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Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective

July 2007
Ethics 117(4):595-622

DOI:10.1086/518806

Authors:

Elizabeth S. Anderson

University of Michigan

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Ethics 117 ( July 2007): 595–622

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595

Fair Opportunity in Education: A

Democratic Equality Perspective*

Elizabeth Anderson

Recent work on justice in the distribution of educational opportunities

has focused on two phenomena. The ﬁrst is the shift in the United

States from an “equality” to an “adequacy” standard of fair educational

opportunity. Instead of making the state provide equal educational in-

puts to rich and poor children, advocates for the disadvantaged, courts,

and policy makers have been trying to make the state educate all students

to at least an adequate threshold of achievement.

The second is the

fact that education is not just an intrinsic good for the individual but

an important instrumental good with positional features. It opens up

access to the most rewarding careers and leadership positions in society

in virtue of endowing individuals with relatively superior qualiﬁcations.

Because such high payoffs are attached to an individual’s relative aca-

demic achievement in the competition for rewarding careers, one per-

son’s gain in educational achievement is another’s loss of socioeconomic

prospects. This consideration has led many egalitarians to reject ade-

quacy standards for educational opportunity and insist that the state—

and even parents—should constrain their educational investments in

children according to an equality standard. Only so, it is argued, can

individuals have genuinely fair opportunities, and only so can the state

avoid unjustly injuring the already disadvantaged by effectively closing

* I thank Harry Brighouse, Josh Cohen, Lawrence Blum, Sally Haslanger, Rob Reich,

Debra Satz, Adam Swift, Philippe Van Parijs, and participants in theMarch 2006 Massachusetts

Institute of Technology conference, “Equality and Education,” for helpful comments.

1. For a history of this development, see Michael Rebell, “Educational Adequacy,

Democracy, and the Courts,” in Achieving High Educational Standards for All, ed. Timothy

Ready, Christopher Edley Jr., and Catherine Snow, National Research Council Conference

Proceeding (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), 218–68.

596 Ethics July 2007

them off from realistic prospects for rewarding careers and leadership

positions.

I believe that we need to reframe this discussion by shifting our

focus from the good education is supposed to do for the individuals

who have it to the good the more educated are supposed to do for

everyone else. Let us call “elites” those who occupy positions of re-

sponsibility and leadership in society: managers, consultants, profes-

sionals, politicians, policy makers.

In a democratic society, elites must

be so constituted that they will effectively serve all sectors of society, not

just themselves. They must perform in their ofﬁces so that the inequal-

ities in power, autonomy, responsibility, and reward they enjoy in virtue

of their position redound to the beneﬁt of all, including the least ad-

vantaged. This requires that elites be so constituted as to be systemat-

ically responsive to the interests and concerns of people from all walks

of life.

This democratic conception of the responsibilities of an elite should

shape our conception of the qualiﬁcations it must have. The qualiﬁ-

cations of a democratic elite are those features that enable and dispose

it to carry out the responsibilities a democratic society assigns to it—

responsiveness to and effective service of the interests of people from

all sectors of society. Responsiveness requires (i) awareness of the in-

terests and problems of people from all sectors and (ii) a disposition

to serve those interests. Effective service of those interests requires (iii)

technical knowledge of how to advance these interests and (iv) com-

petence in respectful interaction with people from all sectors. Respectful

interaction is both constitutive of effective service in democratic societies

and essential to eliciting information about the interests of clients, cus-

tomers, and constituents and to engaging their cooperation in effecting

solutions to their problems. An educational system suitable for a dem-

ocratic society must cultivate all four qualiﬁcations in its elite and must

select individuals for elite education with a view to how effectively an

elite so composed will manifest these qualiﬁcations as a group.

Once we take seriously this democratic requirement of systematic

responsiveness to all, we shall ﬁnd that it has demanding egalitarian

implications both for the composition of an elite and for how it should

be educated. I shall argue that for an elite to possess all four qualiﬁ-

2. Adam Swift, How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent

(London: Routledge, 2003); Rob Reich and William Koski, “The State’s Obligation to

Provide Education: Adequate Education or Equal Education?” (unpublished manuscript,

Stanford University, 2006); Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, “Equality, Priority, and Po-

sitional Goods,” Ethics 116 (2006): 471–97.

3. I am assuming that some hierarchy of ofﬁces is necessary for efﬁcient production

of goods and services and that a regime that rotated everyone through all ofﬁcial ranks

would be infeasible in any advanced society.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 597

cations, its membership must be drawn from all sectors of society, in-

cluding the less advantaged. Moreover, these diverse members must be

educated together, so that they can develop competence in respectful

intergroup interaction. A democratically qualiﬁed elite must be an elite

that is integrated across all the major lines of social inequality and

division that characterize it.

Working backward from the good we demand elites to do for ev-

eryone in society to their necessary qualiﬁcations, we arrive at a standard

for the educational opportunities a democratic society must provide to

its youth. A just K–12 educational system must prepare students from

all sectors of society, and especially those disadvantaged along any di-

mensions, with sufﬁcient skills to be able to succeed in higher education

and thereby join the elite. This yields a sufﬁcientarian or adequacy

standard for just provision of opportunities for education: every student

with the potential and interest should receive a K–12 education sufﬁ-

cient to enable him or her to succeed at a college that prepares its

students for postgraduate education.

Against this adequacy standard, advocates of equality object that it

ignores the positional advantages of students who, in virtue of the state’s

richer investment in their K–12 education, are more qualiﬁed for college

and hence more likely to get admitted.

This objection, however, pre-

sumes a narrowly academic conception of qualiﬁcation for college, ac-

cording to which students can be arrayed on a single scale of merit

from top to bottom. On the broader four-dimensional conception of

qualiﬁcation articulated above, some qualiﬁcations are essentially dis-

persed across all sectors of society, and others can only be developed

jointly by an integrated elite. This is not to deny the relevance of aca-

demic qualiﬁcations. It is to insist that this is a partial conception of

qualiﬁcation. When colleges select an elite that is truly qualiﬁed to serve

everyone in society, they must select for all dimensions of qualiﬁcation.

This substantially reduces the positional advantages of those who are

highly qualiﬁed by narrowly academic standards and grants positional

advantages to those whose dispersed knowledge is relatively scarce

among elites as currently constituted.

Oddly, the adequacy versus equality debate has been conducted in

abstraction from the debate about the value of “diversity” in education

that lies at the core of current arguments in favor of afﬁrmative action.

This is ironic, since afﬁrmative action is explicitly designed to open

educational opportunities to the disadvantaged by ﬂattening out the

positional advantages of students who have beneﬁted from unequal state

investment in their educations. The conception of elite qualiﬁcations

4. Reich and Koski, “The State’s Obligation to Provide Education”; Brighouse and

Swift, “Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods,” 475–77.

598 Ethics July 2007

that I have just articulated is just another way to capture the underlying

point of diversity—with two twists that are often elided in discussions

of this topic. First, “diversity” contributes to the qualiﬁcations of an elite;

it is not a consideration that competes with meritocratic criteria. Second,

it contributes to the qualiﬁcations of a group only when its members

work together across sectional lines. It is not a qualiﬁcation a group has

simply in virtue of the range of identities possessed by its individual

members. To see how these claims can be true requires a deeper un-

derstanding of how diversity—or integration, as I prefer to call it—is

supposed to work.

This is not a brief in favor of afﬁrmative action. Afﬁrmative action

is but one policy, and a belated and marginal one, that aims to tackle

the educational problems that arise for a democratic society in the face

of social inequality, especially in the context of group segregation. My

brief is rather for comprehensive group integration in all of a country’s

institutions and hence for integration of schools at all levels. Standards

for fair educational opportunity must be determined with this end in

mind. I shall argue that if they are, and society lives up to such standards,

then the less advantaged will have no grounds for complaint.

