high schools to prepare them for the college interview.

In contrast, working-class students are often first-generation college-goers and attend high schools that provide them with little assistance in the college choice process. The working-class students lack the familial and institutional habiti common to upper- and middle-class students, and are more likely to enroll in the nonelite colleges. While much of the analysis of the data is insightful and illuminating, more analysis of the complexities of race and class would further illustrate the societal entrenchment of class and race-based discrimination. The authors also refer to the importance of peers in college decision-making but do not provide a thorough analysis of their impact.

The contributions of this book are many, ranging from the introduction of an interactive system of habiti to a more nuanced conceptualization of social class. The authors deconstruct the monolithic categories of upper, middle, and low social class to consider intra-class differences based on social and cultural...