The problem
As we approach the 2024 elections, and in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions on college admissions and student debt relief, national conversations have once again focused on college access and affordability. The elimination of affirmative action in college admissions, struggles to find policy solutions for exorbitant student debt, and concerns about inadequate preparation in high school literacy and math make an emphasis on these topics inevitable and important. Though these are crucial conversations, a focus on inequality in college access risks overlooking the inequalities that emerge once students arrive on campus. For those who gain admissions and manage to pay tuition, inequality does not stop at matriculation.
While scholars of higher education have long been cognizant of the complex role higher education can play in social mobility and social reproduction, common frameworks for understanding higher education have centered on questions of inputs and outcomes. For instance, a focus on “pipelines” to, through, and beyond higher education aligns with tendencies to emphasize college enrollment, retention, and completion. Over the past decade, however, scholars and practitioners alike have begun emphasizing the importance of college student experiences.
Emerging research illuminates the complexity of students’ experiences on campus— from examining the elective curriculum, in which students have almost limitless course options, to the extracurricular components of student life (clubs, sports, jobs, and so on). This work examines the impact of students’ experiences on stratification, explaining how inequalities persist between students who are advantaged or marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, immigration, and a host of other sociodemographic characteristics. This chapter explores what we are learning in this regard through research focused on 4- year colleges and universities with attention to solutions that can combat inequality. We propose that attention be paid both to research that centers students’ curricular journeys as well as work that studies the social, extracurricular, and pre- professional opportunities that contribute to undergraduate “pathways,” a framing concept that moves away from pipeline metaphors and emphasizes looking closely at students’ iterative decision- making and experiences to understand and improve their educational journeys. We use the pathways framework to examine how students navigate the broad array of curricular and extracurricular opportunities; we propose specific ways to identify and address inequality within higher education.