HOW DISADVANTAGE IS TRANSMITTED THROUGH COGNITIVE

DEFICITS AMONG ELITES: SEGREGATION AND GROUP

STEREOTYPES

Let us begin our inquiry by exploring the ways elites in a democratic

society may lack the qualiﬁcations they need to effectively serve the

interests of people from all walks of life. We are particularly interested

in how elites may fail to be responsive to the interests of people from

social sectors that are deﬁned hierarchically as dimensions of social

disadvantage, since these failures are most threatening to democratic

ideals. Our concern is not with all of the modes by which disadvantage

is socially reproduced but speciﬁcally with the paths that work through

cognitive deﬁciencies among elites. I shall focus on two such modes:

segregation and group stereotypes. Sociologists and social psychologists

have told us much about how these mechanisms systematically repro-

duce disadvantage, often by depriving the disadvantaged of knowledge

they need to gain access to resources, esteem, and power. This knowl-

edge-based perspective on disadvantage is not mistaken, but it is partial.

I shall stress the other side of the story: how segregation and group

stereotypes generate knowledge deﬁcits on the part of the advantaged,

and especially within elites, and how their ignorance and incompetence

put others at a disadvantage.

Some conceptual clariﬁcations are in order. Let us deﬁne the “ad-

vantaged” as those who systematically enjoy relatively superior access to

resources, social esteem, power, and inﬂuence (including elite status)

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 599

in virtue of their socially ascribed group identities. The “disadvantaged”

may be deﬁned in corresponding fashion. Depending on the society in

question, systematic advantages and disadvantages may be attached to

identities such as class, gender, race, ethnicity or nationality, immigrant

status, tribe, age, religion, caste, marital and parental status, sexual ori-

entation, family membership, language/dialect/accent, and disability.

Given that access to advantage and disadvantage is governed by many

cross-cutting social identities, any given individual may be advantaged

in some respects and disadvantaged in others. Hence, “the advantaged”

and “the disadvantaged” do not deﬁne mutually exclusive classes of

individuals but rather dimensions of social analysis that may vary de-

pending on the context and the question one is asking. In addition,

the ways any given identity may function to aid or hinder access to

resources, esteem, and power may interact with the other identities an

individual has, often in reinforcing but not simply additive fashion.

For

example, in the United States, particular disadvantages are attached to

poor single black mothers over and above the disadvantages attached

to each identity taken separately, partly in virtue of stigmatizing stereo-

types associated with those possessing this combination of features—for

example, suspicions of sexual licentiousness, drug addiction, and welfare

dependency.

In today’s democratic societies, elites include some members who

are disadvantaged along one or more dimensions. But they are still

dominantly composed of members who are multiply advantaged, es-

pecially in society’s higher positions (chief executive ofﬁcers and board

members of major corporations, legislators, judges, occupants of ex-

ecutive ofﬁces, and so forth). Moreover, attainment of elite status, which

I have deﬁned in terms of ofﬁce or occupation, need not erase the

disadvantages a person may suffer in contexts outside the exercise of

the powers of that ofﬁce. A black businessman may still encounter dif-

ﬁculty hailing a taxi.

An elite individual’s disadvantaged group identity

may also condition her elite status, limiting the powers and advantages

usually attached to her ofﬁce. A female executive may face sexual ha-

rassment or insubordination on the part of male and female staff who

resent having a woman as a boss.

Thus, while possession of an advan-

5. Kimberle´ Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black

Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,”

University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–67.

6. For further discussion of how race undermines access to privilege on the part of

those who have seemingly “made it,” see Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New

York: HarperCollins, 1993); and Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes, Living with Racism: The Black

Middle-Class Experience (Boston: Beacon, 1994).

7. Vicki Schultz, “Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment,” Yale Law Journal 107 (1998):

1683–1805.

600 Ethics July 2007

taged or disadvantaged identity is distinct from elite status, each con-

ditions the other.

Keeping these observations in mind, let us examine how segrega-

tion and group stereotypes transmit disadvantage through their cog-

nitive effects on elites. These mechanisms operate in similar ways that

abstract from the identities of the groups in question. Thus, I speak in

general terms about how modes of social stratiﬁcation affect the cog-

nition of groups in advantaged or disadvantaged positions. For any par-

ticular society, we could apply these claims to particular groups—for

instance, to how U.S. whites are ignorant of and misperceive African

Americans. The generality of these mechanisms helps us see that these

cognitive deﬁcits are not due to whites’ ancestry, skin color, genes, or

mythical racial essence, but simply to their contingent social positioning

as a segregated and advantaged group.

Segregation

Socially stratiﬁed societies are typically characterized by high degrees

of group segregation along dimensions of social inequality. In the

United States, the prosperous and the poor, natives and immigrants,

and whites and members of disadvantaged racial groups tend to live in

different neighborhoods, attend different schools, and belong to dif-

ferent churches and voluntary associations. Even when they are not

spatially segregated, these groups still tend to practice social segregation,

choosing friends, associates, and acquaintances more from members of

their own group than from members of other groups.

Assortive mating

patterns ensure that family lines, too, tend toward internal homogeneity.

Family-owned businesses transmit this segregation to the sphere of work,

to the extent that they preferentially hire from within the homogeneous

family and friendship network. Gender poses only a partial exception

to the general pattern of segregation of the more from the less advan-

taged. While heterosexual families, public schools, and churches are

gender integrated, the perpetuation of “separate spheres” for men and

women is manifested in an intense gender segregation of paid occu-

pations, sports teams, and many exclusive private clubs, especially those

established by elite businessmen.

Certain orthodox religious sects also

segregate men and women in their houses of worship and in other

spheres of social exchange.

8. On class segregation in the United States, see Paul Jargowsky, “Take the Money

and Run: Economic Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” American Sociological Review

61 (1996): 984–98; on racial segregation, see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American

Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9. Maria Charles and David Grusky, Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of

Women and Men (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 601

Segregation transmits disadvantage in numerous ways. Spatial seg-

regation of neighborhoods enables advantaged groups to provide public

goods to themselves while denying them to the disadvantaged.

This is

notoriously true for public schools. The citizens of a rich town may vote

for zoning regulations that prevent the construction of housing for

lower-income people. They may then provide themselves with excellent

schools from which they have effectively excluded the less advantaged.

They may insist on local funding of schools, to prevent the less advan-

taged from gaining access to revenues drawn from property taxes on

the rich. Spatial segregation also facilitates the concentration of negative

externalities on the disadvantaged. Socially necessary but undesired fa-

cilities such as toxic waste dumps, polluting factories, and homeless

shelters can be located in neighborhoods populated by the poor, im-

migrants, blacks, and Native Americans.

Spatial segregation also helps perpetuate social segregation, which

often also exists even in formally integrated spaces. Social segregation

reproduces disadvantage by limiting the circulation of social and cultural

capital to those already well endowed with these assets. “Social capital”

refers to the networks of associates by which knowledge of and access

to opportunities is transmitted.

Individuals tend to learn about job

and educational opportunities from their families, neighbors, cowork-

ers, and friends. If one’s associates have limited acquaintance with better

jobs and have never been to college, then one is likely to remain ignorant

of these opportunities as well. Associates also provide the crucial per-

sonal connections needed to open doors to opportunity, through re-

ferrals and recommendations. Many employers recruit new employees

by advertising openings through their current employees. This habit

not only saves on advertising costs but may also yield a more reliable

workforce, since current employees are likely to want to protect their

own jobs and reputations by recommending only associates whom they

believe will be good workers. Similarly, admissions ofﬁcers at selective

schools tend to weigh more heavily the recommendations of those they

know personally. While reliance on social networks to recruit new em-

ployees or members of the elite may therefore save on search and eval-

uation costs, it tends to reproduce disadvantage in segregated societies.

“Cultural capital” refers to knowledge of and facility in the often

informal or little-publicized norms, conventions, and codes of conduct

10. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 148–60.

11. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for

the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58.

12. Barbara Reskin, The Realities of Afﬁrmative Action in Employment (Washington, DC:

American Sociological Association, 1998), 32–33.

