OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet.
OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining
traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide
means of delivering educational content.
MIT's reasoning behind OCW was to "enhance human learning worldwide by the availability of a web of knowledge". MIT also stated that it would allow students (including, but not
limited to, its own) to become better prepared for classes so that they
may be more engaged during a class. Since then, a number of universities
have created OCW, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Principles
According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project:
is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
is available for use and adaptation under an open license, such as certain Creative Commons licenses.
does not typically provide certification or access to faculty.
Ten years after the US debut of OCW, in 2012 MIT and Harvard University announced the formation of edX, a massive open online course
(MOOC) platform to offer online university-level courses in a wide
range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. This new
initiative was based on MIT's "MITx" project, announced in 2011, and
extends the concepts of OCW by offering more structured formal courses
to online students, including in some cases the possibility of earning academic credit
or certificates based on supervised examinations. A major new feature
of the edX platform is the ability for students to interact with each
other and with teachers in online forums. In some cases, students will
help evaluate each other's work, and may even participate in some of the
teaching online.
In addition, edX is being used as an experimental research
platform to support and evaluate a variety of other new concepts in
online learning.
Problems
A problem is that the creation and maintenance of comprehensive OCW
requires substantial initial and ongoing investments of human labor.
Effective translation into other languages and cultural contexts
requires even more investment by knowledgeable personnel. This is one of
the reasons why English is still the dominant language, and fewer open
courseware options are available in other languages. The OCW platform SlideWiki addresses these issues through a crowdsourcing approach.
Africa
Eduflic - eduflic provides the platform and tools for everyone to access fully
accredited online courses and degrees from top universities and industry
leaders.
OER Africa
OER Africa has various OCW offerings available:
The Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) Mathematics to
assist teachers in their understanding upper primary and middle school
maths as well as teaching issues relating to mathematical content
The ACE School Leadership and Management aimed at empowering school leaders to lead and manage schools effectively
The Household Food Security Programme aims to train household food
security facilitators to work as change agents in the areas of
agriculture, food and nutrition, focusing on households within
communities
The Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) assists
university partners across East Africa to develop courses that can be
offered by participant universities through blended learning
The Agshare II project, a collaboration between three HEIs in
Ethiopia and Uganda on agricultural issues, lists a number of courseware
documents under the list of Resources, while Communication Skills
courseware developed by the University of Malawi is available at the IADP-SADC Digital Resources Project.
Americas
Colombia
Universidad Icesi, OpenCourseWare de la Universidad Icesi
OpenCourseWare, originally initiated by MIT and the Hewlett Foundation, came to China in September 2003, when MIT and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) joined together with Beijing Jiaotong University to organize an OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing. As a result of this conference, 12 universities
petitioned the government to institute a program of OpenCourseWare in
China. This group included some of the most prestigious universities in
China, as well as the Central Radio and Television University, which is China's central open university, with more than 2 million students.
As a result of this petition, the Chinese government instituted the CORE (China Open Resources for Education) to promote OpenCourseWare in Chinese Universities, with Fun-Den Wang (the head of IETF) as chairman. The CORE is an NGO supported by the Hewlett Foundation,
IETF and other foundations. According to CORE's website, it has nearly
100 Chinese universities as members, including the most prestigious
universities in China, such as Tsinghua University, Peking University and Shanghai Jiaotong University. This organization organized volunteers to translate foreign
OpenCourseWare, mainly MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese and to promote
the application of OpenCourseWare in Chinese universities. In February
2008, 347 courses had been translated into Chinese and 245 of them were
used by 200 professors in courses involving a total of 8,000 students.
It also tried to translate some Chinese courses into English, but the
number is not too much and some are only title translated. There have also been produced 148 comparative studies comparing MIT
curriculum with Chinese curriculum using the MIT OpenCourseWare
material. CORE's offices are hosted within the China Central Radio and Television
University, and they receive partial funding from the IETF and the
Hewlett Foundation. They also host annual conferences on open education, and the 2008
conference was co-located with the international OpenCourseWare
Consortium conference, which brought a large amount of foreign
participants. The website has been offline since 2013.
