Equity, status and freedom: a note on higher education

Strategies to enhance socio‐economic equity in higher education embody one or both of two objectives. The first strategy is to advance ‘fairness’ by changing the composition of participation, bringing higher education into line with the ideal model of a socially representative system. The second strategy advances ‘inclusion’ by broadening the access and completion of under‐represented groups. Governments often focus on both objectives. For example current Australian policy mentions both objectives while giving priority to fairness. But as Amartya Sen notes, the two approaches embody heterogeneous traditions of social justice. They also have diverging implications for freedom, and for social status in education (the ‘elephant in the room’). The utopian fairness approach emphasises the proper functioning of institutions. The realist inclusion approach emphasises the agency of those excluded. OECD country experience suggests that while measures of fairness provide useful information, a programmatic focus on enhanced inclusion is both more achievable and more fruitful.