602 Ethics July 2007

that govern access to advantages.

It is transmitted through families and

informal social engagement more than through formal education.

Col-

lege-educated parents transmit cultural capital to their children when

they teach them how to polish their re´sume´s and personal statements,

how to make a good impression in an interview and on the job, how

to ask for a raise or promotion, how to get the inside track on good

internship opportunities. Rules of etiquette, body language, proper

modes of dress, decorum, and taste, an “educated” accent and avoidance

of slang, facility in the art of “small talk” within elite circles, and in-

numerable other subtle and often unarticulated skills, habits, and ex-

pectations attached to better opportunities remain hidden from the

disadvantaged insofar as they are socially segregated from those who

possess such cultural capital. This impairs the ability of the disadvan-

taged to successfully navigate more privileged social settings.

As this brief summary of the impact of segregation on the disad-

vantaged suggests, most scholars who study segregation stress how it

deprives the less advantaged of the knowledge and skills, including social

and cultural capital, they need to advance. This is correct, but it is only

part of the story. Segregation also deprives the more advantaged of

knowledge. To the extent that they lead lives that are isolated from the

lives of the disadvantaged and personally know few disadvantaged peo-

ple, they are liable to be relatively ignorant of the problems the latter

face in their lives and of the constraints within which the latter must

cope with their problems. When the elite is drawn overwhelmingly from

multiply advantaged, segregated groups, their cognitive deﬁcits hurt the

disadvantaged, because elites constituted in this way lack awareness of

and responsiveness to the problems and interests of the disadvantaged.

Consider, for example, the case of a personnel manager at a midsize

ﬁrm who once told me of the failure of an employee beneﬁt she wanted

to promote among her staff, many of whom were working mothers with

children in day care. The beneﬁt was a tax-sheltered dependent-care

expense account. Employees who enrolled in the program would have

a designated amount of money withdrawn from each paycheck and

deposited in a special child care expense account. They would submit

their expenses for reimbursement, which would be provided on a tax-

free basis. The beneﬁt promised to cut the cost of child care by the

employee’s marginal tax rate. After publicizing the advantages of the

program, the manager was puzzled and disappointed that none of the

lower-paid staff in her ﬁrm signed up for it. When she asked the sec-

13. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.”

14. Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Knowledge,

Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education, ed. Richard Brown (Lon-

don: Tavistock, 1973), 80.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 603

retaries why they hadn’t enrolled, they explained that on their salaries,

they couldn’t afford the ﬂoat. Between the time of incurring the expense

and receiving reimbursement, they would have paid twice the cost of

day care—once to the provider and once to the dependent-care account.

If their paperwork was rejected for some reason or if they were a few

days late submitting it, they could ﬁnd themselves having to cover three

months of expenses at once. Their remaining salary was not enough to

make ends meet.

The tax-sheltered dependent-care account is an example of a policy

designed with the interests and capacities of upper-middle-class working

parents in mind. It neglects the needs and constraints of working-class

parents. Were the elite drafters of this tax policy unaware of the con-

straints faced by low-paid working parents, or did they simply not care?

Either way, they lacked at least one of the qualiﬁcations a democratic

elite needs to perform competently in ofﬁce—awareness of the problems

of those they are supposed to be serving and a disposition to respond

to these problems. Had the elites in charge of tax policy included people

who had personally experienced such problems or had their social net-

works included such people, these problems would likely have been

more salient and action guiding. Segregation of elites from the disad-

vantaged deprives them of the social capital (personal acquaintance with

others) and hence propositional knowledge they need to do their jobs

well.

Segregation also deprives multiply advantaged elites of the cultural

capital that circulates in disadvantaged social circles.

This makes them

less qualiﬁed to do their jobs, because, to serve the less advantaged

effectively, elites need facility with the language and styles of commu-

nication, body language, manners, and other subtle cultural habits of

the less advantaged. For example, to effectively diagnose and treat a

patient from an immigrant community, health care providers need not

only the capacity to communicate in the immigrant’s language but fa-

miliarity with the immigrant’s cultural norms. Such norms may lead the

patient to minimize complaints about symptoms, interpret symptoms in

radically different terms than physicians do, seem to defer to the doctor’s

recommendations in the clinic in obedience to immigrant community

norms while signaling a different attitude through body language, and

so forth. Health care providers’ lack of cultural knowledge of the im-

migrant community may lead them to misdiagnose and mistreat im-

migrant patients or to fail to effectively communicate medical needs to

15. Here I use the terms “social capital” and “cultural capital” in a normative sense,

to refer to what people need to perform competently in elite positions, according to

democratic standards. This contrasts with the sociological or descriptive sense of these

terms, used to refer to what people need to gain access to elite positions.

604 Ethics July 2007

them.

Similarly, middle-class educators who are geared to respond to

pushy middle-class parents and to design interventions in light of active

and articulate parental inputs are liable to let the learning problems of

less advantaged children “slip through the cracks” when the children’s

parents obey working-class norms of deference to the “experts.”

Communicative competence is a shared good of the communica-

tors. It is not a private possession that one party has and the other lacks.

If A and B are not communicating effectively due to cultural differences,

then both lack cultural capital with respect to each other. Segregation

of the advantaged from the disadvantaged reproduces this mutual lack

of cultural capital. When elites are overwhelmingly drawn from segre-

gated advantaged groups, they share their deﬁcits in cultural capital.

Stereotypes

Social group stereotypes were originally viewed by psychologists as ex-

pressions of preexisting group prejudice, bigotry, or antipathy. Today,

cognitive psychologists tend to view stereotypes as a generic mode of

representing all classes of objects, which may be detached from affects

and attitudes.

A stereotype is conceived as a schema for making in-

ferences about the nature of a particular object once it has been rec-

ognized as a member of a class with an associated schema. Stereotypes

are crude, typically unconsciously held heuristics that enable people to

economize on information processing and react quickly to situations

involving the object. Stereotypes “work” in the sense that those who

think in terms of one usually ﬁnd their purposes satisﬁed by relying on

it.

Stereotypes embody several cognitive biases. They distort people’s

reception of new evidence about their targets, making stereotype-con-

ﬁrming evidence highly salient, while leading them to overlook stereo-

type-disconﬁrming evidence. Hence, they are resistant to change in light

of contrary evidence. They tend to exaggerate the homogeneity of mem-

bers of a particular class and to exaggerate the differences between

16. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York: Farrar, Straus,

& Giroux, 1998), documents a tragic case of cross-cultural miscommunication between

American physicians and Hmong immigrants whose daughter suffered from epilepsy.

17. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 2003), 198–220, documents how the mismatch of middle-class

educators’ cultural capital to working-class parents’ cultural styles systematically disserves

the working-class students.

18. Linda Krieger, “The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to

Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunity,” Stanford Law Review 47 (1995):

1161–1248, brieﬂy surveys the history of social psychology’s theorization of stereotypes.

19. Susan Fiske, “Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination,” in Handbook of Social

Psychology, ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (New York: McGraw-

Hill, 1998), 357–411, reviews the numerous uses of stereotypes.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 605

members of different classes.

They also bias causal explanations of the

behavior of members of the class. When an object’s behavior conforms

to the stereotype, those who hold the stereotype tend to attribute the

behavior to the object’s internal characteristics. When the object’s be-

havior contradicts or fails to conform to the stereotype, those who hold

the stereotype tend to attribute the behavior to circumstances external

to the object.

Although the general theory of stereotypes represents them in cog-

nitive rather than affective terms, this reﬂects the high level of gener-

alization at which most cognitive psychologists operate, which abstracts

from the content of particular stereotypes. The content of stereotypes

of advantaged and disadvantaged social groups reﬂects historical pat-

terns of oppression and ideological rationalizations of inequality.Besides

attributing positive qualities to advantaged groups and negative qualities

to disadvantaged groups, such social group stereotypes often engage

multifarious forms of antipathy against disadvantaged groups, including

hatred, fear, disgust, contempt, distrust, resentment, estrangement, and

aversion.