But before the OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing and the establishment of CORE, on April 8, 2003, the Ministry of Education had published a policy to launch the China Quality Course (精品课程) program. This program accepts applications for university lecturers that wish to put their courses online, and gives grants of between $10,000 – 15,000 CAD
per course that is put online, and made available free of charge to the
general public (ibid.). The most prestigious award is for the "national
level CQOCW", then there is "provincial level" and "school level". From
2003 to 2010, they produced 3862 courses at the national level by 746
universities. According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the
total number of the courses available online is more than 20,000. These typically include syllabus, course notes, overheads, assignments,
and in many cases audio or video of the entire lectures. The scale of this project has also spurred a large research activity,
and over 3,000 journal articles have been written in Chinese about the
topic of OpenCourseWare.
Cul-studies.com provides culture studies and teaching in China
under a Creative Commons license run by Contemporary Culture Studies
(CCCS) of the Shanghai University.
China Quality Course is a program launched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China since April 8, 2003. The website allows for ranking of courses. From 2003 to 2010, 3862 courses had been produced at the national level by 746 universities. According to the official website for the China Quality Course, the
total number of courses available online is more than 20,000. It lists no license or copyright on the website.
Malaysia
University of Malaya
(UM) is the foremost and premier Research University (RU) in Malaysia.
It is a multidisciplinary RU that has more than 27,000 students and 1700
academic staff with 17 faculties and research centres that covers the
whole spectrum of learning from the Arts, Sciences and Humanities. The
university's beginning at the Kuala Lumpur campus dates back to 1959 and
has graduated over 100,000 people, including leaders in various fields.
Pakistan
The Virtual University
(Urdu:ورچوئل یونیورسٹی; Vu), is a public university located in urban
area of Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. Its additional campus is also located
in residential area of Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan.
Established in 2002 by the Government of Pakistan to promote
distance education in modern information and communication sciences as
its primary objectives, the university is noted for its online lectures
and broadcasting rigorous programs regardless of their students'
physical locations. The university offers undergraduate and
post-graduate courses in business administration, economics, computer
science, and information technology. Due to its heavy reliance on
serving lectures through the internet, Pakistani students residing
overseas in several other countries of the region are also enrolled in
the university's programs.
Flexilearn is an open course portal. It was initiated by Indira Gandhi National Open University,
and apart from providing free course materials, allows students to
appear for the requisite exam conducted by the university and receive
certification.
All previously operational local chapters are now collectively offering courses under SWAYAM
(Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds). This is done
through a platform that facilitates hosting of all the courses, taught
in classrooms from Class 9 till post-graduation. All the courses are
interactive and free of cost to any learner. Nine national
co-coordinators are appointed, which also includes NPTEL, i.e., course
work by Indian engineering institutes headed by IIT Madras.
The courses hosted on SWAYAM are in four quadrants – video lecture,
specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded and/ or
printed, self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and an online
discussion forum.
Japan
OpenCourseWare was introduced and adopted in Japan.
In 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) and Tokyo Institute of Technology
(Tokyo Tech) studied the MIT OpenCourseWare, leading them to develop an
OCW pilot plan with 50 courses at Tokyo Institute of Technology in
September. Later, in July 2004, MIT gave a lecture about MIT OpenCourseWare at
Tokyo Tech that prompted the first meeting of the Japan OCW Alliance.
The meeting was held with four Japanese universities that had mainly
been recruited through the efforts of MIT professor Miyagawa, and his
personal contacts. In one case, the connection was the former president
of the University of Tokyo being an acquaintance of Charles Vest, the former president of MIT.
