Philosophical Considerations about Equity in Higher Education

Abstract

Abstract

The principle of equity traditionally means that equals should be treated equally and unequals should be treated unequally. Applied to higher education, that principle implies that institutions should grant access to aspiring students based on their demonstrated motivation and ability to take advantage of such education. However, neither a standard inherent-desert nor a social-value argument succeed in providing a moral justification for the equity principle for access to higher education. Therefore, it is argued that the principle of equality in access to higher education, according to which no aspiring student may be denied such access, is more morally justified than the principle of equity in access.

Equity is one of the premier values in most world societies, representing a central consideration in achieving social justice. Equity is related to equality, but it is a qualified form of that value that also recognizes and responds to certain relevant differences among individuals. Specifically, since at least the time of Aristotle, equity has been defined as treating equals equally and unequals unequally. In other words, equity prescribes at times both equal and unequal treatment of individuals, depending upon the characteristics of the individuals involved. This essay will consider the application and meaning of this value to education in general and higher education in particular.

At the ages of early primary education, it is widely believed that very young children are fundamentally morally equal and therefore that equity requires roughly equal treatment of all children, at least with regard to the basic purposes of instruction and to some extent to the methods used. Young children have not developed sufficiently or achieved in ways that would justify significantly different treatment. In secondary and especially higher education, however, the differences among students become more apparent and take on increased personal and social meaning. Therefore, at these levels it is equally widely believed that there are reasons to emphasize differentiation in the treatment of students. Indeed, in most higher education institutions, these inequalities provide one important rationale for the denial of education to many on the grounds that they are not sufficiently capable of taking advantage of the instruction offered by such institutions and for an increasingly radical differentiation of the content of the education of those who are admitted on the grounds that they possess differential abilities to take advantage of such instruction. Against this background, this essay will attempt to ascertain the extent to which these inequalities provide a sufficient rationale based on considerations of equity for limiting access to higher education and for the differentiation of instruction in such education.

Before considering the ultimate moral acceptability of the current practice of this restriction of access to and differentiation in higher education on the basis of equity, it is important to elaborate upon the standard account of the meaning of and rationale for this practice. First, the characteristics upon which the differentiation is based must provide relevant reasons for differential treatment. For example, such traits as students’ ethnicity, gender, economic background, or geographic origin are widely considered to be irrelevant to their education. Thus, on the standard account, part of the task of achieving equity is to ensure that decisions about access and differentiation are not based on educationally irrelevant characteristics. However, other characteristics, such as academic talent and the motivation to study hard, are thought to be relevant. Therefore, another related task of achieving equity is to ensure that such decisions are based on appropriate characteristics of the students. Second, the educational treatments to be distributed must be appropriate to the basis for differentiation. For example, it would seem intuitively unfair to distribute opportunities for learning advanced mathematics to students who demonstrate high levels of talent and motivation in music. Thus, the standard rationale for equitable differentiation in higher education requires that the specific educational opportunities that are distributed are aligned with the particular inequalities of talent and motivation that provide the basis of the differentiation. Conversely, those with similar talents and motivation are to receive similar educational opportunities to develop their talents. Third, however, the emergence of these talents and motivations is sometimes significantly affected by students’ family backgrounds, including their ethnic, gender, economic, and geographic characteristics, which, as we have noted, are morally illegitimate grounds for differentiation. For this reason, equity requires undertaking yet another task so that students have educational experiences that enable them and others in the society to recognize their natural talents and to develop the motivations to utilize them that their social backgrounds may obscure or make improbable. In this way, the standard account of equity in higher education requires students to have certain educational opportunities that are probably but not necessarily best delivered prior to students’ entering higher education, namely those that make it possible for them and the society to discover their potential for academic study.

