Introduction:

Problems of Morality and Justice in Higher Education

Harry Brighouse and Michael McPherson

About 60 percent of Americans have higher education, and some 40 percent graduate with some sort of post–high school degree. Graduating from college has a significant effect on one's lifetime earnings, on the kind of work one is able to perform, and on one's health and longevity. It is a prerequisite for many lucrative careers, and graduating from a more selective college often gives someone an advantage over a competitor from a less selective one in professional labor markets. In other words, access to higher education is an important factor in the competition for the benefits our society distributes unequally. But higher education is also a factor in creating those benefits. Education makes people more productive economically and more capable socially, and it enables them to use their leisure time in more fulfilling ways.

College is not just good for the income and life prospects of graduates. They also get to enjoy the experience of being in college itself—a time that is widely regarded as one of self- exploration in which they can learn more about their own talents and inclinations and how these fit into the wider world. Furthermore, students can accumulate knowledge and understanding of the world and develop their talents. In other words, they learn. This is why, in addition to advantaging graduates in labor-market competition, higher education also makes them more productive: it contributes to the creation of the pool of unequally distributed benefits that graduates are better placed to win.

Most students do not attend highly selective colleges: they go to colleges for which the only qualification is a high school diploma or a GED. But highly selective colleges play a crucial role in the formation of elites in our society. They educate the young people who will later form large proportions of lawmakers, businessmen and businesswomen, education and public sector leaders, and judges at the state, national, and even international levels, as well as most other high-status professionals.

So it is natural that highly selective higher education should be the focus of a great deal of public policy and scholarly debate. What role should the liberal arts have in a college education? Should colleges orient themselves to the educational demands of the business sector? What is the role of highly selective colleges in the public sphere? To what extent should they be subsidized, either directly or indirectly, by the public? Should they simply teach students skills and academic knowledge, or should they play a role in shaping character, and if so, to what end? Should highly selective colleges' admissions practices give an edge to racial minorities, legacies, or poor students? How much should the public purse subsidize disadvantaged students attending such institutions?

These debates are fundamentally about values, and we believe that moral and political philosophers can contribute in useful ways. Deciding exactly which policies and practices we should adopt demands careful attention to the empirical evidence supplied by social science. It also requires thinking about what we ought to value—about questions of distributive justice and of what constitutes a valuable education. Philosophers are trained to identify value considerations in great detail—to specify them with just a little more precision than would ever be needed for practical purposes. In our experiences, disagreements about policy and practice often proceed with minimal attention to the values assumed on either side. However, all sides can benefit from more clarity about which moral values are in play.

We can crudely divide the moral issues concerning higher education into three overlapping categories. The first concerns what students should learn. Should college prepare students to be maximally productive, economically speaking? Should it focus on developing citizens with powerful deliberative capacities and the inclination to use them for the public good? Should it challenge the opinions and religious and cultural assumptions students bring with them? Should it shape students' views about what is valuable in life and valuable to learn? Or should it respond to their preferences and allow them to shape their own values? Should it do all or just some of these things? Should different colleges aim at different balances?

The second category concerns who should attend college. Should college be just for the few elite who will occupy privileged positions in our society? Should college be a prerequisite for all professions? Should parental income and wealth influence who goes to which college, and whether somebody goes at all? Should everybody, or nearly everybody, go to college, just as everybody goes to high school? Should colleges attend to diversity considerations in regulating access? Should we have some institutions that are much more selective than others?

The third category concerns the relationship between universities and the wider world. Should universities pursue commercially sponsored research? Who should own the knowledge that the universities produce? Should universities enjoy the benefits of tax-exempt status? Should they be involved in running public services, such as hospitals and schools? When and how should interested parties outside universities have a say in what is taught, and in what ways?

We charged the authors of the chapters in this volume with addressing some of these fundamental questions about the values underlying debates about higher education and asked them to do so in ways that would be interesting and accessible to other philosophers, scholars, policy makers, administrators, students, and members of the general public who are engaged in the debates. We invited contributors who we were confident had an informed interest in the selective and very selective colleges segment of higher education and who had a record of producing distinguished philosophical work. All have been students and teachers, and several either have been or currently are leaders and administrators. We did not assign a question to each contributor, but instead gave them free rein to address the questions that most interested them. Their contributions mostly engage with questions that clearly arise in the segment of higher education they inhabit. We did not ask the authors to attempt to work out the extent or ways in which their conclusions might apply to other segments of higher...