New article by Christof Brandtner in Social Forces.
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 col- leges 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.
Reference:
Michelle Jackson and Christof Brandtner. Institutional exclusion: the cultural production of educational inequality through college narratives. Social Forces, 2025. https//doi.org/10.1086/733799
Sign on Agnes Scott Campus with the College’s Mission Statement by Rbradley923, CC BY-SA 4.0.
