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Dissertation Information for Patricia Marie McDonough

NAME:
- Patricia Marie McDonough

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Higher Education

SCHOOL:
- Stanford University (USA) (1992)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Who goes where to college: Social class and high school organizational context effects on college-choice decision making

Abstract: This study examines the ways in which social class and high school guidance operations combine to shape a high school student's perception of her opportunities for a college education in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This study asks and answers: "Why, if there is a single opportunity structure for American higher education, do individuals perceive it differently?" The data come from interviews with 12 white, female, middle-range academic performer, high school seniors in four California high schools, and those students' best friends (12), parents (12), and counselors (4).

I integrate studies of status groups and organizations and I use Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus. Cultural capital provides advantages to individuals in their interactions with schools and in making the transitions between those institutions. I introduce the concept of entitlement: students believe that they are entitled to a particular kind of collegiate education based on their family's habitus or class status and organize their college searches around a range of "acceptable" institutions. I propose extending habitus to organizations. I show how organizational habitus makes possible individual decisions by bounding the search parameters and schools offer different organizational habitus, different views of the college opportunity structure.

My data identify the social-class and organizational-context patterns of young women's college application processes, where families and schools are in a mutually influencing process that affects individual outcomes. These class-based patterns stand in contrast to traditional aspiration or expectation research which assumes an individual-level analysis of such planning processes.

I describe a range of new, nonschool-based admissions support services, which are individual, class, and organizational responses to a uncertain environment. I call for research on interinstitutional linkages, such as the one between high schools and colleges, and on the interinstitutional linkages between families and schools (Anyon, 1981; Lareau, 1989). I call for a culturally expanded notion of equal opportunity which ameliorates the sociocultural and organizational barriers to the higher education opportunity structure.

MPACT Scores for Patricia Marie McDonough

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:15:03

Advisors and Advisees Graph