In 2006, the OCW International Conference was held at Kyoto University wherein the Japanese OCW Association was reorganized into the Japan OCW Consortium. At that time, Japan OCW Consortium had over 600 courses; currently they have 18 university members, including the United Nations University
(JOCW, n.d.). On Japanese university campuses there are few experts in
content production, which makes it difficult to get support locally, and
many of the universities have had to outsource their production of OCW.
In example, the University of Tokyo has had to mainly employ students
to create OCW.
The motivation for joining the OCW movement seems to be to create
positive change among Japanese universities, including modernizing
presentation style among lecturers, as well as sharing learning
material. Japanese researchers have been particularly interested in the technical
aspects of OCW, for example in creating semantic search engines. There
is currently a growing interest for Open Educational Resources (OER)
among Japanese universities, and more universities are expected to join
the consortium.
"In order to become an integral institution that contributes to
OER, the JOCW Consortium needs to forge solidarity among the member
universities and build a rational for OER on its own, different from
that of MIT, which would support the international deployment of
Japanese universities and also Japanese style e-Learning."
The "ocw.um.ac.ir (Persian: سامانه فیلم های آموزشی دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد)" is an online educational platform in Iran
which provides free online courses from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
in Iran. The motto of the ocw.um.ac.ir is "Making Accessible Excellent
High Quality Education For Every Iranian for Free". ocw.um.ac.ir partners with Iran's top professors of Ferdowsi University
of Mashhad and so on. There is more than 200 courses available on
ocw.um.ac.ir for free.
In the United Arab Emirates, a discussion, led by Dr. Linzi J. Kemp, American University of Sharjah, has begun about sharing teaching and learning materials (‘open course
ware’) through a community of educators and practitioners in the GCC.
There is growing availability of high quality and free open access
materials shared between universities e.g. MIT (USA). Resource sharing
also takes place on the ‘Open University (UK), OpenLearn’ platform. Kemp
(2013) proposes that teaching and learning will be enhanced when
teachers across institutions of higher education work together to bring
their shared knowledge into classrooms. Furthermore, when the platform
is opened up to include practitioners - e.g. employers - then the
relationship with the industry will further ensure that the teaching and
learning is available and beneficial for a wider community.
Equal opportunity is a state of fairness in which individuals are treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices, or preferences, except when particular distinctions can be explicitly justified. For example, the intent of equal employment opportunity is that the jobs in an organization should go to the people who are most qualified
– persons most likely to perform ably in a given task – and not go to
persons for reasons deemed arbitrary or irrelevant, such as
circumstances of birth, upbringing, having well-connected relatives or friends, religion, sex, ethnicity, race, caste, or involuntary personal attributes such as disability, age.
According to proponents of the concept, chances for advancement
should be open to everybody without regard for wealth, status, or
membership in a privileged group. The idea is to remove arbitrariness from the selection process and base it on some "pre-agreed basis of fairness, with the assessment process being related to the type of position" and emphasizing procedural and legal means. Individuals should succeed or fail based on their efforts and not
extraneous circumstances such as having well-connected parents. It is opposed to nepotism and plays a role in whether a social structure is seen as legitimate.
The concept is applicable in areas of public life in which benefits are earned and received such as employment and education, although it can apply to many other areas as well. Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy.
There are two major types of equality: formal equality, the individual merit-based comparison of opportunity, and substantive equality, which moves away from individual merit-based comparison towards group equality of outcomes.
Differing political viewpoints
Equal
opportunity for all: "We fight God when our Social System dooms the
brilliant clever child of a poor man to the same level as his father", British Admiral Jacky Fisher, Records (1919)
People with differing political viewpoints often view the concept differently. The meaning of equal opportunity is debated in fields such as political philosophy, sociology and psychology. It is being applied to increasingly wider areas beyond employment, including lending, housing, college admissions, voting rights, and elsewhere. In the classical sense, equality of opportunity is closely aligned with the concept of equality before the law and ideas of meritocracy.
