Conference Program

Merit-based admission systems frame access to higher education as the outcome of individual effort and academic achievement, suggesting that opportunities should be allocated fairly on the basis of merit (Mijs, 2016; Reay, 2020). However, access remains deeply stratified, with students unevenly distributed across institutions and programs with different levels of prestige and selectivity, reproducing inequalities of class, gender and ethnicity (Brunner & Labraña, 2020; McCowan, 2016). Academic performance hierarchically classifies applicants while legitimizing these differences as merit, even though achievement itself is shaped by social origin and educational inequalities (Liu, 2011; Reay, 2021). Educational choices, in turn, cannot be understood as purely individual decisions but as relational processes shaped by the interaction between social structures, institutional arrangements and students' dispositions (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997).

In Ecuador, despite higher education reforms introduced in 2010 aimed at democratizing access, including tuition-free public university education and affirmative action policies for historically excluded groups, inequalities persist and barriers remain for Indigenous and low-income students (Ponce & Carrasco, 2017; Rivera, 2019).

This paper explores how, despite high academic performance, students from historically excluded groups navigate the tensions between the promise of meritocratic access and the social constraints that shape their educational choices and horizons of possibility. Drawing on a qualitative approach, the study uses data from 26 semi-structured interviews with affirmative action students who achieved high scores in the national admission exam at the Universidad Central del Ecuador.

The findings identify four distinct logics of university choice, structured around orientations toward risk and the future. A maximization logic leads students to strategically pursue highly selective programs through knowledge of admission rules and family pressure toward prestigious careers. An entry assurance logic prioritizes securing admission over preferred programs, driven by perceptions of the process as uncertain and limited knowledge of the system. A confidence in entry logic involves lower systemic tension and more vocational decisions, although self-limitation emerges through perceptions of personal ability. These three logics share individualised and positional orientations toward the future, distancing students from the structural conditions shaping their trajectories and resonating with meritocratic narratives.

A fourth logic operates differently. More frequently articulated by women and Indigenous students, it frames career choices in relation to collective experiences, community commitments and transformative aspirations, challenging the individualised and positional terms through which meritocratic futures are typically constructed (Webb & Sepúlveda, 2020).

Taken together, these findings show that access to selective university programs cannot be understood solely as the outcome of individual merit or instrumental decision-making, but as a relational and socially conditioned process. Moreover, the experiences of affirmative action students in their transition to higher education reveal the limits of policies focused exclusively on distributive or compensatory mechanisms of access, and the need to incorporate broader conceptions of justice that attend to recognition (Fraser, 2008) and the relational dimensions through which educational choices and transitions are constructed (Lynch et al., 2021).