Inequality in university admissions

As a current senior in a high school, whose favourite subject is sociology, I felt almost obliged to explore the topic of inequality in education, specifically how this impacts university admission processes.

Every new year, as university decisions arrive, a familiar kind of post floods Instagram. A satisfied student, a grid of elite university logos and underneath, the name of the private counseling agency that “made it happen”. For families scrolling past, the message is hard to miss: this is what success looks like.

I set out to understand what these services actually do and how their impact extends beyond the student receiving them through designing a research. I surveyed 20 students and parents, interviewed families on both sides of the private-counseling divide along with school and private counselors and analysed acceptance posts from three private counseling agencies operating in Pakistan.

The three sources pointed to the same conclusion - private college counselling will continue to reproduce class-based advantage unless targeted and personalised support is offered within existing academic institutions.

Eighty-two percent of survey respondents said private counselors give students access to “unspoken” admissions criteria, such as when to apply early and how to position a student for a niche programme, that students relying on their schools simply don’t hear about. This corroborates my literature review of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of cultural capital — and the related theory of institutional habitus developed with Passeron (1977), which provided the theoretical foundation for the study.

Bourdieu argues that educational institutions, despite their appearance of meritocracy, systematically reward forms of knowledge, taste, and self-presentation that are unevenly distributed by class background, effectively converting inherited economic and cultural capital into achievement.

Sixty-five percent of respondents also noted that private counseling offers a social network and a student without that network cannot build the same profile on paper, however talented they may be. With packages commonly costing anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000, the divide between students seeking counselling outside school is financial.

The interviews further support the conclusion - a critique of the education system itself and lack of resources to offer all pupils an equal chance. This corroborates my literature review of Bowles and Gintis (1976) who argue that meritocracy is a myth used to legitimise unequal outcomes.

Across both groups interviewed, the majority described private counseling as giving pupils an advantage. Parents who even paid for it also called it unfair, but they critiqued the system itself, not their choices within it. Parents saw it as a rational response to a competitive system, but they did not defend the system itself.

This matters as it’s not the fault of counselors or parents or pupils for wanting extra resources, it’s the system in which opting out feels like a risk most families who can afford not to take it won’t take.

The advertising of these counselling agencies is most visible in the marketing. Every acceptance post I examined, across all three agencies, used aspirational imagery and prestige from famous universities. Nearly all were built around a student success story, and on a five-point scale from purely informational to highly promotional, the posts averaged 4.8.

What should change

None of this means families who use private counselors are doing something wrong. It means the system is rewarding access over potential, and fixing that requires structural change rather than blame.

Schools need to focus on hiring qualified counselors who are approachable and those who can allocate the time to give students tailored guidance instead of just general advice.

Universities should be far more transparent about what actually matters in holistic review, which would shrink the information only available to some and not gatekeep the “unspoken” rules.

The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.