Generally, the terms equality of opportunity and equal opportunity
are interchangeable, with occasional slight variations; the former has
more of a sense of being an abstract political concept while "equal
opportunity" is sometimes used as an adjective, usually in the context
of employment regulations, to identify an employer, a hiring approach,
or the law. Equal opportunity provisions have been written into
regulations and have been debated in courtrooms. It is sometimes conceived as a legal right against discrimination. It is an ideal which has become increasingly widespread in Western nations during the last several centuries and is intertwined with social mobility, most often with upward mobility and with rags to riches stories:
The
coming President of France is the grandson of a shoemaker. The actual
President is a peasant's son. His predecessor again humbly began life in
the shipping business. There is surely equality of opportunity under
the new order in the old nation.
Theory
Outline of the concept
In
a factory setting, equality of opportunity is often seen as a
procedural fairness along the lines of "if you assemble twice as many
lamps, you'll be paid double" and in this sense the concept is in
contrast to the concept of equality of outcome, which might require that all workers be paid similarly regardless of how many lamps they made.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the concept assumes that society is stratified with a diverse range of roles, some of which are more desirable than others. The benefit of equality of opportunity is to bring fairness to the selection process for coveted roles in corporations, associations, nonprofits, universities and elsewhere. According to one view, there is no "formal linking" between equality of
opportunity and political structure, in the sense that there can be
equality of opportunity in democracies, autocracies and in communist nations, although it is primarily associated with a competitive market economy and embedded within the legal frameworks of democratic societies. People with different political perspectives see equality of opportunity differently: liberals
disagree about which conditions are needed to ensure it and many
"old-style" conservatives see inequality and hierarchy in general as
beneficial out of a respect for tradition. It can apply to a specific hiring decision, or to all hiring decisions
by a specific company, or rules governing hiring decisions for an entire
nation. The scope of equal opportunity has expanded to cover more than
issues regarding the rights of minority groups, but covers practices
regarding "recruitment, hiring, training, layoffs, discharge, recall,
promotions, responsibility, wages, sick leave, vacation, overtime,
insurance, retirement, pensions, and various other benefits".
The concept has been applied to numerous aspects of public life, including accessibility of polling stations, care provided to HIV patients, whether men and women have equal opportunities to travel on a spaceship, bilingual education, skin color of models in Brazil, television time for political candidates, army promotions, admittance to universities and ethnicity in the United States. The term is interrelated with and often contrasted with other conceptions of equality such as equality of outcome and equality of autonomy.
Equal opportunity emphasizes the personal ambition and talent and
abilities of the individual, rather than his or her qualities based on
membership in a group, such as a social class or race or extended
family. Further, it is seen as unfair if external factors that are viewed as
being beyond the control of a person significantly influence what
happens to him or her. Equal opportunity then emphasizes a fair process whereas in contrast equality of outcome emphasizes an equal outcome. In sociological analysis, equal opportunity is seen as a factor correlating positively with social mobility, in the sense that it can benefit society overall by maximizing well-being.
Different types
There are different concepts lumped under equality of opportunity.
Formal equality of opportunity
describes equal opportunities based only on merit but these
opportunities should not depend on your identity such as gender or race.
Formal equality does not guarantee equal outcomes for groups or equal
representation of groups, but requires that deliberate discrimination be
only meritocratic. For instance, job interviews should only discriminate against
applicants based on job competence. Meritocratic universities should not
accept a less-capable applicant instead of a more-capable applicant who
cannot pay tuition. Formal equality can be called racial color blindness and gender blindness.
Substantive equality
describes equal outcomes for groups or equal representation of
identities such as gender or race. Substantive does not guarantee
equality of opportunity based only on merit. For instance, substantive
equality includes that jobs are distributed according to the race and
gender proportions of the whole population.
Equality before the law
describes where the law does not discriminate explicitly based on
protected identity such as gender or race. Equality before the law does
not imply Formal equality of opportunity or substantive equality. If
firing any pregnant employee is legal, it would meet Equality before the
law but would violate both Formal equality of opportunity and
substantive equality.
