Since this is one of the top search results for questions related to this I felt it was worth mentioning how you can make this work with Kendo().DropDownListFor() as well.
Everything is the same as with OnaBai's post except for how you select the item based off of its text and your selector.
To do that you would swap out dataItem.symbol for dataItem.[DataTextFieldName]. Whatever model field you used for .DataTextField() is what you will be comparing against.
@(Html.Kendo().DropDownListFor(model => model.Status.StatusId)
.Name("Status.StatusId")
.DataTextField("StatusName")
.DataValueField("StatusId")
.BindTo(...)
)
//So that your ViewModel gets bound properly on the post, naming is a bit
//different and as such you need to replace the periods with underscores
var ddl = $('#Status_StatusId').data('kendoDropDownList');
ddl.select(function(dataItem) {
return dataItem.StatusName === "Active";
});