access equity capacity

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Concept Paper

Access, Equity, Capacity

IFE 2020 Senior Seminar

July 2008

Introduction:

As we will discuss further below, these three concepts and the varieties of

practices that flow from them, have not always been the stuff of higher

education, although in various ways they have been common touch-plates for

basic education. In the current period, however, the powerful combination of

national development and demographic shifts has propelled eachin different

waysto the center of higher education policy discourse.

It has become commonplace to see the Asia-Pacific region as characterized by

two different development trajectories. The more historically developed nations in

the regionJapan, Korea, Taiwanare experiencing rapid aging. As they

continue to pursue familiar patterns of economic development, they find

themselves with labor shortages, especially at the lower end of the employment

structure, and an overdeveloped higher education capacity. Built toaccommodate the rapidly escalated demand for higher education in the late

1970s through to the most recent period, these structures are now proving

excessive in some regards with respect to their intended populations. At the other

end of the scale are India and China, whose massive economies are rapidly

expanding, creating ever-new labor force needs both to meet their own

requirements as well as those of highly segmented global labor markets. In both

countries a succession of governmental policies has been addressed to

enhancing perceived higher educational capacity. In the middle of this continuum

are other countries in the regionIndonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines

whose patterns of economic development are less uni-dimensional, but whose

youth-biased demographics press for continued higher education expansion.

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In July 2008 the East-West Center will convene a seminar of senior scholars at

National Chung Cheng University in Chia-yi Taiwan to address the particular set

of issues produced by this tension between demographic and development

issues for higher education throughout the region. The particular focus will be to

gain a better understanding of how the values of access, equity and capacity

interact in these varied settings and are being processed in higher education

policy settings. The goal will be to produce a set of scholarly papers that will later

appear as a special edition of a regional educational journal.

Settling on Some Reasonable Definitions:

In education, access is both a measure and a reflection of a policy prescription.

As a measure, it references some portion of a given population, which is

provided entry to educational institutions at a given level. As a policy prescription,

it references the commitment to government to seek or ensure entry to

educational facilities at a given level, andit reflects decisions made within the

policy environment with respect to whether such entry opportunity will be

provided within the public or private sector, or both. These distinctions have

applied to higher education in one way or another throughout its history, giventhat in one way or another universities and other HEIs have been authorized by

governmental action. Thus, even in those historical periods when higher

education has been perceived as providing an essentially elite function for

society, the writ to offer higher education and thereby create a quantum of access

for a portion of the population, springs from legitimated governmental authority.

In the post WW-II period and the era of rapid economic development,

government policy has been closely identified with providing access to higher

education through the expansion of existing institutions and the creation of new

ones, both through direct governmental investment and through private sector

authorization. In this sense access, as form of metric, and capacity are

intrinsically linked. As a value operating within policy discourse, access comes to

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be engaged with many other discourses including those associated with equity,

resources, notions of future social development, etc. In these contexts access

has a strongly normative construction (who should obtain access and under what

conditions?) and a strong empirical/analytical construction (who is obtaining

access and under what conditions?)

Within policy discourse, capacity appears a deceptively simple concept: it is what

higher education has and is able to do. Capacity, however, has multiple

dimensions running from those determined by its site (physical and virtual), by

the nature of its human capital, its governance structure, to all the many

elements involved with its delivery capacity. Indeed, much of what higher

education accreditation and quality assurance are about is seeking to develop

notions of capacity consistent with the mission of an HEI and then determine the

extent to which existing capacity along these multiple dimensions is sufficient to

achieve the stipulated mission. Complicating factors in the assessment of

capacity include the constant need to refresh capacity against the normal strains

of institutional performance, and changing notions of acceptable capacity that

arise from HEIs being situated in social, economic and political environments

subject to continual change.

Equity is a goal often embraced, but frequently misunderstood. In its post WWII

policy manifestations, equity has often been used interchangeably with equality,

the dominant notion being that all individuals in a designated population should

be, or have the right to be, treated equally by authoritative actions. Within higher

education contexts this leads to the presumption that all students should be

treated equal. Peter Hershock, however, has argued persuasively that this is an

impoverished notion of equity because in practice the effort to treat all

participants equally actually works to validate individual and social differences

passed onto the institutional structures of higher education by persistent and

prior patterns of inequality. A more robust notion of equity, he argues, would be

one in which individual differences are given standing within diverse institutional

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contexts. In this view HEIs would seek to allow individuals to maximize their

social and intellectual potentials through institutional settings that maximize

individual potential. (Hershock, 2007)

The Move Toward More is Better

As suggested above, the prevailing norm of access in education arises out of the

historical experience with schooling wherein the development of industrial society

resulted in irresistible pressures toward universal and compulsory basic

education. Over time, and especially during recent development decades,

achieving universal education has come to be equated with meeting a necessary

requirement for successful economic development. The values embedded in the

UNESCOs program of Education for All make clear that education is equated

with achieving a status of full citizenship.

