4 - OR DID THEY JUMP?

Summary

I shall now turn to the pulling forces of educational decisions. In chapter 1, two distinct versions of the pulled-from-the-front type of action were identified. The first tends to stress the adaptive features of rational choice and treats preferences as irrelevant. The only ‘preference’ which counts is a kind of built-in mechanism which makes people act according to the goal of ‘the more the better’, where the more is largely taken to refer to material goods and well-being. Differences in behaviour are accounted for by differences in the probability of success of a given course of action relative to other alternatives. In this chapter, I shall analyse the key notion of probability of success as referring to those circumstances through which subjects form an idea (1) of how likely it is going to be for them to reach successfully a given level of education and (2) of how relatively rewarding that level of education will be in terms of material benefits. With respect to (1) this notion will be dealt with in the first section of this chapter, where I shall consider the effects of past academic achievement, for example school reports and type of school attended on future educational decisions; with respect to (2) it will be dealt with in the second section, where I shall try to measure subjects’ response to labour market objective circumstances.