The Dual Commodification of College-Going: Individual and Institutional Influences on Access and Choice

Abstract

The college-choice process has long been understood to be complex, and this complexity has become more apparent as increasingly diverse student populations seek to access a postsecondary education. The process is necessarily complicated in that it involves a host of intertangled factors that must align with a match wherein a student chooses the same institution that chooses them. Explaining college choice is made even more challenging by the different priorities and influences that shape student decision-making. Over time, a series of theoretical models have been developed and tested to make sense of this process, and a robust body of empirical literature focusing on how students select institutions has also been produced. There is also a smaller body of work about how institutions select students. However, few models and studies have explored how students and institutions go through the choice process in tandem. This represents a limitation in the ability of traditional models to fully and accurately explain how students end up enrolling in the institutions that they do. To that end, this chapter presents the Dual Commodification Model of College-Going that integrates both student and institutional actions and factors that create and alter choice sets, lead to a specific choice, and account for changes in the process and system over time. This chapter also explains how this model can be applied to diverse student populations and institutional types, allowing for the greatest utility for scholarly and practical purposes.