Access and equal opportunity in higher education in the United States: the effects of education and public finance policies

The principle of equal opportunities in education aims to eliminate the social and economic privileges that young people face in acquiring their social status and roles. In this way, everyone, regardless of their social and economic status, will have the opportunity to take their place in society according to their wishes and abilities, and to fully realize their personalities and aspirations. Education, besides being a fundamental right, plays a crucial role in reducing societal inequalities, preventing detrimental factors, and fostering economic and human development. Education represents an enduring benefit for all of humanity, underscoring the importance of preventing factors that lead to disparities in educational access. This study aims to assess the significance of inclusion in higher education and equal educational opportunities in the context of sustainability. It will also evaluate factors related to economics, social dynamics, regional disparities, biology, and management that contribute to inequality of opportunity.

This chapter draws from the experience of the Israeli kibbutz to address the question of why middle-class students are more successful in the competition to enter higher education. The chapter provides a conceptual framework for measuring equal opportunity in education. It then describes the problem of equal opportunity in access to higher education in Israel. It also provides some background on the organization of the kibbutz and its education system. The last section of the chapter presents the data and the findings of statistical analysis.

It has been a busy time for the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). Over the past few years the association has acquired a new name, a new journal, and many new members. The 2012 annual conference, convened in Boston last March, proved to be the largest conference in the association’s thirty-seven-year history, with 556 members in attendance. The theme, selected by incoming president Deborah Cunningham, was “Education Finance, Policy, and Practice: The Role of Evidence in a Dynamic World,” which underscores the contemporary challenge to the association: how to apply an increasing abundance of information and sophisticated analytical tools to produce the evidence needed to guide decision making by educational policy makers and practitioners. The Boston meeting was notable not only for the number in attendance. The unique qualities and strengths of the association were in clear display: papers of unusual methodological rigor; an interdisciplinary mix of academics from the social sciences, public policy schools, and colleges of education; educational finance professionals, policy analysts, and practitioners, a mix rarely found in the same place; and sessions addressing today’s hot topics as well as issues that have endured over the years. Having said this, all indications are that AEFP is what it has always been: a small, diverse group of people tackling some really big problems. Of particular note was a trend that has been growing for years but has clearly come into full flower: the large

Higher education is central to the development of a country. Without it, countries are bound to lag behind others in the race for development. Without human resources development and institution building, a nation cannot dream of progress and prosperity. The investment in higher education does not go unrecorded and its neglect does not get ignored. The policies of the Government are placing greater stress on upgrading the skills of the vast resources of human capital in the country through measures promoting access to education, with a focus on enhancing the knowledge distribution power of the economy through collaborative network and the diffusion of technology, and providing the enabling conditions for change in the science system to maximize the benefits of technology.The objective of the study was to investigate the extent of equal opportunities in higher education in Punjab.The study was descriptive and survey type. The study was delimited to the higher education institutions of Punjab. The population included 18 public universities in Punjab. A random sampling technique was applied for selection of sample. Ten public sector universities were randomly selected for the above population. Ten teachers (5 male and 5 female) and 20 students (10 male and 10 female) were further selected from the sample universities.Data were collected through questionnaires developed with the help of experts. Data collected were tabulated, analyzed using the Likert’s five-point scale and chi-square. After drawing the conclusions, some workable recommendations were made for the improvement of higher education, bringing equity and access in higher education. The following conclusions were drawn from responses. (1) The concept of gender bias is prevailing in the developing countries of the world. (2) The study showed that there is indifferent attitude of teachers towards male and female students.(3) It was also found that the behaviour of the teachers was indifferent to rural and urban students. It creates region differences to breed. (4) The results showed that girls are not preferred to boys in selection of technical or scientific subjects. (5) The majority of the respondents pointed out those admission criteria effects the students with average grade to get enrolled in higher education. (6) Age restrictions keep the students with genuine problems away from higher education.The following recommendations were made on the basis of conclusions: (1)The authorities must assure that fair access to higher education is provided without gender bias.(2) There should be establishment of public universities in rural areas to promote equity region wise. (3)There should be equal opportunities for girls in selection of the subjects of their own choice. (4) Teachers should be trained in a way that student belonging to any group or sex have equal behaviour of teachers.(5) Admission criteria must have some relaxation for deprived students.(6) There should be an alternate way in the selection of medium of instruction.

