| 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. |
