Over the past few years, higher education policy makers and practitioners, along with system and institutional leaders, have redoubled their efforts to improve the retention and graduation rates of the nation’s college students. Federal and state governments and major national foundations have invested millions of dollars in initiatives aimed at increasing student success. Many of these efforts are now showing promise for moving the needle, however slowly, on college completion rates.
Within this “completion agenda,” there has been a particular focus on improving outcomes for students from lower- and middle-class families and students of color, for whom many forms and aspects of higher education have been and remain inaccessible. But enduring gaps in opportunity and success remain, from prekindergarten through higher education and into the workforce. Students’ success in college is a function of educational experiences that span their entire lives and that are inextricably bound in complex social and economic dynamics. Thus despite years of increasing diversity in overall postsecondary enrollment, educational opportunity in the United States—and the economic and social benefits it affords—remains markedly stratified along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.
Despite enduring inequities and the stubbornly slow pace of improvement, there is reason to be optimistic. The completion agenda has ushered in a wave of new resources and initiatives dedicated to ensuring that US higher education fulfills its promise for the twenty-first century by tackling inequities head on. For example, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has advocated for equity as essential to contemporary higher education through initiatives like Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) and the new LEAP Challenge, and through projects like General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs). Precisely because they hold great potential for transforming higher education, reform efforts like these must make equity a central concern.
To truly address the needs of America’s future, we cannot address equity in higher education separately from core educational redesign. Rather, we must make equity a key framework for any reform—one that is explicitly and deliberately wedded to goals for educational excellence and student achievement.
This goal is especially important when our reforms focus on the most fundamental experiences of postsecondary education, such as the general education curriculum. As we design or implement new ways of structuring and delivering these core educational experiences, we must constantly ask ourselves: In what ways does the general education curriculum advance or neglect equity as both a societal goal and a learning goal for students? In what ways does the current delivery of general education contribute to or perpetuate inequities in higher education experiences, and in what ways do our proposed reforms correct those inequities? (Bensimon 2012).
Furthermore, we must consider the ways in which the content of our general education curriculum empowers students who have experienced marginalization and instills in all students the knowledge, values, and ideals that are crucial to counteract the economic and racial polarization that threatens our nation. The United States may aspire to have the most college-educated population in the world, but this goal will be meaningless without the resolve to become the most equitable society.
In this publication, we provide both an empirical and a conceptual overview of equity as a framework for higher education reform. The terms equity and equality are often confounded or used interchangeably;equality is typically defined as treating everyone the same or giving everyone the same opportunities regardless of their individual attributes, we define equity as proportional representation—here, of racial and ethnic groups and those of different socioeconomic status—in terms of access, retention, completion, and participation in programs (e.g., honors programs), experiences (e.g., study abroad), and activities (e.g., undergraduate research) that build students’ academic and cultural capital. While we recognize that many groups have experienced and continue to experience marginalization in higher education— including women, particularly in certain science and engineering fields (Touchton, Musil, and Campbell 2008); lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students; and those from religious minority groups—we focus in this report on inequities linked to socioeconomic status and race and ethnicity due to our country’s specific and entrenched history of affirming and enforcing these inequities even in the face of their direct contradiction with democratic ideals.
As we define it here, being equity-minded involves taking stock of the contradictions between the ideals of democratic education and the social, institutional, and individual practices that contribute to persistent inequities in college outcomes among different racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic classes. Equity-minded individuals are aware of the sociohistorical context of exclusionary practices and racism in higher education and the effect of power asymmetries on opportunities and outcomes for students of color and students of low socioeconomic status. Being equity-minded thus involves being conscious of the ways that higher education—through its practices, policies, expectations, and unspoken rules—places responsibility for student success on the very groups that have experienced marginalization, rather than on the individuals and institutions whose responsibility it is to remedy that marginalization.
Equity-mindedness guards against the ingrained habit of blaming inequities in access, opportunity, and outcomes on students’ social, cultural, and educational backgrounds. Equity-minded practices are created through
1. willingness to look at student outcomes disaggregated by race and ethnicity as well as socioeconomic status;
2. recognition that individual students are not responsible for the unequal outcomes of groups that have historically experienced discrimination and marginalization in the United States;
3. respect for the aspirations and struggles of students who are not well served by the current educational system;
4. belief in the fairness of allocating additional college resources to students who have greater needs due to the systemic shortcomings of our educational system in providing for them;
5. recognition that the elimination of structural racism in institutions of higher education requires intentional critical deconstruction of structures, policies, practices, norms, and values assumed to be race neutral (Lawrence et al. 2004).
In this paper, we argue that systematic inequalities in participation and outcomes that consistently leave socioeconomically disadvantaged students and those from marginalized racial and ethnic groups in educational systems of lesser value while placing dominant groups in systems of higher value (in terms of labor market outcomes and social status attainment) are signs of inequity. These systemic and racialized inequalities bear investigation, intervention, and remedy (Dowd and Bensimon, forthcoming). Thus the first section of this paper is a call to action, making the case for equity as integral to any higher education reform effort because of the vital role higher education plays in the lives of individuals and the health of society.
In the second section, we synthesize what we know about the complex dynamics of inequity in the policies and practices of educational institutions, illustrating the many ways in which such inequities manifest in disparities across the educational experiences of socioeconomically disadvantaged students and students of color. The goal of this review, beyond providing a basic overview of race- and class-based disparities in educational outcomes, is to demonstrate that those disparities are the cumulative result of racial and socioeconomic stratification across a complex set of educational experiences, including access to the kinds of broad and applied learning needed for success in a twenty-first-century workforce (Finley 2012; Humphreys and Kelly 2014).
In the third section, we provide an overview of the concept of equity as a framework for higher education reform, offering five guiding principles for equity “by design.” These principles provide a common vocabulary and conceptual footing for reform, and they suggest benchmarks and safeguards for ensuring equitable design in future efforts. In this section, we propose the need to understand equity as an actionable concept and a quality of policy and practice. We suggest that only by embedding responsibility for equity pervasively in the design of new policy and practice can educational reforms achieve their much-needed aims.
The five principles will be essential if higher education is to address the cumulative impact of the complex, multifarious, and inextricably linked inequities that students from marginalized communities experience across the lifespan. By the time young people from low-income families and many communities of color arrive at postsecondary institutions—if they do—they and their families have likely persevered through inadequate preschool education, underresourced K–12 schools, and interactions with an array of bureaucratic systems of public assistance that serve to stigmatize and demoralize. Enrolling in higher education at all is an immense victory for many of these students. But too often, they arrive without adequate academic preparation at institutions that do not have the resources, tools, or knowledge to correct for a lifetime of marginalization wrought by institutionalized racism and classism.
No single reform initiative can address all of these challenges. But neither do we have to accept how poorly the current systems serve marginalized students. While we must be candid about the realities of inequities across social and economic structures, we must also be willing to disrupt the current systems