Formal equality of opportunity is often more difficult to measure. A political party that formally allows anyone to join, but meets in a
non-wheelchair-accessible building far from public transit,
substantively discriminates against both young and old members as they
are less likely to be able-bodied car-owners. However, if the party
raises membership dues in order to afford a better building, it
discourages poor members instead. A workplace in which it is difficult
for persons with special needs and disabilities to perform can
considered as a type of substantive inequality, although job
restructuring activities can be done to make it easier for disabled
persons to succeed. Grade-cutoff university admission is formally fair,
but if in practice it overwhelmingly picks women and graduates of
expensive user-fee schools, it is substantively unfair to men and the
poor. The unfairness has already taken place and the university can
choose to try to counterbalance it, but it likely can not
single-handedly make pre-university opportunities equal. Social mobility and the Great Gatsby curve are often used as an indicator of substantive equality of opportunity.
Both equality concepts say that it is unfair and inefficient if
extraneous factors rule people's lives. Both accept as fair inequality
based on relevant, meritocratic factors. They differ in the scope of the
methods used to promote them. The difference between the two equality
concepts is also referred to as Dilemma of Difference.
Formal equality of opportunity
Formal equality of opportunity is sometimes referred to as the nondiscrimination principle or described as the absence of direct discrimination, or described in the narrow sense as equality of access. It is characterized by:
Open call. Positions bringing superior advantages should be open to all applicants and job openings should be publicized in advance giving applicants a
"reasonable opportunity" to apply. Further, all applications should be
accepted.
Fair judging. Applications should be judged on their merits, with procedures designed to identify those best-qualified. The evaluation of the applicant should be in accord with the duties of
the position and for the job opening of choir director, for example, the
evaluation may judge applicants based on musical knowledge rather than
some arbitrary criterion such as hair color. Blind auditions and blind interviews have been shown to improve equal opportunity.
An application is chosen. The applicant judged as "most qualified"
is offered the position while others are not. There is agreement that
the result of the process is again unequal, in the sense that one person
has the position while another does not, but that this outcome is
deemed fair on procedural grounds.
The formal approach is limited to the public sphere as opposed to private areas such as the family, marriage, or religion. What is considered "fair" and "unfair" is spelled out in advance. An expression of this version appeared in The New York Times:
"There should be an equal opportunity for all. Each and every person
should have as great or as small an opportunity as the next one. There
should not be the unfair, unequal, superior opportunity of one
individual over another."
The formal conception focuses on procedural fairness during the competition: are the hurdles the same height? (photo: athletes Ulrike Urbansky and Michelle Carey in Osaka)
This sense was also expressed by economistsMilton and Rose Friedman in their 1980 book Free to Choose. The Friedmans explained that equality of opportunity was "not to be
interpreted literally" since some children are born blind while others
are born sighted, but that "its real meaning is ... a career open to the
talents". This means that there should be "no arbitrary obstacles" blocking a
person from realizing their ambitions: "Not birth, nationality, color,
religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine
the opportunities that are open to a person – only his abilities".
It is a relatively straightforward task for legislators to ban
blatant efforts to favor one group over another and encourage equality
of opportunity as a result. Japan banned gender-specific job descriptions in advertising as well as sexual discrimination in employment as well as other practices deemed unfair, although a subsequent report suggested that the law was having minimal
effect in securing Japanese women high positions in management. In the United States, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a private test preparation firm, Kaplan, for unfairly using credit histories to discriminate against African Americans in terms of hiring decisions. According to one analysis, it is possible to imagine a democracy which
meets the formal criteria (1 through 3), but which still favors wealthy
candidates who are selected in free and fair elections.
There is some overlap among these different conceptions with the term meritocracy which describes an administrative system which rewards such factors as individual intelligence, credentials, education, morality, knowledge or other criteria believed to confer merit. Equality of opportunity is often seen as a major aspect of a meritocracy. One view was that equality of opportunity was more focused on what
happens before the race begins while meritocracy is more focused on
fairness at the competition stage. The term meritocracy
can also be used in a negative sense to refer to a system in which an
elite hold themselves in power by controlling access to merit (via
access to education, experience, or bias in assessment or judgment).
