In education policy circles across the UK, the USA, and China, one phrase has dominated the last few decades: parental choice. The narrative is seductive. If we treat schools like businesses and parents like consumers, competition will force standards up, bad schools will close, and every child will have the opportunity to succeed.

However, a deep dive into sociological and economic research reveals a starkly different reality. Far from being a tide that lifts all boats, education markets often function as a sophisticated mechanism for middle-class families to lock in their advantages, leaving working-class families to navigate a system rigged against them.

Here is what the research tells us about the hidden costs of the education market.

The Market as a Class Strategy

The shift from state-planned education to market-based systems was driven by the idea that public monopolies were inefficient and unresponsive. Proponents argued that breaking this monopoly would empower parents. Yet, researchers argue that this marketization is essentially a “class strategy”

The market creates a “Darwinian” struggle where popular schools thrive and unpopular ones fail. But unlike buying a car or a phone, the “consumers” (parents) do not enter the market with equal resources. The market assumes everyone has the skills and cultural capital to decode complex information and “work the system,” but these skills are heavily concentrated in the middle class. As a result, the market reproduces social class advantages rather than dismantling them.

The “Skilled Chooser” vs. The “Disconnected”

The disparity in how different classes navigate this market is profound. Middle-class parents are often “privileged/skilled choosers”. They possess the cultural capital to decode school brochures, the confidence to negotiate with gatekeepers, and the financial resources to move into the catchment areas of the best schools.

Conversely, working-class parents often approach school choice with ambivalence and anxiety. Research indicates that for these families, the choice process is less about maximizing academic profit and more about avoiding failure. Working-class choice is frequently characterized by a “rational avoidance of high risk choices,” where parents might avoid high-status schools for fear their child will be rejected, humiliated, or feel “out of place”.

While middle-class parents are playing a game they expect to win, working-class parents are often trapped in a game where the stakes are dangerously high, leading to a process of “self-exclusion”.

The Global War for “Positional Goods”

Why is the competition so fierce? Because education has become a “positional good”. In a positional competition, it doesn’t matter how well you do in absolute terms; it only matters how well you do relative to everyone else.

As more people gain degrees, the value of those degrees drops (credential inflation). This forces families to seek ever-higher credentials or degrees from elite institutions to maintain their social standing. This is exacerbated by the “globalisation of positional competition”. The labor market for high-skilled jobs is increasingly international, meaning parents feel the pressure to create “world-class” children capable of competing not just locally, but globally.

This pressure is fueled by economic shifts. Skill-biased technology change means that demand for educated workers has risen, increasing the wage gap between graduates and non-graduates. The economic penalty for “losing” the education race is higher than ever.

The “Deficit” of Aspiration

To explain why inequality persists despite these “opportunities,” governments often turn to the rhetoric of “aspiration.” Policy discourses frequently claim that working-class disadvantage stems from a “poverty of aspiration”—essentially blaming parents and children for lacking the ambition to succeed.

However, this is a trap. By focusing on individual psychology (grit, resilience, confidence), the state individualizes structural problems. It requires disadvantaged young people to perform intense “self-work” and transformation to escape their backgrounds, while masking the material barriers that make such mobility nearly impossible for the majority.

A Case Study in Intensity: The Chinese Market

Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in China. The Chinese education market has exploded with mechanisms designed to allow the rising middle class to buy advantage. Because good schools are scarce, the market allocates them to the highest bidder [24].

Strategies include:

• Choice Fees and Donations: Parents pay massive “donations” (often disguised as voluntary) to secure spots in key schools.
• Converted Schools: Public schools convert to “quasi-private” status to legally charge high tuition fees, effectively segregating students by income.
• Guanxi (Connections): Parents leverage powerful social networks to bypass entrance requirements.

Despite the government’s initial attempts to ban these fees, they eventually accommodated them to supplement educational funding, effectively making the government a partner in this inequality. This has turned parental choice from a meritocratic competition into a private competition based on wealth and power.

Conclusion

The promise of the education market was that it would free families from the constraints of bureaucracy. The reality is that it has shackled them to a relentless treadmill of competition. Whether through “choice fees” in China or catchment-area maneuvering in the UK, the market mechanism privileges those who already possess the most capital. It transforms education from a public good into a private asset, where one child’s success is predicated on another’s exclusion.