Equity

The 21st century has brought new challenges and opportunities for higher education. In the wake of the transition from elitist to mass education, universities worldwide are under pressure to enhance access and equity, on the one hand, and to maintain high standards of quality and excellence, on the other. Today the notion of equity not only implies greater access to higher education, but also opportunities for progress. In recent debates on higher education, the notions of equity and access go beyond minority to diversity. Affirmative action, too, has become race-exclusive and gender...

Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining access and on those losing access under alternative admissions policies. We use the introduction of the Top Ten Percent rule and administrative data from the State of Texas to estimate the effect of access to a selective college on student graduation and earnings outcomes. We estimate separate effects on...

A number of national studies point to a trend in which highly selective and elite private and public universities are becoming less accessible to lower-income students. At the same time there have been surprisingly few studies of the actual characteristics and academic experiences of low-income students or comparisons of their undergraduate experience with those of more wealthy students. This paper explores the divide between poor and rich students, first comparing a group of selective US institutions and their number and percentage of Pell Grant recipients and then, using...

Making doctoral education accessible and successful for students from low income, first generation families as well as members of immigrant or specific ethnic groups is a world- wide problem. In the US the traditional explanation for the low numbers of Ph.D. recipients from these groups are lack of preparation, lack of interest and a “leaky pipeline.” These alone are not enough to explain disparities. This article argues that the most powerful vehicles of exclusion are tacit knowledge and the implicit bias of faculty and is related to doctoral/faculty socialization. Faculty share the...