Therein
lies the problem with the idea of equal opportunity for all. Some
people are simply better placed to take advantage of opportunity.
The Great Gatsby Curve
shows that countries with more equality of wealth also have more social
mobility, which indicates that equality of wealth and equality of
opportunity go together:
If
higher inequality makes intergenerational mobility more difficult, it
is likely because opportunities for economic advancement are more
unequally distributed among children.
Substantive equality of opportunity, sometimes called fair equality of opportunity, is a somewhat broader and more expansive concept than the more limiting formal equality of
opportunity and it deals with what is sometimes described as indirect
discrimination. It goes farther and is more controversial[4] than the formal variant; and has been described as "unstable", particularly if the society in question is unequal to begin with in terms of great disparity of wealth. The substantive equality embraced by Court of Justice of the European Union focuses on equality of outcomes for group characteristics and group outcomes.
Indirect discrimination rests upon
the cardinal assumption that a formally neutral measure is suspicious
when it has substantive disadvantages for a formally protected group.
Substantive equality has been identified as more of a left-leaning political position, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule. The substantive model is
advocated by people who see limitations in formal equality. In the
substantive approach, the starting point before the race begins is
unfair since people have had differing experiences before even
approaching the competition. The substantive approach examines the
applicants themselves before applying for a position and judges whether
they have equal abilities or talents; and if not, then it suggests that
authorities (usually the government) take steps to make applicants more
equal before they get to the point where they compete for a position and
fixing the before-the-starting-point issues has sometimes been
described as working towards "fair access to qualifications". The success of this approach is evaluated by equality of outcome for disadvantaged and marginalized people and groups.
According to John Hills, children of wealthy and well-connected parents
usually have a decisive advantage over other types of children and he
notes that "advantage and disadvantage reinforce themselves over the
life cycle, and often on to the next generation" so that successful
parents pass along their wealth and education to succeeding generations,
making it difficult for others to climb up a social ladder. However, so-called positive action efforts to bring an underprivileged
person up to speed before a competition begins are limited to the period
of time before the evaluation begins. At that point, the "final
selection for posts must be made according to the principle the best
person for the job", that is, a less qualified applicant should not be
chosen over a more qualified applicant. Regardless of the nuances, the overall idea is still to give children from less fortunate backgrounds more of a chance, or to achieve at the beginning what some theorists call equality of condition. Writer Ha-Joon Chang expressed this view:
We
can accept the outcome of a competitive process as fair only when the
participants have equality in basic capabilities; the fact that no one
is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair if some
contestants have only one leg.
In a sense, substantive equality of opportunity moves the "starting
point" further back in time. Sometimes it entails the use of affirmative action
policies to help all contenders become equal before they get to the
starting point, perhaps with greater training, or sometimes
redistributing resources via restitution or taxation
to make the contenders more equal. It holds that all who have a
"genuine opportunity to become qualified" be given a chance to do so and
it is sometimes based on a recognition that unfairness exists,
hindering social mobility, combined with a sense that the unfairness should not exist or should be lessened in some manner. One example postulated was that a warrior society could provide special
nutritional supplements to poor children, offer scholarships to
military academies and dispatch "warrior skills coaches" to every
village as a way to make opportunity substantively more fair. The idea is to give every ambitious and talented youth a chance to
compete for prize positions regardless of their circumstances of birth.
The substantive approach tends to have a broader definition of
extraneous circumstances which should be kept out of a hiring decision.
One editorial writer suggested that among the many types of extraneous
circumstances which should be kept out of hiring decisions was personal
beauty, sometimes termed "lookism":
Lookism
judges individuals by their physical allure rather than abilities or
merit. This naturally works to the advantage of people perceived to rank
higher in the looks department. They get preferential treatment at the
cost of others. Which fair, democratic system can justify this? If
anything, lookism is as insidious as any other form of bias based on
caste, creed, gender and race that society buys into. It goes against
the principle of equality of opportunity.
