This review culls noneconomic literature on education-by sociologists, anthropologists, and practitioners to present a new economic theory of students and schools. This theory elaborates two themes that have eluded economic analysis. First is the student as decision-maker whose primary motivation is her identity. Second is a conception of the school as a social institution. This framework suggests a new perspective on questions such as resource allocation and school reform. It explains why some educational policies succeed and others fail. We show how sociological variables may affect outcomes, and suggest ways economists can incorporate them into theoretical and empirical research.

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Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education

This study investigated college experiences and outcomes for low and high
SES students utilizing data from a longitudinal database. Low SES students
engaged in fewer extracurricular activities, worked more, studied less, and
reported lower GPAs than their high SES peers. Nine years after entering college,
the low SES students had lower incomes, educational attainment, and
graduate school attendance than high SES students. These experiential and
outcome differences are tied to differences in cultural capital and habitus.

http://www.shirleymohr.com/JHU/Sample_Articles_JHUP/RHE_2003_27_1.pdf

Socioeconomic Status and College: How SES Affects College Experiences and Outcomes

This article draws on case studies of nine working-class students at Southern, an elite university. 1 It attempts to understand the complexities of identities in flux through Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field. Bourdieu (1990a) argues that when an individual encounters an unfamiliar field, habitus is transformed. He also writes of how the movement of habitus across new, unfamiliar fields results in ‘a habitus divided against itself ’ (Bourdieu, 1999a). Our data suggest more nuanced understandings in which the challenge of the unfamiliar results in a range of creative adaptations and multi-faceted responses. They display dispositions of self-scrutiny and self-improvement — almost ‘a constant fashioning and re-fashioning of the self ’ but one that still retains key valued aspects of a working-class self. Inevitably, however, there are tensions and ambivalences, and the article explores these, as well as the very evident gains for working-class students of academic success in an elite HE institution.

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‘Strangers in Paradise’?: Working-class Students in Elite Universities

Recent research has entirely vindicated the authors' once-controversial estimates of high levels of intergenerational persistence of economic status, the unimportance of the heritability of IQ in this process, and the fact that the contribution of schooling to cognitive development plays little part in explaining why those with more schooling have higher earnings. Additional research has supported the authors' hypotheses concerning the role of personality traits, rather than skills, per se, as determinants of labor market success. Recent contributions to the study of cultural evolution allow the authors to be considerably more specific about how behaviors are learned in school

/pdf/schooling-in-capitalist-america-revisited-45u6d4dnh3.pdf

Schooling in capitalist America revisited

Despite recent interest in the effects of restructuring and redesigning the work place, the link between individual identity and structural change has usually been asserted rather than demonstrated. Through an extensive review of data from field work in a multi-national corporation Catherine Casey changes this. She knows that changes currently occuring in the world of work are part of the vast social and cultural changes that are challenging the meta trends of modern industrialism. These events affect what people do everyday, and they are altering relations among ourselves and with the physical world. This valuable book is not only a critical analysis of the transformations occurring in the world of work, but an exploration of the effects of contemporary practices of work on the self.

Work, Self and Society: After Industrialism

1. Introduction 2. Freeway Males 3. Freeway Females 4. Within the School 5. Freeway Teachers 6. Freeway Parents 7. Women and Men: A Social Movement Perspective 8. Whether the Working Class?

Lois Weis

Papers

Working Class Without Work: High School Students in A De-Industrializing Economy