Perceiving Inequality, Preserving Selection: Elite University Students and the Distribution of Educational Opportunity in England
- Dr Paulina Rodríguez Anaiz, University of Oxford
- Dr Gonzalo Hidalgo-Bazan, University of Oxford
Research has shown how elites, particularly educational elites, invoke merit retrospectively to explain and justify their own trajectories. But what do students at the top of the educational hierarchy make of the opportunities available to others? Drawing on interviews with educationally elite undergraduates and an interactive distribution task, this article examines students’ perceptions and explanations of social-group allocation across tertiary routes, their distributive ideals and supported interventions. Participants recognised that educational choices and achievements were produced under unequal conditions, yet this structural awareness coexisted with different distributive ideals: representative, compensatory, substantive-choice and merit-first. Most favoured upstream equalisation and contextual admissions over quotas. Merit receded as an explanation of unequal destinations but returned, reconstructed through context, potential and preparedness, when students judged legitimate correction. By separating perceptions, ideals and policy judgements, we show that structural recognition underdetermines redistributive commitment and can often rehabilitate, rather than displace, selection at the elite gateway.
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Dr Paulina Rodríguez Anaiz is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on issues of inclusion and inequality in higher education.
Dr Gonzalo Hidalgo-Bazan is a postdoctoral researcher at SKOPE (Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance) in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the lived effects of education policies and public narratives on educational actors.