The substantive position was advocated by Bhikhu Parekh in 2000 in Rethinking Multiculturalism,
in which he wrote that "all citizens should enjoy equal opportunities
to acquire the capacities and skills needed to function in society and
to pursue their self-chosen goals equally effectively" and that
"equalising measures are justified on grounds of justice as well as
social integration and harmony".
Affirmative action programs usually fall under the substantive category. The idea is to help disadvantaged groups get back to a normal starting position after a long period of discrimination.
The programs involve government action, sometimes with resources being
transferred from an advantaged group to a disadvantaged one and these
programs have been justified on the grounds that imposing quotas counterbalances the past discrimination as well as being a "compelling state interest" in diversity in society. For example, there was a case in São Paulo in Brazil of a quota imposed on the São Paulo Fashion Week
to require that "at least 10 percent of the models to be black or
indigenous" as a coercive measure to counteract a "longstanding bias
towards white models". It does not have to be accomplished via government action: for example, in the 1980s in the United States, President Ronald Reagan dismantled parts of affirmative action, but one report in the Chicago Tribune suggested that companies remained committed to the principle of equal opportunity regardless of government requirements. In another instance, upper-middle-class students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test
in the United States performed better since they had had more "economic
and educational resources to prepare for these test than others". The test itself was seen as fair in a formal sense, but the overall result is seen as unfair in a substantive sense. In India, the Indian Institutes of Technology
found that to achieve substantive equality of opportunity the school
had to reserve 22.5 percent of seats for applicants from "historically
disadvantaged schedule castes and tribes". Elite universities in France began a special "entrance program" to help applicants from "impoverished suburbs".
Luck egalitarianism
Luck egalitarianism
views the unequal outcomes that are connected to bad luck of unchosen
circumstances as unjust, but just if when connected to circumstances
chosen by the individual and that weighing matters such as personal
responsibility was important. A somewhat different view was expressed by John Roemer, who used the term nondiscrimination principle
to mean that "all individuals who possess the attributes relevant for
the performance of the duties of the position in question be included in
the pool of eligible candidates, and that an individual's possible
occupancy of the position be judged only with respect to those relevant
attributes". Matt Cavanagh
argued that race and sex should not matter when getting a job, but that
the sense of equality of opportunity should not extend much further
than preventing straightforward discrimination.
Equality of fair opportunity
Philosopher John Rawls
offered this variant of substantive equality of opportunity and
explained that it happens when individuals with the same "native talent
and the same ambition" have the same prospects of success in
competitions. Gordon Marshall
offers a similar view with the words "positions are to be open to all
under conditions in which persons of similar abilities have equal access
to office". An example was given that if two persons X and Y have identical talent,
but X is from a poor family while Y is from a rich one, then equality
of fair opportunity is in effect when both X and Y have the same chance
of winning the job. It suggests the ideal society is "classless" without a social hierarchy
being passed from generation to generation, although parents can still
pass along advantages to their children by genetics and socialization skills. One view suggests that this approach might advocate "invasive interference in family life". Marshall posed this question:
Does
it demand that, however unequal their abilities, people should be
equally empowered to achieve their goals? This would imply that the
unmusical individual who wants to be a concert pianist should receive
more training than the child prodigy.
Economist Paul Krugman agrees mostly with the Rawlsian approach in that he would like to "create the society each of us would want if we didn't know in advance who we'd be". Krugman elaborated: "If you admit that life is unfair, and that there's
only so much you can do about that at the starting line, then you can
try to ameliorate the consequences of that unfairness".