These cognitions and their associated feelings perpetuate group

disadvantage in numerous ways. When the advantaged hold negative

stereotypes toward the disadvantaged, this tends to lead to avoidance

behavior and inchoate feelings of discomfort in the presence of the

disadvantaged. This reinforces the social segregation of the advantaged

from the disadvantaged and the cognitive deﬁcits such segregation en-

genders in both groups. Stereotypes also have direct effects, causing

discrimination against members of disadvantaged groups, especially

when they have or seek access to elite positions.

Since, in socially

stratiﬁed societies, the stereotype of an elite group member is one who

is multiply advantaged, members of disadvantaged groups seem not to

“ﬁt” the stereotype of an elite and are therefore less likely to be seriously

considered for elite positions.

In addition, to the extent that promo-

tions are conditioned on making friends with the boss, winning his trust,

and making him feel comfortable working at close quarters with him,

aversive stereotypes close off the disadvantaged from this avenue of

20. Fiske, “Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination,” 362.

21. Barbara Reskin, “The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination,” Contem-

porary Sociology 29 (2000): 319–29, succinctly reviews the literature on these themes; for a

more exhaustive survey, see Fiske, “Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination.”

22. Reskin, “The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination”; SamuelGaertner

and John Dovidio, “The Aversive Form of Racism,” in Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism,

ed. John Dovidio and Samuel Gaertner (New York: Academic Press, 1986), 61–89.

23. Reskin, The Realities of Afﬁrmative Action in Employment, 35–36.

606 Ethics July 2007

advancement.

The attribution biases associated with group stereotypes

also distort elite judgments of their subordinates’ performance. If a

white or Asian male computer scientist does a good programming job,

this is likely to be credited to his innate talent, whereas an equally good

performance on the part of a female or black computer scientist is more

likely to be credited to good luck or help from others. Such biases

reproduce the stereotype of the “good” computer programmer as white

or Asian and male, thereby engendering further race- and gender-based

discrimination.

Thus, stereotypes held by elites (decision makers) and by advan-

taged groups more generally perpetuate the disadvantages of subordi-

nate groups. The causes of this disadvantage lie in cognitive defects on

the part of an elite that is overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of those

who are multiply advantaged and segregated from the less advantaged.

Such an elite lacks the qualiﬁcations it needs to serve people from all

social groups fairly and competently.

REMEDIES FOR THE COGNITIVE DEFICITS OF ELITES

If major social problems are caused by cognitive deﬁcits on the part of

multiply advantaged, segregated elites, deﬁcits that deprive them of the

qualiﬁcations they need to do their jobs, we should expect the educa-

tional system to remedy these defects. Unfortunately, the primary model

we have for the kind of knowledge that education offers, which is sup-

posed to qualify elites for leadership positions, is not up to the task of

remedying the cognitive deﬁcits just identiﬁed. The educational system,

especially at its highest levels, takes the production and transmission of

conscious, articulate, impersonal propositional knowledge as its primary

function. Call this knowledge “academic.” This is the knowledge that is

explicitly taught in classrooms, tested in exams, and measured by course

grades and test scores. Possession of academic knowledge is taken to

be the touchstone of elite qualiﬁcation. However, the deﬁcits in elite

qualiﬁcation identiﬁed above do not fundamentally take this form. Nor

can additional academic knowledge remedy the problem. In terms of

the four qualiﬁcations needed by an elite in a democratic society—

awareness, responsiveness, technical knowledge, and competence in re-

spectful intergroup interaction—academic knowledge covers only tech-

nical knowledge and, to a lesser extent, awareness of the problems and

24. George Wilson, Ian Sakura-Lemessy, and Jonathan P. West, “Reaching the Top:

Racial Differences in Mobility Paths to Upper-Tier Occupations,” Work and Occupations 26

(1999): 165–86, show that, in white-dominated workplaces, whites have two paths of access

to managerial and executive positions—demonstration of formal qualiﬁcations such as

prior experience and demonstration of vague qualities such as loyalty through informal

association with the boss—whereas blacks usually have only the formal path to promotion

open to them.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 607

circumstances of people from different walks of life. The deﬁcits of an

elite, when it is drawn overwhelmingly from multiply advantaged and

segregated groups, primarily lie with other kinds of knowledge. Com-

petence in intergroup interaction is a form of cultural capital or know-

how, crucially dependent on savvy in building rapport across group

divisions. Awareness and responsiveness centrally involve facility in and

readiness to engage in ﬁrst- and second-person perspective taking: draw-

ing upon personal knowledge of life in disadvantageous positions and

imaginatively projecting oneself into another’s shoes, while holding one-

self accountable to how the other reacts to and makes claims on one’s

own conduct. To endow an elite with these other forms of knowledge

requires that the elite itself be fully socially integrated across all major

lines of social inequality and that the diverse prospective members of

the elite be educated together.

Three distinctions in knowledge are important here. First, knowl-

edge may be embedded in and derived from different points of view.

Academic knowledge represents the world from a detached, third-per-

son point of view. By contrast, a ﬁrst-person point of view represents

the world from the perspective of a particular agent, in terms of the

obstacles, opportunities, and experienced qualities of the world—what

it is like—for that agent, as the agent sees them. The ﬁrst-person point

of view is immediately experienced by the agent, but it may also be

communicated to others through testimony. For others to get access to

the ﬁrst-person point of view of another, they typically need personal

contact, communicative competence, and rapport with the other, or else

they need someone else with such social and cultural capital to mediate

between the other and oneself. The second-person point of view rep-

resents the perspective we take when we address claims to others and

evaluate the claims others make on us. Claims are demands for re-

sponsiveness to another’s interests and evaluations, conceived as drawing

their authority or normative force from the moral standing of the claim-

ant rather than from the impersonal value of states of affairs. They are

embodied in normative judgments that purport to offer authoritative

claims on others’ actions and feelings. Claims of justice are of this type,

as are, more generally, any claims whereby we claim authority to hold

others accountable for their actions and feelings, submit them to judg-

ment and blame, and so forth.

Second, knowledge may be propositional or personal—knowledge

of a proposition or of a person. Knowing a person involves more than

knowing true third-person propositions about that person. It involves

having rapport with that person, so that he or she reveals herself to the

25. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2006), provides the deﬁnitive treatment of this idea.

608 Ethics July 2007

knower, enabling the knower to empathize, or take up the other’s ﬁrst-

person perspective. More ambitiously, personal knowledge involves mu-

tual regard and reciprocal ﬁrst-person perspective taking. This is the

foundation for access to the second-person point of view, wherein we

recognize one another’s moral standing and authority to make claims

on each other and judge the validity of those claims understood as drawn

from our equal standing.

Third, knowledge may be more or less practically engaged, or dis-

posed to guide action. Practical engagement may occur in conscious

deliberation, unconscious habit, or both. For a representation to be

practically engaged in conscious deliberation requires that it (i) be sa-

lient, or come readily to mind, whenever it is normatively relevant to

resolving the practical question at stake in deliberation and (ii) arouse,

or be clothed in, some motivationally engaged feelings, such as delight

or disgust, alarm or appeal, guilt or outrage. The arousal condition is

needed to ensure that the consideration in question, once it comes to

mind, is not immediately dismissed but presses insistently on conscious-

ness as something that demands to be weighed in practical deliberation.

To be practically engaged in deliberation, representations need to have

some felt normative force behind them.

Matters are somewhat different for representations that are prac-

tically engaged in unconscious habit. Most of our activity is habitual. It

doesn’t surface to consciousness but rather works behind our backs,

more or less automatically, in ways that often defy our consciously held

normative judgments. This does not mean that habitual activity is non-

cognitive. We are not speaking of mere reﬂexes but of habits that are

guided by entrenched, automatic, unconscious representations. Notably,

stereotypes and attribution biases function in this way.

