Expanding Opportunity in Higher Education: Leveraging Promise

6. Measuring the State of Equity in Public Higher Education

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University titled “To Fulfill These Rights.” . . . freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire. . . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equality but human ability. Not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result. With these words, Lyndon B. Johnson rightfully pointed out that equity involves both opportunity as well as results. Yet, almost forty years later, on just about every indicator of educational outcome, from degrees earned to 143 ESTELA MARA BENSIMON LAN HAO LETICIA TOMAS BUSTILLOS Chapter Six Measuring the State of Equity in Public Higher Education grade point average, Whites and Asians are proportionally overrepresented and Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are proportionally underrepresented . This is true in institutions that are highly selective and predominantly White, are open-access with a diverse student population, or are classified as Hispanic serving. But the details of this stratification remain largely invisible to the higher education community. College enrollments for Blacks and Hispanics have increased nationwide , and generally there is a perception that major strides have been made to meet the goals of equal educational opportunity. Even though the number of underrepresented students who go to college and earn a degree is an impressive accomplishment when compared to forty years ago, the gap between Blacks and Hispanics, on the one hand, and their White, non-Hispanic counterparts persists and continues to grow (Ruppert, 2003). Students of color lag well behind Whites in completing college. In 2001, of high school completers ages 25 to 29, about 37 percent of Whites, 21 percent of Blacks, and 16 percent of Hispanics had received a bachelor’s degree. For every Black and Latino student who earns a degree Whites earn two and Asians earn three (Swail, Redd, & Perna, 2003). Simply put, the assumption that progress has been made beyond access into higher education for African Americans and Latinos is not supported by the evidence (Swail et al., 2003). In fact, the achievement gap among these groups is substantial nationwide and has not diminished in the last fifteen years (Bok, 2003). Notably, inequity in educational outcomes in higher education has not been as prominent an issue as the educational gaps between minority and nonminority K-12 students. Unlike the K-12 schools, which under the No Child Left Behind legislation are required to report all of their data disaggregated by race and ethnicity, comparable requirements for higher education at the national or state levels are lacking. In general, the mainstream discourse among higher education policy makers and practitioners with regard to educational opportunity for underrepresented groups has been framed much more by the standpoints of affirmative action and diversity than by the standpoint of accountability. We attribute the absence of equity as an indicator of institutional performance in higher education accountability systems as one of the major reasons for the invisibility of growing inequality in educational outcomes . The purpose of accountability systems is to monitor the performance of tax-supported institutions on measures that are considered important by policy makers and the public in general and to identify areas where improvements are needed. As a policy tool, accountability systems can be an effective way of judging whether institutions are promoting state priorities (Shulock, 2004). In a globalized economy, a state’s well-being depends greatly on an educated workforce, and in many states this implies a substantial increase in the proportion of historically underrepresented minorities going to college 144 Estela Mara Bensimon, Lan Hao, and Leticia Tomas Bustillos and attaining the baccalaureate. Treating equity in educational outcomes as a matter of institutional accountability is in the public interest. Policy makers in majority/minority states will want...