Abstract
The founding moment in the Anglo-American approach to equality of opportunity in education was the early to mid 1960s, a time of relatively high social mobility, with the Master Plan in California, the Robbins report in Great Britain and the Martin report in Australia. Equality of opportunity, joined to the production of human capital, was expected to create a prosperous meritocratic society. Because the founding notions were utopian the outcome was bound to be somewhat disappointing, but as Thomas Piketty shows in Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014), equality of opportunity was further retarded by the shift to growing economic and social inequality after 1980, together with the plutocratic capture of policy. In the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia there is now little appetite for weakening the stratifying effects of elite private schools, lifting the quality of state schools, and opening up more egalitarian access to the leading universities. Compared to the US and UK there is a higher degree of intergenerational social mobility, as well as more egalitarian higher education, in most European nations. But reform in higher education alone has limited prospects. To achieve a ‘fair chance for all’, the preconditions lie in changes in the distribution of economic rewards, a reduced tolerance for social hierarchy, and the re-democratisation of politics and policy.
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Notes
- 1.
I thank Glyn Davis for drawing attention to this essay.
- 2.
Under UC Berkeley’s progressive tuition policy, 40 % of undergraduates are subsidized by other students and pay no tuition, and two thirds receive at least some financial aid. Half Berkeley’s students graduate with no debt. The average graduate debt of $19,000 is just over two thirds of the national average of $27,000 (Douglass 2013, pp. 4–5; Soares 2007, pp. 166–167).
- 3.
The violation of the merit principle in relation to Asian-Americans is the subject of a legal challenge to Harvard (Associated Press 2015). Longstanding use of non-academic criteria by the Ivy League enables them to discriminate, but the problem may also extend to the University of California (Samson 2013).
- 4.
It is ironic that while current international agency literature on inequality pins the blame for growing inequality on super-salaries rather than education, it gives education policy principal credit for cases of reduced inequality, e.g. Brazil; and high growth without growing inequality, e.g. South Korea, and treats education policy as key to reducing inequality (OECD 2010, 2014b; Lee et al. 2012; Cingano 2014; Oxfam 2014, p. 18). However, it is plausible that reduced inequality, and better access to good quality education, both have origins in third factors such as changing economic values, growing trust and/or political reform; and clearly each is facilitated by, as well as facilitating, increased social mobility.
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Marginson, S. (2016). Higher Education and Inequality in Anglo-American Societies. In: Harvey, A., Burnheim, C., Brett, M. (eds) Student Equity in Australian Higher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0315-8_10
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