"That's a good question!" Exploring motivations for law and business school choice

Students' accounts of their decisions to attend elite professional schools, although typically couched as preferences, actually reflect deep class-rel ated constraints. In a sample of 79 law and business students, the author f ound that the majority chose their degrees for similar reasons: professiona l status, intellectual interest, and an upper-middle-class lifestyle. The s tudents' explanations, which were full of uncertainty and default, upset th e assumption that students carefully or consciously choose professional car eers. Commitment to a particular career was vague, and for some students, t he two degrees could have substituted for one another. However, the student s were not investing in specific careers as much as in the maintenance of c lass status through education. Their motivations were shaped and constraine d by individual and organizational factors, including college, peers, work history, and market trends. It is significant that parents played a key rol e, not through direct occupational inheritance but by communicating the imp ortance of professional-managerial education for safeguarding social status .