With this understanding of the meaning of equity, we are now in a position to determine what the ultimate moral justification of this account of equity in higher education might be. It is often maintained that students deserve such differentiation solely because of the traits that they possess. On this account, the distribution of opportunities for music education to students that have great potential for music achievement is justified just because they are talented and motivated in that field. However, this inherent-desert justification is problematic for two reasons. On the one hand, students’ talents and to a lesser extent their motivations are simply accidents of nature, especially if the effects of the social context on the emergence and recognition of students’ abilities have been neutralized as is required under the third consideration we noted. Therefore, because students have done nothing to deserve the characteristics that are the basis for educational differentiation, they cannot be said to deserve that differentiation. 2 On the other hand, the inherent-desert justification implies that students deserve educational opportunities to develop whatever talents they happen naturally to have, no matter how obscure and useless those talents may seem to be. It suggests that those who have the potential patience, motivation, and skill necessary for counting the grains of sand on a beach are just as deserving of higher education to develop those characteristics as those who have the potential to make significant scientific contributions to curing cancer. Intuitively, however, the practical value of the talents to be developed should, it seems, have some legitimate role in determining the kinds of higher education that a society must offer. Otherwise, the members of the society would find themselves obligated to develop at least some students’ talents for which the value, if any, is cannot be discerned. Equity in higher education, therefore, is not only a matter of fairness to those who are to be educated but also to those who supply the resources necessary for that education. For these two reasons, then, the inherent-desert justification for differentiation in higher education at the very least cannot stand alone and may, indeed, be entirely unsatisfactory.

A second line of justification for the standard account of equity that is more sensitive to the social value of students’ talents and motivation must, therefore, be sought. One such justification holds that the predicted value to the society of student potential is the sole ground for the differentiation in treatment that students receive with respect to higher education. This justification implies that the society has an obligation to develop only the student potential that has apparent social value. Moreover, the extent to which that potential is to be developed is determined by the value that it promises to contribute to the society. Combined with the issues already considered, then, equity under this justification requires a society to develop equally the talents of students with equal potential to contribute value to the society and to develop unequally the talents of those with unequal potential to contribute. This formulation enables a society to differentiate its treatment of student talents in three ways. First, a society can refuse to develop particular talents that have little or no apparent social value. In this way, the society can justifiably deny access to higher education for the reason that a student’s specific potential, no matter how great, is of limited utility to the society. Second, a society can refuse to develop a particular socially valued potential for which the cost of development would be greater than the benefit that the society would thereby derive. Here, a society could justifiably deny access to higher education on the ground that student’s talent or motivation is so limited that it would take more social resources to develop than the student’s later use of that developed talent would generate for the society. Third, a society would be justified in differentiating access to the curriculum for those admitted to higher education according to the estimated social contribution that students would make in the various curricular alternatives. Thus, for example, a society could deny a student access to the music curriculum but grant access to the mathematics curriculum on the ground that the combination of the student’s potential in mathematics and the social utility of that subject promises greater social benefits than the development of the student’s musical ability does. In all these cases, a society would meet the requirements of equity in higher education as long as it grants or denies access to all students with similar configurations and amounts of talent and motivation once it has corrected for the effects of irrelevant characteristics on those factors. In fact, this interpretation of equity would tend to maximize social value because it enables a society to make efficient use of the student talents and motivations available in the society.

Just as with the inherent-desert justification, however, this social-value justification is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it assumes that the potential social contributions of particular students can be predicted reasonably accurately so that whether they deserve access to higher education and to what curriculum they deserve access can be determined. However, a society’s ability to make such predictions is extremely limited. In part, this is the result of the inaccuracy of the available measures of student potential. In the United States, for example, scores on existing college admissions tests combined with high school grades are correlated to some extent with first-year college grades, but after that, the correlations of these measures with and thus those measures’ ability to predict subsequent student grades, majors, degree completion, and income falls to zero. 3 Of course, more accurate measures may be available in some societies, but these tests are not usually validated for their correlations with longer-run measures of social value largely, I suspect, because it is assumed that students’ talents provide an inherent justification for differentiation or because it is assumed that short-run validation is sufficient to predict social value in the long run. Nevertheless, as we have found, both of these assumptions are problematic. Furthermore, this failure of prediction is not the result only of inaccurate measurement instruments. Indeed, students’ talents and motivations themselves change as a result of their experiences in higher education and their continuing maturation. Moreover, the quality and quantity of social needs and demands also change over time so that earlier predictions of student contributions to society become inherently and increasingly inaccurate in the long run. If both student potential and social contributions evolve in this way, the ostensibly equitable differentiation of higher education in accordance with students’ social contributions must be nearly impossible to achieve. In other words, access to college and placement in the curriculum are determined at an earlier time based on factors that change during and after college—namely, student talents and motivation and the social contributions that they might make. Thus, what appears in the short run as equity in the allocation of higher education according to this justification turns out in the fullness of time to be illusory and therefore of questionable moral value. This conclusion does not deny that higher education is a means for increasing social value but only that the distribution of higher education according to this particular interpretation of equity is not a reliable or necessary mechanism for accomplishing that goal. In fact, a society’s making higher education more available and accessible undoubtedly can contribute to social value, but the allocation of higher education strictly according to the talents and motivation that students display prior to entering university does not necessarily increase the value that society reaps from this investment.

