ACCESS AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES: THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION AND PUBLIC FINANCE POLICIES Chapter uri icon

abstract

  • The globalization of higher education has been ushered in with conservative public finance policies that use tuition and loans as means of shifting the burden of funding colleges from taxpayers to students and their families (Henry et al., 2001). While there have been critical analyses of these policies illuminating the unintended equity effects (Henry et al., 2001; St. John, 2003) along with literature that espouses the benefits of these shifts (King, 1999), fewer analyses have provided balanced appraisals of the intended and unintended consequences of these new policies. Yet balanced appraisals are precisely what are needed if our goal is to inform the reconstruction of public finance policies in ways that are just for all citizens, taxpayers as well as students and their families. In this chapter we examine patterns of policy change in education and public finance in the United States in an effort to untangle the effects of federal and state policies on educational outcomes. In Section 1 we briefly review the education policy context in the United States and then describe the framework we used to assess the effects of public finance policies on educational opportunity. In Section 2 we examine changes in key outcomes in relation to policy shifts in federal financing of higher education in the United States during the late twentieth century. We conclude by considering the implications for global studies of postsecondary access. 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

author list (cited authors)

  • St John, E. P., Tuttle, T. J., & Musoba, G. D.

citation count

  • 1

complete list of authors

  • St John, Edward P||Tuttle, Tina J||Musoba, Glenda D

Book Title

  • WIDENING ACCESS TO EDUCATION AS SOCIAL JUSTICE

publication date

  • January 2006