Such en-

trenched and practically engaged representations tend to shape action

more reliably than consciously engaged representations, because we

don’t have to stop and deliberate to make them causally efﬁcacious and

because they work even, and especially, when we face pressure to re-

spond quickly to a situation. Importantly, they often guide action con-

trary to our consciously endorsed evaluative judgments. They operate

behind our backs whenever we are not consciously deliberating and

even shape our deliberative habits—the considerations that are salient

or overlooked by us, the evaluative judgments we tend to make upon

the presentation of certain sorts of evidence.

I claim that possession of academic knowledge alone is not sufﬁcient

to qualify a segregated, multiply advantaged elite for positions of lead-

26. Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Implicit Social Cognition: At-

titudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes,” Psychological Review 102 (1995): 4–27; Fiske, “Ste-

reotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination,” 364–75.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 609

ership and responsibility in a democratic society. This is so for several

reasons. (a) The knowledge elites need for full awareness of the prob-

lems and interests of the disadvantaged is often ﬁrst-person. (b) The

knowledge they need for responsiveness to these problems and interests

is often ﬁrst- or second-person. (c) Adequate responsiveness requires

that knowledge be salient, emotionally engaged, and habitually en-

trenched, so that it does not require Herculean conscious effort to

mobilize. First- and second-person knowledge more often has these fea-

tures than third-person book learning. (d) Merely superﬁcial academic

knowledge and consciously avowed moral principles lack the practical

entrenchment necessary to override or block the inﬂuence of biased,

unconscious stereotypes. (e) Ready access to ﬁrst- and second-person

points of view requires communicative competence in the form of the

social and cultural capital needed to build personal knowledge of and

rapport with the disadvantaged. This requires social integration, for

which mere academic knowledge about the disadvantaged is no sub-

stitute.

Consider ﬁrst the awareness qualiﬁcation. For some types of policy

decisions that are consequential for the disadvantaged, academic knowl-

edge may be sufﬁcient. An exemplary case might be central banking

policies directed toward reducing unemployment. Arguably, one

needn’t get inside the heads of those affected by such policies to ﬁgure

out what to do or determine whether they work. Objective data may be

enough. But for other policies, understanding what to do, and especially

why policies are not working as expected and how they might be revised

to be more effective, involves taking up the personal perspective of those

affected and viewing matters from their point of view. I illustrated this

point above with the case of tax-sheltered dependent-care accounts. In

principle the same knowledge could be discovered by examining low-

wage workers’ necessary expenses in relation to their budget constraints.

However, this knowledge is much more readily accessible ﬁrst-personally.

What the low-wage worker knows immediately and ﬁrst-personally about

the value of dependent-care accounts for her could be deduced third-

personally (by outsiders without consulting her) only after painstaking

data gathering and calculation.

In other cases, especially when the knowledge needed concerns

27. One might also gain such knowledge by imaginatively projecting oneself into the

other’s situation and thinking about what one would do if one were in their shoes. However,

the ability of segregated elites to reliably gain knowledge in this way may be questioned.

When one faces real gaps in knowledge of others’ circumstances, it is all too easy to

substitute stereotypes about them, or else generalizations from one’s own experience, to

facilitate inferences about others. For an insightful discussion of the potential and pitfalls

of gaining knowledge about others through imaginative projection, see Maria Lugones,

“Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2 (1987): 3–19.

610 Ethics July 2007

individuals’ interpretations of and responses to what they see as the

meanings of different actions and events, there is no substitute for taking

up the ﬁrst-person point of view. Effective treatment of Hmong immi-

grants for epilepsy requires a grasp of their interpretation of this disease

as a somewhat lucky spiritual possession.

Effective contraceptive pol-

icies require an appreciation of how some groups of women have in-

ternalized norms that stigmatize them for having premarital sex, how

this makes them reluctant to view themselves as sexual agents, actively

choosing to have sex, and hence deters their use of forms of contra-

ception that require planning ahead or daily use.

Elites can gain access to this knowledge in two ways. They could

include people with the relevant ﬁrst-person experiences. Or they could

talk to those who have such experiences, taking their testimony as au-

thoritative about what it is like to be in their position. This second,

ethnographic route requires the investigator to cultivate communicative

competence across social divisions. This, in turn, requires the investi-

gator to acquire some of the social and cultural capital—social con-

nections to the disadvantaged and facility in their cultural norms—that

circulates among the disadvantaged. Either route requires some social

integration of elites with the disadvantaged.

Consider next the responsiveness qualiﬁcation. It’s not enough that

elites know relevant facts about the problems and circumstances of the

disadvantaged. These facts must be both salient and pressing in their

deliberations concerning matters that affect the disadvantaged. Formal

academic training may give segregated elites some knowledge of the

disadvantaged that was originally acquired by the ethnographic route.

They could take a sociology course on poverty, for example. However,

academic exposure does not generally lead to that knowledge being

practically engaged when elites need it for decision making. They may

be able to recall it when their own interests are at stake—for instance,

when they have to pass the exam in Sociology 101. But in the absence

of some powerful motivation to care about the disadvantaged, that same

knowledge is unlikely to be practically engaged when elites need it to

exercise their powers responsibly. It is all too easily forgotten or buried

once formal training has been completed. Even if it is recalled, what

will make it pressing? Under conditions of social segregation of multiply

advantaged elites from the disadvantaged, the latter have little recourse

but to rely on elites’ sense of charity and abstract conscientiousness

toward the disadvantaged to ensure that they give proper weight to what

they know about the disadvantaged.

Contrast this with the motivations available to elites who are socially

28. Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

29. Kristin Luker, Taking Chances (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 611

integrated across social divisions. In that condition, some elites will come

from the ranks of the disadvantaged themselves. Relevant ﬁrst-person

knowledge of disadvantage is likely to be more salient to such elites.

They also have access to an additional motivational path that could

endow this knowledge with motivational force—namely, identiﬁcation

with their disadvantaged group. While there is no guarantee that each

elite drawn from the ranks of the disadvantaged will be motivated to

help those of their group, the availability of the motivational path of

personal identiﬁcation in addition to charity makes this more likely.

More important, social integration dramatically improves elite access to

second-person claims made by or on behalf of the disadvantaged and

enhances their motivational force. There is nothing like face-to-face

interaction with people making claims on one’s own conduct to motivate

people to heed those claims, especially when the claim makers are in

a position to hold one accountable for neglecting those claims. Fellow

elites are in a far stronger position to do this than nonelites. They have

constant contact with fellow elites, must work with them in ofﬁcial con-

texts, are often in a position to judge them on their performance and

sanction them formally or informally for poor performance, and are

more likely to associate with them in private life as well. The bonds of

afﬁliation and trust forged in private life are likely to spill over to greater

conscientiousness in heeding their second-person claims in ofﬁcial con-

texts as well.

Constant personal contact across social divisions enhances the per-

sonal knowledge elites have of the disadvantaged, making knowledge

of their interests and circumstances more salient. Constant interaction

across divisional lines in contexts where cooperation is required en-

hances elite intergroup competence to learn about and heed relevant

ﬁrst- and second-person knowledge. Constant pressure to heed the sec-

ond-person claims of the disadvantaged helps entrench their perspec-

tives practically in elite decision making. In these ways, an elite that is

socially integrated across lines of disadvantage is more qualiﬁed to per-

form its functions than a socially insular elite drawn overwhelmingly

from the ranks of the multiply advantaged. If segregation makes an elite

ignorant and incompetent, then integration makes it more knowledge-

able and competent.

Social integration also reduces the problem of stereotypes and at-

tribution biases against the disadvantaged. All groups in socially stratiﬁed

societies, whether advantaged or disadvantaged, share similar cognitive

biases against the disadvantaged.

However, the disadvantaged, more

30. John Jost, “Outgroup Favoritism and the Theory of System Justiﬁcation,” in Cog-

nitive Social Psychology: The Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition,

ed. Gordon Moskowitz (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001), 89–102, provides a survey and

explanations of this phenomenon.