Second, this justification entirely neglects the aspirations of individual students to live personally meaningful lives. Instead, it requires the allocation of opportunities for higher education entirely in the interests of improving the benefits that accrue to the society as a whole. This justification requires the society to match that allocation to the specific native talents that students possess, but it does not consider whether the use of those talents is personally meaningful to the students affected. Of course, this justification also requires that the allocation accords in a general way with the motivation of students because, unless the students are willing to work diligently in their assigned curriculum, the value that the society hopes to realize from them will not be forthcoming. However, this motivation to work hard can be differentiated from students’ aspirations for personally meaningful lives. For by attaching appropriate external rewards and sanctions to the task, it is possible to engineer student motivations so that they will work assiduously at whatever task others set for them, whether it is meaningful to them or not. Now, if the society could in fact align their higher education decisions with the improvement of social value, this potential failure to consider student aspirations for personally meaningful lives might be tolerable because it would be a sacrifice made for the greater good. However, if, as we have found, the assumption that such alignment of the results of higher education with the improvement of social value can in fact be achieved is highly speculative at best and impossible at worst, the engineering of student motivations with disregard for their aspirations seems to be utterly unjustified. That is, there is no plausible countervailing social value to offset the sacrifice of student aspirations for personally meaningful lives. Although there is wide disagreement about the relative normative importance of these aspirations, there is equally widespread agreement that these aspirations are of some value. Therefore, the sacrifice of these aspirations without some compensating normative gain is morally questionable.

In summary, we have found that equity in higher education requires both similarity and variation in the treatment of students according to their talents and motivations when those characteristics are determined in a way that does not allow irrelevant features of students’ backgrounds to affect the expression and recognition of their talents and motivations and to influence the society’s subsequent decisions about differential treatment. However, neither of the standard justifications for equity in higher education—the inherent-desert justification or the social-value justification—succeeds. Although equity requires differentiation of education on the grounds of differences in natural ability and motivation, those differences do not prove to have moral significance on their own, and this interpretation of equity imposes upon society obligations that sometimes conflict with social value. When the consequences of students’ natural differences for generating social value are considered as the grounds for differentiation, equity does have potential moral significance, but accurately differentiating higher education according to the actual value that society will realize is so difficult (if not altogether impossible) that the moral cost, however small or large, of ignoring students’ aspirations for personally meaningful lives makes this interpretation of equity in higher education morally implausible.

Given this conclusion that the two standard justifications for equity in higher education are on their own of doubtful moral significance, it seem reasonable to seek an alternative basis for allocating higher education that is morally preferable to equity. It should be noted that this conclusion is not at all a general repudiation of the moral value of equity but one that applies only to the special circumstances of higher education and other cases in which the bases for desert are of questionable moral value and in which the prediction of social value is unfeasible. In cases where desert is attached more clearly to specific actions or characteristics for which the individual has definite responsibility or where the creation of social value is more securely predictable from those factors, equity may be an entirely appropriate basis for the allocation of resources or opportunities. Of course, those cases must be analyzed carefully to ensure whether higher priority moral values are involved. I should also note that this conclusion for higher education is, to put it mildly, surprising, especially in light of typical academics’ intuitions about these matters, including my own. As a result, the argument for this conclusion obviously needs to be reviewed carefully. That said, I will tentatively accept this result and consider whether other values might provide a morally attractive basis for allocating higher education.

Now, there are several plausible values that might replace equity as the criterion for distributing higher education—social value (in itself rather than as an interpretation of equity), citizenship, liberty, and equality, to name four prominent candidates from the ethics literature. As we have seen, however, social value does not provide a workable rationale for the unequal distribution of higher education according to students’ talents and motivation, and our discussion thus far rules out the unequal distribution of higher education on other grounds that are considered to be irrelevant to be morally irrelevant—such as economic background, gender, ethnicity, or geography. From the perspective of social value, we are left with the conclusion, therefore, that higher education is to be distributed equally, regardless of students’ characteristics. Similarly, in modern states, citizenship and liberty are to be distributed equally, so that they cannot provide a rationale for the unequal distribution of higher education except as a corrective to existing inequalities in the distribution of those values. Thus, this argument leads me to the tentative conclusion that equality itself may be the preferred criterion for the distribution of higher education, either because equality is inherently valuable or because it is a means to the morally justified distribution of other values.

