Rational choice theories of education view student's educational decision as a sequence of binary choices between options that entail long-term utility and options that reduce short-term risk of failure. One of the best articulated models of educational choice asserts that choice between alternative options is affected by students' utility considerations, their expectations regarding the odds of success or failure in alternative educational options, and their motivation to avoid downward social mobility. We evaluated these propositions using data on students' curricular choices in Tel Aviv-Jaffa high schools. We found that educational choice was affected by subjective utility and failure expectations, but not by class maintenance motivations. Just as important, and contrary to the model's main assertion, educational inequality between social strata was not mediated by any of these choice mechanisms. Finally, and importantly, about a fifth of the students in Tel Aviv-Jaffa did not choose between long-term utility and short-term risks, but combined the two. These students, the hedgers, combined the riskier scientific subjects that are expected to yield long-term utility with social sciences and the humanities that reduce the risk of failure in the short term, but are not expected to yield large long-term utilities. The hedgers, moreover, were shown to be disproportionately female and drawn from disadvantaged social strata. These results suggest that educational systems that allow multiple rather than alternative choices may enhance the attainment of working-class youth because they enable them to opt for long term utility while providing a safety-net in the form of additional safer subjects.

Although gender inequalities in education have greatly changed in recent decades with young women outpacing young men, girls and boys continue to study in gender-typical fields of study. Recognizing that boys and girls might have different educational preferences, we conceptualized gender differentiation as an outcome of both socialization processes and rational choice factors. Using a data set from an original survey of curricular choices of high school students in Tel Aviv-Jaffa in Israel, we employed nested logit regression models using the KHB method to examine the determinants of the gender differentiation in advanced course-taking. We found that socialization mechanisms (significant other influences) and rational choice motivations (utility considerations and failure expectations) explain up to 40 percent of the gender-typical curricular choice in our data. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.

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This study demonstrates that studying ethnic/racial inequality on the basis of cross-sectional data conceals how such inequality might unfold over the life course. Moving beyond a snapshot perspective, we ask, Do Israel's Jewish ethnic groups differ in their long-term earnings trajectories? Analyzing nearly 20 years of registered earnings data, the authors find that for the same cohort (25-to 32-year-old Jews in 1995), the ethnic earnings gap has widened over these years. This trend, we demonstrate, is explained largely by increasing wage premiums for college degree, even when these premiums are ethnicity blind. That is, ethnic inequality in educational attainment is translated to increasing ethnic earnings inequality over the life course. This pattern cannot be detected in previous research in Israel, which relied on the snapshot perspective on the basis of cross-sectional data. The consequences of these findings for changes in inequality in divided societies are discussed.

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