Making of Higher Education Preferences: A Critical Appraisal

The long held exogenous view of preferences constitutes the underlying core of educational decision making in neoclassical economics. This paper is organized in three sections. The first section presents the conceptual and empirical difficulties with the notion of preference adopted in neoclassical economics and its implications to higher education. Section two offers a critical appraisal of psychologists’ efforts, grounded in empirical studies, to revise the concept of preference. The third section critically examines the issues and argues that neither standard economics, mainstream psychology, nor their ‘convenient’ fusion is able to adequately portray the educational preferences. Hence, it becomes imperative to ask how education preferences are formed; and how do the social-psychological processes shape the formation of higher education preferences.