These same post-war decades have witnessed the migration of these notions

from lower to higher education. Many commentators have pointed to the class-

based historical nature of higher education (e.g. Carnoy, 2002) and its function in

terms of the perpetuation of ruling elites. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976) University

education was intentionally and explicitly elitist and privileged. Even in theAmerican context where achieving public education through the creation of state

universities was a commonplace, elitism prevailed in recognition that only a

(relatively) small percentage of the educated population needed higher

education. Equity and access as values came to mean the provision of equality

of opportunity through some combination of unbiased achievement qualifications

for applicants, supplemented by additional subventions for those with the most

financial need.

These social reproduction dynamics have progressively come to be subverted by

other value positions and strategic social and economic arguments that hold

higher education achievement as an increasingly necessaryqualification for

social success, and collectively for economic achievement. The well-known

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Stanford classifications of higher education institutions into elite, mass and

convenience institutions aptly summarized the historical experience in the United

States as the historically elite institutions were joined by mass institutions

developed primarily in the public sector in the post-world war II period to provide

capacity for a generation of higher education seekers for whom training beyond

secondary education seemed a necessity. In the past three decades, the so-

called convenience institutions developed largely (but not exclusively) by the

private sector have sought to generate additional capacity to yet another

population fraction. Education of an 18-22 year old cohort for participation in

society and the economy has come to be replaced by patterns of episodic higher

educational contact over long spans of maturity. In the United States today the

average age of the undergraduate student is in the late 20s; more than half of all

undergraduate students are non-traditional; the average person over the course

of a working life can expect to change jobs 12-14 times. What is meant by the

educational requirements of society and nations has substantially shifted, and

with it the meanings and intentionality of equity and access, morphing into a

collective notion something akin to equitable access.

Accounting for Changing Social Structures and Needs

How did this shift occur? The answer is that it occurred in a series of steps and

waves. Throughout the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s education was

increasingly linked to social and economic development, a process that

intensified with the emergence of the information/knowledge economy/society.

(Castells, 1995) These emerging information technologies led first to an

awareness that entirely new skills were required both to create and operate such

a society, and later to the realization that an innovation and diffusion process had

been triggered that made movements toward increased amounts of higher

education consumption inevitable.

The capacity biases of the industrial period, which tended to privilege the

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creation and control of physical/material assets, came to be increasingly

displaced by human capital theory and the understanding that the idea was the

new domain of privilege in an information/knowledge based society. All of

education, but particularly universities were expected to quickly recognize and

fulfill the need for workers appropriate to such societies. This demand, which

continues unabated, has come to be known as the alignmentissue, the extent to

which educational institutions produce graduates appropriate for the labor needs

of these rapidly transforming societies. The demand for alignment is expressed

loudly and continuously within the policy process, and perhaps more than any

other factor is driving educational reform throughout higher education. It has

become in many respects the de facto standard against which access, equity and

capacity are being measured.

Contributing Factors

As higher education began to expand during the three decades from 1970-1990,

the so-called era of massification, it quickly became clear that a variety of levels

of differentiation regarding access were emerging. Most HEIs promoted policies

generally under the rubric of equality of opportunity or merit-based access. Inthe case of HEIs in North America this meant that post-secondary graduates

could apply as they wished to whatever HEIs they thought they might admit

them; in other words, they had equality of opportunity to apply and of course the

opportunity to be accepted or denied admission. Throughout Asia post-

secondary students were screened through some form of national entrance

examination, which operated on the general principle of merit; in other words,

all were equal before the exam. In point of fact, in both systems, a sophisticated

differentiation existed that demonstrated that access was segmented by a

number of variables not the least significant of which were: race, culture,

occupation, gender, regional origin, lineage, income, political power, religion and

caste to name the most familiar. In other words, while broader access was being

promoted on the one hand, selective access based on a variety of socio-

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economic and other factors was operating on the other.

More specifically, despite advances in the education of females at the

precollegiate level, at the tertiary level gender disparity is more obvious. There

also exists gender stereotyping in tertiary education with males focusing in the

STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) areas and women in

humanities and social sciences, including education. Women are also under-

represented in HE management and administrative positions as well as in

income distribution. Income-related equity and access are also evident in the

region with South Asia having the highest incidence of income poverty, and within

country discrepancies (such as the Western region of China) also contributing to

a lack of HE access and equity. It became clear over time that there was no

greater inequality than the equal opportunity of unequals; these systems operate

to allow some to come to the table advantaged over others. To respond to this

condition several policies emerged with names like affirmative action, quota

systems, positive discrimination, scheduled castes, and so on. Dominant groups

then challenged these policies as just another form of discrimination; and so, the

debate on access entered a new and more tense era.

