Cultural capital and habitus in context: the importance of high school college-going culture

Abstract

While an extensive body of research has examined the role of cultural capital in reproducing social class inequality in educational outcomes, the role of habitus and school context has received less attention in quantitative studies. We attend to this gap in the literature by considering the relationship between cultural capital, habitus, and the transition into higher education across high schools with low and high college-going cultures in the United States. Findings indicate that the relationship between cultural capital and transition into higher education is context specific and manifested only in schools with a high college-going culture. In addition, students from less advantaged family backgrounds benefit more from cultural capital than their more advantaged counterparts, but this is the case primarily in schools with a high college-going culture. Habitus, however, is related to the transition into higher education regardless of the high school context and benefits all students equally.

Keywords:

• Cultural capital
• habitus
• US higher education
• college-going culture
• school context
• social class inequality

Notes

1. While this article focuses on variation across school contexts, it is valuable to note that students can also be sorted within schools (such as tracking), which is particularly salient in Bowles and Gintis’ work.

2. Although see Kingston (2001) for a critique of this broader definition of cultural capital.

3. Higher education literature has tended to focus either on cultural capital (Kaufman and Gabler 2004; Dumais and Ward 2010; Noble and Davies 2009) or on habitus (Grodsky and Riegle-Crumb 2010), without considering them jointly. There is a large body of research on educational expectations, but this research is rarely framed within Bourdieu’s social reproduction framework.

4. All sample sizes have been rounded to the nearest 10 in compliance with standards regarding national center for education statistics (NCES) restricted-use data files.

5. An alternative model specification would include using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). However, our current version of HLM has limited multiple imputation capabilities and does not provide estimates of average marginal effects, which is crucial for our purposes given that our analyses rest on comparing coefficients across models and school contexts.

6. Parents were asked about educational expectations of their children only in the baseline parent survey (i.e. 10th grade).

7. We also tested interactions between educational expectations and SES. Those results are not reported because there were no statistically significant interactions in either schools with a low or a high college-going culture.