612 Ethics July 2007

often than the advantaged, live in conditions in which counteracting

ideas are practically engaged. In general, people tend to prefer members

of their own group to out-group members and are more sensitive to in-

group heterogeneity than outsiders are. In-group cooperation enhances

both of these effects.

The good news is that stereotype-reducing conditions can be se-

cured for elites through social integration. Groups do not have to be

deﬁned along sectional lines of ascriptive identity. They can be deﬁned

by formal commitment to cooperation toward an institutionally sup-

ported goal. When a cooperative group contains both advantaged and

disadvantaged members working together toward common goals, the

need to obtain individuating information about fellow cooperators helps

overcome out-group stereotypes. Cooperation with the disadvantaged

on terms of equality also tends to induce in-group favoritism toward all

cooperators, which helps overcome generalized antipathy toward the

disadvantaged. The experience of working together reduces prejudice

and intergroup antipathy.

It follows that socially integrated elites who are educated together

on terms of equality under conditions of institutionalized support for

intergroup cooperation are less prone than segregated elites to preju-

dicial cognitive biases. An integrated elite is therefore more qualiﬁed

to carry out its responsibilities than is a socially insular elite that is drawn

overwhelmingly from the ranks of the multiply advantaged.

The cognitive beneﬁts of social integration cannot be replicated

simply by inculcating academic knowledge. Explicit, formal instruction

concerning the falsehood of group stereotypes and the injustice of act-

ing on them has only modest effects on behavior. People who sincerely

express commitment to principles of equal treatment and who con-

sciously disavow negative stereotypes of the disadvantaged still discrim-

31. This is the famous “contact hypothesis” ﬁrst advanced by Gordon Allport, The

Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954). Importantly, not all intergroup

contact is equally good at reducing stereotypes and group antipathy. Formal, institutionally

supported contact aimed at promoting shared goals works better than informal contact.

See Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conﬂict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). It is also important that groups interact on terms

of equality, as peers, rather than in contexts where the advantaged occupy elite positions

and the disadvantaged occupy subordinate positions. Recent studies supporting Allport’s

hypothesis that integration on terms of cooperation and equality reduces group prejudice

and stereotypes include Cynthia Estlund, Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen

a Diverse Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Samuel Gaertner and

John Dovidio, Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model (Philadelphia:

Psychology Press, 2000). For a review of the literature, see John Dovidio, Samuel Gaertner,

and Kerry Kawakami, “Intergroup Contact: The Past, Present, and the Future,” Group

Processes and Intergroup Relations 6 (2001): 5–20.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 613

inate against the disadvantaged.

This is because stereotypes and an-

tipathy targeted at the disadvantaged are practically entrenched in habit

and operate unconsciously. Merely formal absorption of explicit beliefs

rarely penetrates deeply, unless people are put into circumstances where

they are forced to repeatedly put these beliefs into practice, so that

these counterstereotypical beliefs become entrenched in habit. The rel-

evant circumstances are ones in which people must cooperate with dis-

advantaged group members on terms of equality and are held account-

able both for successful cooperation with them and just conduct toward

them.

This requires personal interaction with the disadvantaged. We

change our habitual beliefs about and attitudes toward others through

personal knowledge of and cooperation with them—by way of ﬁrst- and

second-person knowledge—not by way of formal instruction.

If it is hard to appreciate these points, this is because the academic

model of the knowledge that counts toward elite qualiﬁcation has pro-

foundly distorted debates over the value of “diversity” in education.

Institutions of higher education in the United States today recognize

the educational value of diversity, but they have struggled to articulate

this value within the terms of the academic model. Opponents of afﬁr-

mative action, accepting this model, frame diversity-oriented admissions

as a compromise of standards of academic merit. They challenge pro-

ponents to show evidence that students’ grades and test scores improve

with diversity. Lacking much quantitative evidence of conventional ac-

ademic improvement, defenders of afﬁrmative action attempt to cast its

beneﬁts in more qualitative terms—for instance, in terms of the cog-

nitive beneﬁts of the greater diversity of observations that heterogeneous

students make in class participation. Against this point, opponents argue

that if diversity of opinion is valuable, then schools should select directly

for ideological diversity rather than using social identities as a proxy for

this.

The opponents’ reply is inapt insofar as what elites lack is not

ideological diversity but diversity in ﬁrst-person experiences that have

been shaped by membership in various disadvantaged groups and by

exposure to diverse second-person claims by the disadvantaged. The

proponents’ attempts to cast this argument merely in terms of ideas

that students will hear in class discussions also concedes far too much

to the academic model of education.

32. Gaertner and Dovidio, “The Aversive Form of Racism.”

33. For general discussion, see Reskin, “The Proximate Causes of Employment Dis-

crimination.” An important empirical study illustrating the importance to reducing prej-

udice of institutionally supported racial integration, valuation of intergroup competence

among elites, and accountability of elites for their conduct toward disadvantaged racial

groups is Charles Moskos and John Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial

Integration the Army Way (New York: Basic, 1997).

614 Ethics July 2007

Elite educational practice in higher education is wiser than its rhet-

oric. Most selective colleges in the United States are residential colleges,

for sound educational reasons. Living away from home, and with stu-

dents from diverse social groups, provides prospective elites with crucial

opportunities to reshape their identities in a more integrated, diverse

environment than what they experienced in their homes and neigh-

borhoods. For many elite students, especially for those who are multiply

advantaged, college is their ﬁrst opportunity for signiﬁcant contact on

terms of equality with members of other racial groups and class origins.

Much of the critical learning that elites need to undertake is grounded

in intergroup peer interactions out of class, not in formal in-class dis-

cussion or class assignments. For the educational value of diversity is

located not just in academic knowledge but in other ways of knowing—

personal knowledge of others in face-to-face interaction, direct con-

frontation with their ﬁrst- and second-person claims, and cultivation of

forms of social and cultural capital that circulate beyond the bounds of

the social circle within which one grew up and that enable competent

interaction across lines of social inequality. Pursuit of diversity and in-

tegration in higher education, then, does not compromise the qualiﬁ-

cations of elites but rather enhances their qualiﬁcations.

A SUFFICIENTARIAN STANDARD FOR FAIR EDUCATIONAL

OPPORTUNITY

I have argued that an elite qualiﬁed to serve a socially diverse society

must be socially integrated, incorporating that diversity within itself not

just in membership but in social interactions among its members. This

means that the members of the elite must be drawn from all signiﬁcant

social groups and be educated together. Working backward from the

requirements for a qualiﬁed elite, we can derive a standard of fair ed-

ucational opportunity to which all social groups should be entitled.

Access to elite status is largely governed by attainment of a four-year

college degree, reﬂecting success in a curriculum demanding enough

to prepare students for postgraduate (professional) education. Since

the elite must draw its membership from all social groups, members of

all social groups must have effective access to a primary and secondary

education sufﬁcient to qualify them for success at a four-year residential

college with such a curriculum. By “effective access” I mean access within

the realistic reach of students exercising substantial but not extraordi-

34. Douglas Massey, The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s

Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 198–201,

observes that this is particularly true for white students, who come from far more segregated

and homogeneous family, neighborhood, and school backgrounds (as measured by race,

class, parents’ marital status, and so forth) than their more diverse black and Latino peers.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 615

nary effort and within the ﬁnancial reach of their families. In practice,

I believe this entails that every student with the underlying potential

should be prepared by their primary and middle schools to be able to

successfully complete a college preparatory high school curriculum and

should have such a curriculum available to them in high school upon

successfully completing the requisite prior course work. This yields a

high but not unattainable sufﬁcientarian standard for fair educational

opportunity.

Sufﬁcientarian principles do not constrain inequalities in educa-

tional access above the sufﬁciency threshold. Parents who want to pro-

vide their children with more education than the minimal required to

enable them to complete successfully a serious four-year college degree

are free to do so, using their own private resources or by demanding

that their public schools provide more. The sufﬁcientarian standard

thus rejects “leveling down” educational opportunities to the lowest

common denominator in the name of equality. I believe such leveling

down ought to be rejected, because the development of human talents

is a great intrinsic good, a good to the person who has it, and a good

to others. More highly educated people are better able to serve others

in demanding jobs and volunteer service positions.

