The Well-Intentioned Abuse of "Equity"

 From an Inside Higher Ed story:

“And in 2020, an important report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce supplied contemporary and comparative evidence that general education helps “tame” authoritarian inclinations and thus protects democracy….

Policy and higher education leaders must become bold in making the case that democracy is the foundation of everything else we hold dear….”

Cool. I love democracy, and loathe authoritarianism. Tell me more.

"At most institutions, participation in civic and democracy learning remains optional rather than part of the degree-requirement fabric."

Sigh. So we're going to promote democracy and erode authoritarianism in students by taking away their freedom to choose what classes to take and requiring them to enroll in what we want. Great.

My hope is that the case for democracy teaches students how to lose with grace. How to, as Sebastian Junger put it, prefer a fair system in which you have no power to an unfair system in which you have all the power.

I think this also means separating how we fight against things we don’t like; choosing between legislation and social pressure/persuasion. I don’t like the CRT bans that remove from school libraries harmless and important books about Ruby Bridges. But those bans, although illiberal, were achieved through a democratic process that I have to agree to respect. 

Will examples like these be taught to students? Or is it just going to be about voter ID laws and all the bad things Republicans do.

But that’s not even my biggest gripe with the article. It's this:

“And we need to set equity goals and markers so that the civic learning movement becomes inclusive rather than, as it is today, often marked by deep disparities between who participates and who does not…

“the students least likely to “do optional” are America’s low-income, first-generation students and students from historically underserved communities.

"The result is deeply inequitable participation in college-level civic learning.”

My gripe is aimed at this obsession with equity, a term that is often a noble goal that is too often shoehorned into strategies without a thought of its usefulness.

Managing Risk

According to The Big Short, the mortgage backed securities that led to the Great Recession were once a popular investment tool. Once you pooled a bunch of mortgages together, you got a really safe investment with pretty good returns. The problem is that, as demand for them surged, investors began to run out of mortgages to fill them with. This led to taking on riskier and riskier mortgages.

I think something similar is happening in higher education. About 80 years ago the number of US colleges took off in response to increasing demand, fueled by the GI bill, draft dodgers, and the rise of most people’s standard of living, making affording college a possibility. The latter part is what I am interested in and will return to. 

Since we haven’t done much to expand immigration (numbers improved, but not as a share of the population) and coupled with infertility and rising tuition, there is a shortage of demand and colleges are starting to look like 2007-era mortgage backed securities, with more students enrolling who are likely to drop out.

Does that mean low-income students should be discouraged from pursuing higher education? No, but I think both students and colleges need to be more transparent about what they are looking for.

Life Examined

Baby Boomers went to college to get a better job AND become a better citizen. The latter part is what comes from a life of relative privilege. You care about citizenship once your basic needs are met. For Boomers of that era who did not pursue college, it wasn’t always because of costs. A lot of times there was enough good-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a degree.

Let’s be honest, this push to teach citizenship and the value of democracy is something you only care about when your hierarchy of basic needs have been met. You have to be privileged to even be thinking about it.

So close to getting it

The sad thing is that the Inside Higher Ed's author is so close to getting it.

“Faced with such disparities, educators point out that community college students (and many four-year college students) often live very complex lives, balancing college study with work and family and frequently facing searing societal disparities as well.”

The first generation, low income community college student who we’re trying to force, in the name of equity, to pass a course about citizenship and the value of democracy, isn’t in college because he wants to have a broad-based liberal arts education. He wants to get a job so he doesn’t have to worry about his heat being shut off, how to afford his son’s baby formula, or how to take care of his ailing mother. And there isn’t a manufacturing job that pays enough so this is his only chance.

He is in school so he can make more money! That is it! And now you’re going to force him to take some class that isn’t going to make him more valuable in the workplace? 

You want equity? Let’s start with making it easier for low income people to find good paying jobs. Anything that isn’t doing that is just making their lives harder.