On the basis of this conclusion, then, we should consider exactly what the equal distribution of higher education might mean as a guide to policy in higher education. An obvious consequence of equality as a goal of higher education policy is that prospective students are to receive equal access to opportunities for higher education. Equality of access means that all students who wish to attend higher education will be able to do so. On the one hand, achieving this end implies that opportunities will have to be sufficiently numerous to satisfy this demand fully. In all nations of which I am aware, such sufficiency would necessitate expanded social and personal investment in higher education. If, as suggested above, such expansion increases social value, moreover, this argument suggests that enhanced social value and equality can be achieved simultaneously. On the other hand, the goal of equality in higher education implies that students’ own aspirations for particular meaningful lives and not their ethnic, economic, gender, and geographic backgrounds are the effective reason for their deciding to take advantage of the opportunity for higher education. On this account, the demand for higher education is to be roughly equal between the children of different ethnic groups, between genders, and so on unless there is a legitimate reason to believe that student aspirations differ significantly within these groups. If no such reason exists, variance across these groups in the demand for higher education would suggest that access is not genuinely equal. And additional social efforts will have to be made to ensure that such aspirations are not a socially discriminatory consequence of these irrelevant characteristics. This was one of the morally appealing features of equity, and we can see that it is also an implication of equality.

However, the goal of equality in higher education might also imply that the curriculum and the instruction that students experience after they have obtained access is to be completely identical. Are there, in light of this possible implication, any morally valid grounds for differentiation in higher education? At least two values that we have already considered suggest that there are. Because a society’s needs for the skills and knowledge produced in higher education and students’ aspirations for meaningful lives are diversified, both of which as we have seen have moral value, a diversification of the curriculum according to those factors would seem morally justified. Would this diversification, however, be consistent with the value of equality? I believe so, at least to a significant extent, for two reasons. First, equality in higher education cannot mean equality of outcomes because, even in the same curriculum, students’ aspirations will differ, with the consequence that their achievement will concomitantly differ. Second, policy can attempt to coordinate important moral values—such as equality, social value, and personal aspirations—so that all can simultaneously be realized, at least to the extent that is practical. One such coordinating policy in higher education might be for the society to determine what specific arrangement of educational opportunities is of greatest potential social value and to permit students to choose among those available opportunities according to their own aspirations under the conditions of equal access. Of course, such a policy would not necessarily maximize the achievement of any of these values. Students’ personal aspirations might, for example, not match perfectly the society’s needs, and the opportunities made available based on those needs might not completely fulfill students’ aspirations. Moreover, the combination of students’ aspirations and the socially valuable opportunities made available might eventuate in the students from some social groups choosing to pursue higher education or some curricular options less frequently than those from others, with the result that some groups might not be fully equally represented in higher education or its various fields of specialization. However, if these inequalities persist after efforts have been made to ensure that student aspirations are not the result of the socially discriminatory treatment of irrelevant characteristics, there are good reasons for such unequal results, namely, the moral value that attaches to the pursuit of social value and the expression of personal aspirations.

This brief analysis of the policy implications of equality in higher education has concluded that (1) opportunities for higher education should be expanded to satisfy students’ personal aspirations more fully, (2) social effort should be increased to reduce the discriminatory effect of irrelevant characteristics upon students’ personal aspirations, and (3) curricular differentiation may be undertaken to increase social value but should permit students to pursue their aspirations at least to some reasonable extent. Of course, further ethical analysis and empirical policy research are necessary to determine for any particular society the necessary extent of and the mechanisms for the morally appropriate expansion of opportunities for higher education, the specific policies that would be morally appropriate and effective for reducing discrimination, and the morally appropriate allocation of costs between public and private sources of funding higher education, among many other things. However, this analysis has at least begun to demonstrate the role that equality, in preference to equity, might take in thinking about the ethical distribution of higher education.