The Embrace of Neoliberalism:

From the 1990s to the present, the dominant policy environment both in the US

and Asia generally falls under the rubric of Neoliberalism. (Harvey, 2005) It works

nicely with the complexity of the HE access issue in the sense that public

institutions and public policy toward disadvantaged groups was allowed to shift

from the public good sector to the private market. As local and national

governments moved away from promoting policies designed to positively address

the HE access issue, the private sector moved in and flourished as the demand

for HE continued to increase across all socio-cultural lines. In the US,

examination preparatory businesses sprung up, schools, and testing

organizations marketed their wares to students desiring to get an academic edge

on the competition in order to enter the highest tiers of HE. In Asia, specialty

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drive the curriculum at all lower levels as primary and secondary teachers teach

to the national entrance exam. While the U.S. does not have national entrance

examinations, there does exist a complex system of honors courses, college

entrance track curriculum, advanced placement tests, and of the course the

Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) all of which serve similar functions. These

mechanisms have been challenged and critiqued recently and alternatives

proposed, but they continue to function as the dominant access and equity

screening devices.

Reexamining Access, Equity and Capacity

In the proposed senior seminar we seek to develop a set of papers that will

examine the inter-relationships between these factors across the range of

country and regional settings represented by participants: China, India,

Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, and ThailandEast,

Southeast and South Asia.

We suggest that authors consider among other questions whether there exist

alternatives to the situation as sketched above that have not been given sufficient

study. The model here might be the work of Joseph Farrell at the University ofToronto, who has sought to examine novel educational responses to the various

crises and predicaments that have developed in lower education as it as sought

to address the same three issues.

Another question that one might want to put is whether access to HE is all that it

is cracked up to be? That is to say, as various societies have rushed to address

access and capacity, the dominant tendency has been to add capacity after the

structural models of existing institutions and systems. This has resulted in adding

many more students to systems of institutions whose historic legacy has been to

function largely as centers of elite education. This has raised issues of bringing

large numbers of students into higher education who are often manifestly

unready for the level of instruction demands. This problem in turn tends to lead

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to a situation in which institutions need to water down curriculum and standards

or face the prospect of finding large numbers of students unable to meet

established standards. (Grade inflation in the west is a persistent reminder of the

problem.) Seeking to solve access issues in the most evident manner also has

resulted often in the evolution of curricula that are inappropriate for addressing

national problems, etc.

One suggestion is that the dominant discourses on these three values, especially

those that purport to link capacity with access may need to be reconceptualized.

Perhaps policy discourses should seek a new utilitarian base: asking the

question of higher education graduates for what purpose? Asking such questions

need not (as they have often recently) result in default responses that link higher

education solely with limited occupational related outcomes. It may indeed be the

case that in the changing and shifting climate of increased global interaction and

dependence we need to give renewed attention to how the kinds of inputs that

are being mobilized within nations are being employed. One view is that

questions of access, equity and capacity should be framed more explicitly in

terms ofmixes of formal and non-formal HE or tertiary education. Such a move

would carry us in the direction of in effect a move toward a more differentiatedmodel that focuses less on world class, elite HE institutions and looks more

closely at community college, rural cooperatives, open universities etc. that seek

to respond to wide varieties national and local needs. Such a shift of focus would

allow us to identify discourses and outcomes that produce value across a larger

slide of social endeavors.

To The Task-Our Seminar Model

The immediate foregoing is but one set of suggestions of where our broad,

shared discussion of access, equity and capacity might take us. We envision that

each participant will develop a brief paper of between 2500 and 3500 words.

Papers will be provided to EWC staff prior to the July meeting and will be

distributed to all participants prior to the meeting. During our sessions, each

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paper will be presented and discussed individually. Following the presentation,

approximately a day and a half will be spent in seminar format, further discussing

papers where appropriate, but more generally seeking to develop new, synthetic

materials out of our seminar discussions. Notes of all sessions will be taken by

staff and made available to participants subsequent to the meeting.

Immediately subsequent to the seminar, papers will be reviewed and returned to

their authors with suggestions for revision, both to develop new material

suggested in the seminar and to prepare them for submission to an appropriate

journal.

References

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. 1976, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational

Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books

Castells, Manuel, 2000, The Rive of the Network Society, 2nded., Oxford:

Blackwells.

Carnoy, M. 2002. "What does globalization mean for educational change? Acomparative approach." Comparative Education Review46(1): 1-9

Harvey, David 2005,A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University

Press

Hershock, Peter D., 2007, Education and Alleviating Poverty: Educating for

Equity and Diversity in Peter D. Hershock, Mark Mason & John N. Hawkins,

eds., Changing Education: Leadership, Innovation and Development in a

Globalizing Asia Pacific, Hong Kong: Springer.

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