Remediation of students' deficiencies in preparation, basic skills, and foundational knowledge has been an enduring, but largely ignored, component of curricula in colleges and universities in the United States. In recent years, however, policy makers have become more aware and less accepting of this state of affairs. While analysts document the extent of remediation - one regional study found that roughly one-third of freshmen students took remedial classes at 85% of the institutions surveyed (Abraham, 1992) and a national study uncovered comparable figures, 29% of freshmen at 78% of institutions (NCES, 1996) - legislatures and state coordinating boards have begun to consider and enact policies to dictate and contain remedial education (Lively, 1993, 1995a, 1995b). From their perspective, the presence of remediation at colleges and universities has increasingly come to symbolize the failure of the nation's precollegiate educational system, the eroding standards of American colleges and universities, and an inefficient use of public resources. State higher education coordinating boards, in particular, have become the policymaking bodies that translate concerns about remediation into operational imperatives for public colleges and universities. Boards are intended to be, in Berdahl's (1971) phrase, the suitably sensitive serving to advocate institutional interests and academic values and to buffer institutions from direct political intrusion while still pointing institutions in the directions preferred by the public and state policymakers. From an institutional perspective, boards have always intruded into their independent and autonomous operation. However, observers have suggested that the structures for coordination that came to prominence in and around the 1960s have, in recent years, combined with economic and social conditions to increase system coordination and centralized control in public higher education (see, for example, Clark, 1994; Hearn & Griswold, 1994; Kerr & Gade, 1989). What may at one time have been a mediator between institutional and external interests may since have become more of a proctor and surrogate that readily passes external demands through to institutions in the form of increasingly intrusive bureaucratic control mechanisms such as policy mandates. In this vein, a board's policy dictates to institutions about remediation raise a number of troubling issues. They appear to threaten campus autonomy, limit the ability to accomplish an institutional mission, and restrict the potential applicant pool and enrollment base. First, the type of course work offered and who must take it are fundamental questions for institutions of higher education. Answers to these questions say a lot about the nature of an institution and the professional identity of the people who work in it. We typically think of questions such as what is taught, to whom, and for how much credit as matters of institutional and, more specifically, faculty prerogative. Classic statements of governance such as the AAUP/ACE/AGB (1966) Statement on Governance of Colleges and Universities, tend to consider academic issues and, in particular, curricular topics as the domain of institutional faculty. In truth, the governance of institutions is not as segmented as this statement suggests, and multiple stakeholders are involved in the many decisions arising in the normal operation of higher education institutions. Even so, dictating remediation policy from the coordinating board level can appear excessively prescriptive and preemptive of the faculty role in overseeing the curricula of institutions. Second, remediation in higher education has a proud tradition. It is one mechanism that gives real dimension to access and equal opportunity in higher education. Remedial services have been vital tools in helping GI bill, disadvantaged minority, low SES, returning adult, and handicapped students succeed in college (Clowes, 1992, pp. …

There are significant inequalities in the lives of America’s children, including inequalities in the education that these children receive. These educational inequalities include not only disparities in funding per pupil but also in class size, teacher qualification, and resources such as books, labs, libraries, computers, and curriculum, as well as the physical condition of the school and the safety of students within it. While not all schools attended by poor children are bad schools, and not all schools attended by well-off children are good schools, there are clear patterns. Poor children are more likely to attend crowded and poorly equipped schools with less qualified teachers than the children of more affluent families. They are less likely to have computers, books, and advanced placement academic courses. To give one example of the differences in school resources, the wealthiest districts in New York spent more than $25,000 per pupil at the same

