Expanding Student Access to and Success in Higher Education: Confronting Systemic Inequities

Abstract

After addressing the growing interconnections - or linkages - between K-12 education and higher education in the United States, this paper surveys five illustrative examples of inequities in access to and success in education that link the two levels of education. These examples concern: racial and ethnic minority students, low socio-economic status students, English language learners (ELL students), undocumented foreign students, and students with disabilities. The paper then considers how structures and processes of governance for both K-12 education and higher education inhibit the capacities of both levels to collaborate on inequities and other matters of mutual interest, thus prompting a need to reform governance structures. Next, the paper explores developments regarding two particularly important inequities - inequities in governmental funding of public K-12 education and inequities caused by racial and ethnic resegregation in public K-12 education. Both types of inequities have corrosive effects on K-12 education and on higher education and present great challenges for the future of American education. Both levels of education have a strong mutuality of interest regarding these challenges and other endemic problems of inequity in access to and success in education. Last, the paper provides numerous examples of “pockets of progress” - collaborative initiatives that are now under way to address concerns and challenges of the type the paper has identified - followed by various examples of societal developments that make this work even more crucial than earlier discussion in the paper may have suggested.