Against this claim, defenders of an egalitarian distributive principle

argue that it is unfair for the state to channel more educational resources

to some students than to others. It should treat all students equally.

However, the consequence of implementing an equality-of-resources cri-

terion of fair educational opportunity would be to level down oppor-

tunities to the tastes of the median voter. This would come at a signiﬁcant

cost to human development. In addition, the kind of equality that mat-

ters is not equality of resources. Equality refers fundamentally to an

ideal of social relations, in which people from all walks of life enjoy

equal dignity, interact with one another on terms of equality and respect,

and are not vulnerable to oppression by others.

This requires that

people with diverse identities share a common stock of cultural capital

whereby they can cooperate competently with one another and respond

to one another’s claims and that each have enough human capital to

function as an equal in civil society. It does not require that everyone

have equal education. Inevitably, some people will have more human

capital than others, if not because of differential external investment,

then through differential underlying potential and tastes for education.

If inequalities in human development due to different talents and am-

bitions do not undermine equal standing in civil society, then inequal-

ities due to differential public or private investment need not undermine

this standing either—provided the sufﬁciency standard is met.

35. Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287–337.

616 Ethics July 2007

Egalitarians object that my stress on the egalitarian civic value of

education neglects the value of education as a private good to the in-

dividual, which is positional.

The more education one has, the better

able one is to compete for coveted positions at selective colleges and,

in turn, for better-paying, more prestigious, and intrinsically rewarding

careers. Even if everyone is educated to a sufﬁciency standard, those

who beneﬁt from greater public or private investment in their human

development will outcompete the others for these coveted positions.

This is unfair to those who enjoyed less investment in their educations,

especially if the state is responsible for the unequal investment.

This objection assumes that the positional advantages attributed to

additional formal education accrue across lines of social inequality. That

is, it assumes that the prosperous can convert their greater resources

into a competitive advantage over the less well-off in access to higher

education by investing more in K–12 education. The qualiﬁcations re-

quired for a democratic elite put sharp constraints on the ability of the

better-off to gain competitive advantages in this way, however. Since an

elite overwhelmingly drawn from the already class-privileged is less qual-

iﬁed than an elite drawn from all socioeconomic classes, colleges that

are doing their jobs must sharply discount the positional advantages

that the prosperous can accrue by endowing their children with more

academic knowledge. The marginal value to a college admissions com-

mittee of additional academic qualiﬁcations among the better-off should

fall off steeply in head-to-head competition with sufﬁciently academically

prepared students from disadvantaged social backgrounds.

Other egalitarians have suggested limiting the positional advantages

that accrue to more education as well.

Reich and Koski dismiss their

suggestions for compromising meritocratic standards as utopian.

The

argument of the last section supplies a strictly meritocratic case for

limiting the positional advantages of formal education. Academic knowl-

edge is but one of the types of knowledge elites need to have. Acquiring

the other types of knowledge requires that elites be drawn from all

social groups and be educated together, in integrated settings that foster

intergroup communication and cooperation on terms of equality. Since

additional academic knowledge is no substitute for these other types of

knowledge, its marginal value as a qualiﬁcation for access to higher

education really does decline as more highly academically prepared

students are admitted, and schools seek students with other qualifying

36. Reich and Koski, “The State’s Obligation to Provide Education.”

37. Brighouse and Swift, “Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods,” 488–89, suggest

allocating desirable jobs by lottery or nepotism rather than by meritocratic criteria such

as educational achievement.

38. Reich and Koski, “The State’s Obligation to Provide Education.”

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 617

features. Once we admit social integration as a key to educating a qual-

iﬁed elite, we must acknowledge that certain qualiﬁcations for admission

to the elite are essentially distributed across group lines. Other quali-

ﬁcations that elites need can be developed only by a socially integrated

elite drawn from all sectors of society. This does not entirely eliminate

the positional advantages of more education. In particular, it will still

count in within-group competition. Nor should these positional advan-

tages be wholly eliminated. Academic qualiﬁcations are genuine. But

considerations of social integration sharply limit the positional advan-

tages that accrue to higher academic achievement in competitions be-

tween the multiply advantaged and the disadvantaged for access to elite

positions.

It might be objected that the case for integration justiﬁes only token

representation of the disadvantaged in higher education and so would

do little to counteract the positional advantages of differential educa-

tional investment at the K–12 level. My argument, however, is for very

substantial representation of disadvantaged groups in higher education.

Elite ignorance and neglect of the problems of the disadvantaged is

vast. Integration has little hope of correcting this deﬁcit unless multiply

advantaged elites have a high probability of encountering the disadvan-

taged as peers frequently, in substantial numbers. If they are present in

only token numbers, members of advantaged groups will have few op-

portunities for signiﬁcant interaction with them.

Tokenism also primes

group stereotypes rather than defusing them. People learn to pay at-

tention to the internal heterogeneity of out-groups only when they are

present in substantial enough numbers that their presence is not per-

ceived as unusual.

So far, I have derived the requirements for fair educational oppor-

tunity from an analysis of what opportunities must be effectively accessible

to individuals in order to constitute an elite that is qualiﬁed and disposed

to serve the interests of all classes in society. This satisﬁes the interest that

the disadvantaged have in how effectively the elite will serve it. Does it

also satisfy the interest the disadvantaged have in getting the chance to

serve in elite positions themselves? I believe so. The demand for a thor-

oughly integrated elite serves both interests at once. If everyone has ef-

fective access to an education that prepares them for a college that qual-

iﬁes its students for professional positions, and colleges follow admissions

39. William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of

Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1998), 234–36.

40. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Some Effects of Proportions on Group Life: Skewed Sex

Ratios and Responses to Token Women,” American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 965–90;

Reskin, “The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination,” 325.

618 Ethics July 2007

procedures that give substantial weight to the imperative of integration,

this amounts to giving the less advantaged a positional good that coun-

terbalances the positional advantages the prosperous obtain from invest-

ing more resources in their children’s academic preparation.

It might be thought that, even if the positional objection is met,

the disadvantaged still have a just complaint against arrangements that

channel more public resources to educating the children of the pros-

perous than to educating others. Shouldn’t the state invest equal re-

sources in everyone’s education? I think not, for three reasons.

First, equality of resources is not the right standard of equality. In

some cases we can and do invest more educational resources in the

disadvantaged. This is particularly evident for the education of the dis-

abled, who receive far more intensive investments than their peers.

Rather, the proper egalitarian aim is to ensure, to the extent feasible,

that everyone has sufﬁcient human capital to function as an equal in

civil society—to avoid oppression by others, to enjoy standing as an

equal, to participate in productive life, and so forth. This sometimes

requires more intensive investment in the disadvantaged than an equal-

ity of resources standard would allow. Even in cases of severe disability,

where the egalitarian standard cannot be met, there is a strong case for

doing what we can to improve disabled children’s basic functioning so

that they can participate meaningfully in community life.

Second, once the positional objection is met, the less advantaged

have no just complaint against groups that value education highly from

taxing themselves so as to invest more public funds in education than

the median voter would choose. Different groups have varying tastes

for public goods and should be free to tax themselves accordingly.

Moreover, once educational institutions are designed so that more

highly educated elites are genuinely responsive to everyone’s interests,

everyone beneﬁts from others’ education, and we all share an interest

in having some be educated more highly than the median voter would

be willing to fund.