Once upon a time, there was a generation of indentured servants called Millennials. They were beautiful and mysterious and clever and feckless, in the way that all young people can sometimes be. The Millennials had dreams of future careers in which they were near-mystical, all-powerful protectors of the planet, brunching on avocado toast, driving in electric cars, and eradicating golf courses from the earth. Droves of Millennials applied to universities, believing that a diploma was a barrier for entry to advance the careers of which they dreamt. Most were confronted with a conundrum: borrow to subsidize the dream career, with decades of (potentially unaffordable) payments when they were finally employed. The Generation Who Stole the World, commonly referred to as the Baby Boomers, had decided that unlimited access to debt was the most economically sound approach by which to offer equal opportunity in higher education — and the delectable irony of this tale is that the availability of debt caused (or at the very least, accompanied) the skyrocketing of costs. A vicious cycle resulted in an entire generation of educated Millennials having mortgaged their futures, and visibly sagging under the weight of the chains of their debt. This hyperbolic tale leans into stereotypes for dramatic effect, but is also strikingly accurate in its rendering of higher education financing in the United States. The Boomer gerontocracy inherited the benefits of New Deal policies, with substantial public investment into infrastructure and education, but then gradually shifted the financing of higher education away from grants and towards student loan debt. Millennials have taken on 300% more student loan debt than their parents, with those borrowers between the ages of 25 and 34 each having an average of $42,000 in student loan debt. Student loan debt has more than doubled since 2009 and can no longer be ignored: according to projections in this Article, assuming the same steady rate of growth from 2004 to 2019, outstanding student loan debt will exceed $13.5 trillion within the next twenty years, far outpacing the projected growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States. There is a glaring gap in academic literature with regard to the choice to primarily lean upon student loan indebtedness to finance higher education, the unsustainability of such an approach, and the intergenerational equity of shifting debt from this generation to the next. Those crafting public policy have implicitly shirked away from notions of intergenerational sustainability in its management of higher education financing — with the (perhaps unintentional) result that higher education financing is operating on Ponzi principles. Forward-looking higher-education policy must be rooted in notions of intergenerational equity: a society is intergenerationally just when each generation does its best to contribute its fair share towards succeeding generations, avoiding serious harm to future generations, with a consciousness of the needs that may exist in the future. This Article fills a gap by considering the way in which debt is used (and potentially abused) as a common pool resource and that the management of a common pool resource arguably carries with it intergenerational equity obligations. The first in a two part series, this Article proposes a way forward with a creative solution — the repurposing of the gratuitous tax system such that the revenues are earmarked and dedicated to the retooling of higher education finance in the United States.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the situations related to possibility and equality of opportunity in higher education in terms of chaos theory. During the research process, the aim was to determine the extent to which socio-economic chaos arising from student characteristics affected the possibility and equality of opportunity in higher education. In democratic countries, where it is considered that almost all professions with a high social status cannot be acquired without having a higher education qualification, higher education as a fundamental human right should be disseminated to different classes of the society. In this research, functions of a democratic educational administration upon the possibility and equality of opportunity in higher education in Turkey were discussed within the scope of sociologic variables. The population of “The Research for Equality of Opportunity and Possibility in Higher Education within the Concept of Democratic and Sociologic Features” included 29,477 students studying at Erzincan and Mersin Universities in 2012–2013 academic year; and the study sample included 776 students chosen with random cluster sampling model according to the faculties of both universities. Students with illiterate mothers were found to have benefited from the secondary education at a lower level than the other student groups. The student groups with high school and university graduate mothers were found to have benefited from the secondary education opportunities at a higher level.

Reviewed by: Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers Dongbin Kim and Jenny J. Lee Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers Edward P. St. John in collaboration with Eric H. AskerBaltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 272 pages, $44.95 (hardcover) Given rising tuition costs and decreasing student grant aid, postsecondary access for low-income students is one of the greatest challenges facing higher education policy makers today. Written by one of the most influential financial aid analysts in higher education, Refinancing the College Dream: Access, Equal Opportunity, and Justice for Taxpayers,is timely and well addresses this major and growing concern. With his extensive experience and expertise, Edward St. John offers a significant contribution in our understanding of the role of financial aid policy in accessing higher education over the past decades. Beyond the economics of education, the author discusses financial aid within the context of social responsibility and justice. The book is broadly divided into two parts. In part 1, "Understanding the Access Challenge," St. John draws upon John Rawls' theory of justice and develops three indicators to evaluate the effects of finances on college access. The three indicators are: (a) access to higher education, as represented by college enrollment rates for high school graduates; (b) equal opportunity, as represented by the disparity in college enrollment rates across race/ethnic or income groups; and (c) tax payer costs, as represented by tax expenditures per student enrolled in postsecondary education. Using these indicators, St. John analyzes the impact of financial aid policy changes at different periods throughout higher education finance history. The 1970s are defined the period of "equalizing educational opportunity." During this period of time, providing equal educational opportunity was considered a social goal, thus expanding federal and state roles in funding for higher education is justified. His research evidence supports that financial aid in the 1970s sufficiently increased college participation in the 1970s and early 1980s. St. John argues that it was the availability of grants that improved equal opportunity while the availability of loans increased total college participation rates. Higher education finance experienced significant change in the 1980s, which are defined "middle-class assistance." Beyond focusing on federal and state roles in funding for higher education, policy debates on increasing access and equity moved toward reforming K-12 schools. St. John explains that the increased emphasis on loans in the 1980s expanded the access to postsecondary education for the middle-class and increased efficient use of taxpayer dollars, but it also increased disparity in college enrollment rates across race/ethnic and income groups. The 1990s, "justice for taxpayers," show a shift on the burden to pay for college from taxpayers to students and their families. Coupled with the rising costs of attending college, the expansion of merit-based programs, the introduction of tax credits, and the decline in federal grants and state support in higher education, further eroded the equity indicator in the 1990s, while middle and upper classes benefited from the policies. Understanding the importance of academic access along with financial access, St. John provides a "balanced access model" which offers a more complete way of viewing [End Page 130] the effects of policy on access. St. John charges that the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) analyses, which have been the main propellers in driving national debates on access from financial policies to academic preparation, failed to consider the role of finances and thus reached misinformed conclusions about the causes of the greater inequality in access to postsecondary participation. The greater disparity in postsecondary participation was not caused by the failure of school reform, but by the reduction in need-based grants. After analyzing the access challenge in part 1, St. John proposes a contingency approach to "meet the access challenge" in part 2. The contingency approach is to inform policymakers about financial and educational reform strategies that can improve access and equalize opportunity in colleges, in states, and at the federal level. The contingency approach is based on the author's effort to balance different values, interests, and concerns as represented in the three indicators: (a) improving access for majority to postsecondary education; (b...

The expansion of higher education and emphasis on students' learning outcomes and the advent of new pedagogical approaches to teaching in higher institutions of learning are reflected in the quality of graduates turned out into the world of work. These are supposed to improve productivity and consequently national development.

Two approaches to making judgments about moral urgency in educational policy have prevailed in American law and public policy. One approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing equal opportunities in education for all. The other approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing adequate opportunities in education for all. Although the former has deep roots in American culture and its jurisprudence, a common narrative is that in recent years the equal opportunities approach has been displaced by the educational adequacy approach, which is said both to have enjoyed much greater success in the school financing litigation as well as to be theoretically more defensible. The present article is designed to make a contribution to the retrieval of the equal opportunities approach. It does so by sketching out a theory of equal opportunities in education organized around the idea of stakes fairness that can withstand the criticisms often made of that approach and by showing how that theory is better able than the educational adequacy approach to address the fairness of a more robust educational policy agenda that extends beyond school financing.

Who should take college-level courses? impact findings from an evaluation of a multiple measures assessment strategy

Purpose: This paper aims at studying the degree of equality of educational opportunity in the Italian university system. Methodology: We build on the approaches developed by Peragine (2004, 2005) and Lefranc et al. (2006a, 2006b) and focus on the equality of educational opportunities for individuals of different social background. We propose different definitions of equality of opportunity in education. Then, we provide testable conditions with the aim of (i) testing for the existence of equality of opportunity (EOp) in a given distribution and (ii) ranking distributions on the basis of EOp. Definitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic conditions that are tested by using nonparametric tests developed by Beach and Davidson (1983) and Davidson and Duclos (2000). Findings: Our empirical results show a strong family effect on the performances of students in the higher education and on the transition of graduates in the labor market. Moreover the inequality of opportunity turns out to be more severe in the South than in the regions of the North-Center. Originality: This work contributes to the literature in three ways: first, it proposes a definition of equality of educational opportunities. Second, the paper develops a methodology in order to test for the existence of equality of opportunity in a given distribution and to rank distributions according to equality of opportunity. Third, we present empirical evidence on the degree of equality of educational opportunity in the Italian university system.

Hamabost urtetan bete beharreko Garapen Iraunkorreko Helburuak markatu dizkigu Garapen Iraunkorrerako 2030 Agendak; haietako bat, hezkuntza. Hezkuntzak guztiontzako eskubide bat izan behar du, kalitatezkoa, inklusiboa, bidezkoa eta etengabe ikaskuntzarako aukerak eskaintzen dituena. Artikulu honek hezkuntzari lotutako garapen iraunkorreko helburua azaltzen du; zehazki, helburu horren hirugarren erronkari helduko dio, hezkuntza-eskubidean eta goi mailako hezkuntzari dagokion aukera-berdintasunean sakonduz. Horretarako, UPV/EHUk arrakasta akademikoa lortzeko bultzatutako Arrakasta programa aitzindaria erabiliko dugu eredu gisa. Programa horrek haur eta nerabeen babeserako eta gizarte-inklusiorako sistemen barruan dauden gazteek unibertsitatean sartzeko eta goi mailako ikasketak arrakastaz bukatzeko aukera izateko baldintzak sortzen ditu. Artikulu honetan, programa hori martxan jartzeko prozesua, garapena eta bertan parte hartzen duten ikasleen pertzepzioak jasotzen dira. Parte-hartzaileen lehen pertzepzioek argi uzten dute beren goi mailako ikasketen «blindatzea» baino haratago doala programa; izan ere, itxaropenak sortzen ditu, babes-sisteman artatutako haur eta nerabeen eta agenteren ikuspegi, itxaropen eta zerumugak aldatzen ditu, eta, garrantzitsuena, hezkuntza inklusiboa eta aukera-berdintasuna bermatzen ditu.

Approaches of Quality Assurance Models on Adult Education Provisions