Third, the objection presupposes a condition of class segregation

41. It does not follow from this that different communities within a state are entitled

to draw on vastly unequal tax bases to fund their unequal tastes for education. John Coons,

William Clune III, and Stephen Sugarman, Private Wealth and Public Education (Cambridge,

MA: Belknap, 1970), propose an “equal tax rates, equal spendable dollars” criterion of

equity in public school ﬁnance, according to which communities should be entitled to

draw funds from a common tax base in proportion to their willingness to tax themselves,

with equal tax rates yielding equal tax revenues. It isn’t clear how much more people

would be willing to tax themselves once they provided the revenues needed to secure for

all the high level of sufﬁciency proposed by my criterion. To the extent that they would,

I suggest that the Coons et al. standard offers a fair starting point for justly allocating

surplus tax revenues.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 619

in which municipalities differentiate themselves not simply by their pro-

vision of public goods in accordance with the tastes of their residents

but also by the class composition of their residents. I have argued that

social segregation is itself unjust, in that it creates an insular, clubby,

self-serving, negligent, and ignorant elite. We cannot rely on afﬁrmative

action in college admissions to correct the problems of pervasive class

and racial segregation. While afﬁrmative action is necessary, taken alone

it is too little, too late. The argument of this article entails much more

extensive policies designed to integrate education at all levels. For start-

ers, this could include a right of any child to cross municipal lines to

be admitted to any public school in which their group is underrepre-

sented, relative to the demographics of their state or their metropolitan

area, provided that their parents or guardians pay the school the same

tax rate that prevails in the community where the school is located. This

would not deter the poor from attending schools in wealthy commu-

nities, since the poor typically pay higher school tax rates than the rich

do.

Over the long term, comprehensive social integration of schools

by class and race requires dismantling the laws and practices that cur-

rently enable advantaged communities to segregate themselves from the

less advantaged. Class-exclusionary zoning laws that require minimum

lot and home sizes, prohibit multifamily units or rental units in home-

owner neighborhoods, and so forth should be prohibited. Housing dis-

crimination laws should be vigorously enforced by using testers and

imposing severe penalties for violations. Private developers should be

required to build mixed-class housing in all residential tracts. Such mea-

sures would profoundly alter current habits of segregation. While they

seem radical, extreme class segregation has been a fact of U.S. life only

since the spread of zoning laws in the 1920s and didn’t become the

rigid norm until well into the postwar suburban boom.

If prosperous

Americans less than a century ago grew up rubbing shoulders with less

advantaged neighbors, we can learn to do so again.

This article has focused on fair educational opportunity, not fair

educational outcomes. Yet we cannot be indifferent to actual educational

achievement. The egalitarian goal is to create a society in which all of

42. See, e.g., Jeffrey Cohan, “Shrinking Tax Bases Crippling Suburbs,” Pittsburgh Post-

Gazette, March 7, 2004, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04067/281673.stm, and “Local

Taxes Display an Uneven Bite: County Residents Who Are Black or Poor, Pay More,”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 8, 2004, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04068/282688.stm,

documenting how poor and black communities pay far higher local tax rates (sometimes

ten times as much), for far less revenue yield, than wealthy and white communities.

43. William Fischel, “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for Its Exclusionary

Effects,” Urban Studies 41 (2004): 19–26, traces extreme exclusionary zoning policies to

the 1970s.

620 Ethics July 2007

its members stand in relations of equality to one another in the major

institutions of civil society, especially at work and in civic activities. Equal

standing in relation to others entails a negative and a positive goal.

Negatively, it requires that each person have sufﬁcient internal capacities

and external resources to enjoy security against oppression—violence,

domination, material deprivation, social exclusion, stigmatization, and

the like. Positively, it requires that each person have enough to function

as an equal in society—to fulﬁll a respected role in the division of labor,

participate in democratic discussion, appear in public without shame,

and enjoy equal moral standing to make claims on others. These goals

set a minimum threshold of acceptable educational outcomes that varies

with the general level of attainment in society. In developed societies,

more than basic literacy and numeracy is required to hold one’s own

in interactions with others, whereas this would not be required in a

society where literacy is rare and few jobs require it. I suggest that in

the developed world attainment of a high school diploma or its equiv-

alent, representing real twelfth-grade-level achievement, is necessary for

equal standing. I venture also that this would be sufﬁcient for equal

standing provided elites with greater education were actually qualiﬁed

for their positions by democratic standards—which is to say, aware of

and responsive to the interests and claims of the less educated.

CONCLUSION

Recent work on justice in the distribution of educational opportunity

has proceeded on the assumption that just distributive principles in this

area can be determined independently of what we need the most highly

educated to do for the rest of us and what it would take to qualify them

for the roles we expect them to serve. On this assumption, advanced

education is conceived as just another private good, access to which is

determined by positional competition in the realm of cognitive devel-

opment. This model treats one person’s cognitive development as an

injury to others, because it puts others in an inferior position to compete

for higher education and the further private goods it helps people

secure.

44. I thus wish to dispel the “positional arms race” metaphor that pervades the lit-

erature on educational opportunity. In my view, this metaphor supposes that the content

of education remains ﬁxed on traditional academic goals, ignoring practical education in

intergroup cooperative competence and the other educational functions of integration.

I have been arguing that more education for elites does not necessarily widen inequalities

in functioning between elites and the rest. If elites are properly educated to be responsive

to others, more education for them will redound to the beneﬁt of the less advantaged.

This entails that elite education should be a humbling experience oriented to their ob-

ligations of service to others, rather than what it currently is, a celebration of theirsupposed

“giftedness” that only sharpens their heightened sense of entitlement to all things good.

Anderson Fair Opportunity in Education 621

I have argued elsewhere that such a conception of the value of

cognitive development reﬂects a political economy of envy, with its ac-

companying destructive and wasteful implications.

In this article I have

tried to recover for egalitarian thought two Rawlsian insights that are

critical for detaching egalitarianism from the politics of envy. First, in-

equalities in the distribution of a good are justiﬁed if they redound to

the beneﬁt of everyone. Second, we should conceive of the asymmetrical

distribution of human knowledge and talents as a public good and

arrange social institutions so that this distribution functions as a resource

that beneﬁts everyone. Rawls took the difference principle, which en-

capsulates the ﬁrst insight, to embody the conditions under which the

distribution of human talents does function as a public good.

He ar-

gued that, if we take these insights seriously and realize them in our

social arrangements, then we will avoid the politics of envy, because we

will see that “it is not in general to the advantage of the less fortunate

to propose policies that reduce the talents of others.”

I use Rawls’s insights to different ends than Rawls himself did,

because my concern lies with nonideal theory—that is, with constructing

workable criteria of justice in educational opportunity for our currently

unjust world, rather than for a well-ordered society. Hence, the asym-

metrical distribution of human knowledge and talents that is my focus

is based not on nature or genetics but on the epistemological conse-

quences of social inequality and segregation. They entail that certain

knowledge and skills essential to serving everyone, and especially the

disadvantaged, are held by the disadvantaged themselves or else can be

reliably generated only by comprehensive integration of the disadvan-

taged into all positions in society, including elite positions. The knowl-

edge and skills elites need to serve everyone are essentially distributed

across all social sectors, or best created in socially integrated cooperative

settings, and hence require that the elite be constituted from all social

sectors and educated so that members from all sectors learn to work

together on terms of equality.

This alternative conception of human knowledge as diverse and

socially distributed, rather than as arrayed on a single hierarchy of cog-

nitive development, undermines the presuppositions of the positional

competition model of education, which implicitly takes pervasive social

45. Elizabeth Anderson, “Rethinking Equality of Opportunity: Comment on Adam

Swift’s How Not to Be a Hypocrite,” Theory and Research in Education 2 (2004): 99–110.

46. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1999), 87 (“The difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the

distribution of natural talents as in some respects a common asset and to share in the

greater social and economic beneﬁts made possible by complimentarities in its

distribution”).

47. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 92.

622 Ethics July 2007

segregation for granted. To do justice to the alternative conception

requires a comprehensive commitment to the practice of integration.

I have argued that if we practice integration in our educational insti-

tutions to the extent required to produce a qualiﬁed elite, the resulting

distribution of educational opportunity will redound to the beneﬁt of

all and provide no grounds for complaint on the part of the disadvan-

taged, even if some receive more investments in their education than

others.

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