Level playing field
The
match's outcome is deemed legitimate if there is a level playing field
and rules do not favor either player or team arbitrarily. (photo: Cesc Fàbregas duels with Anderson in a football match in 2008)
Some theorists have posed a level playing field conception of equality of opportunity,similar in many respects to the substantive principle (although it has
been used in different contexts to describe formal equality of
opportunity) and it is a core idea regarding the subject of distributive justice espoused by John Roemer and Ronald Dworkin and others. Like the substantive notion, the level playing field conception goes farther than the usual formal approach.[]
The idea is that initial "unchosen inequalities" – prior circumstances
over which an individual had no control, but which impact his or her
success in a given competition for a particular post – these unchosen
inequalities should be eliminated as much as possible, according to this
conception. According to Roemer, society should "do what it can to
level the playing field so that all those with relevant potential will
eventually be admissible to pools of candidates competing for
positions". Afterwards, when an individual competes for a specific post, he or she
might make specific choices which cause future inequalities – and these
inequalities are deemed acceptable because of the previous presumption
of fairness. This system helps undergird the legitimacy of a society's divvying up
of roles as a result in the sense that it makes certain achieved
inequalities "morally acceptable", according to persons who advocate
this approach. This conception has been contrasted to the substantive version among
some thinkers and it usually has ramifications for how society treats
young persons in such areas as education and socialization and health care, but this conception has been criticized as well. John Rawls postulated the difference principle
which argued that "inequalities are justified only if needed to improve
the lot of the worst off, for example by giving the talented an
incentive to create wealth".
Moral senses
There is general agreement that equality of opportunity is good for
society, although there are diverse views about how it is good since it
is a value judgement. It is generally viewed as a positive political ideal in the abstract sense. In nations where equality of opportunity is absent, it can negatively impact economic growth, according to some views and one report in Al Jazeera suggested that Egypt, Tunisia and other Middle Eastern nations were stagnating economically in part because of a dearth of equal opportunity.
Practical considerations
Difficulties with implementation
There is general agreement that programs to bring about certain types
of equality of opportunity can be difficult and that efforts to cause
one result often have unintended consequences or cause other problems.
A government policy that requires equal treatment can pose
problems for lawmakers. A requirement for the government to provide
equal health care services for all citizens can be prohibitively
expensive. If the government seeks equality of opportunity for citizens to get
health care by rationing services using a maximization model to try to
save money, new difficulties might emerge. For example, trying to ration
health care by maximizing the "quality-adjusted years of life" might
steer monies away from disabled persons even though they may be more
deserving, according to one analysis. In another instance, BBC News questioned whether it was wise to ask
female army recruits to undergo the same strenuous tests as their male
counterparts since many women were being injured as a result.
Age discrimination can present vexing challenges for policymakers trying to implement equal opportunity. According to several studies, attempts to be equally fair to both a
young and an old person are problematic because the older person has
presumably fewer years left to live and it may make more sense for a
society to invest greater resources in a younger person's health. Treating both persons equally while following the letter of the
equality of opportunity seems unfair from a different perspective.
Efforts to achieve equal opportunity along one dimension can exacerbate unfairness in other dimensions. For example, public bathrooms: If for the sake of fairness the physical
area of men's and women's bathrooms is equal, the overall result may be
unfair since men can use urinals, which require less physical space. In other words, a more fair arrangement may be to allot more physical space for women's restrooms. The sociologist Harvey Molotch
explained: "By creating men's and women's rooms of the same size,
society guarantees that individual women will be worse off than
individual men."
Another difficulty is that it is hard for a society to bring
substantive equality of opportunity to every type of position or
industry. If a nation focuses efforts on some industries or positions,
then people with other talents may be left out. For example, in an
example in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
a warrior society might provide equal opportunity for all kinds of
people to achieve military success through fair competition, but people
with non-military skills such as farming may be left out.
Lawmakers have run into problems trying to implement equality of opportunity. In 2010 in Britain,
a legal requirement "forcing public bodies to try to reduce
inequalities caused by class disadvantage" was scrapped after much
debate and replaced by a hope that organizations would try to focus more
on "fairness" than "equality" as fairness is generally seen as a much
unclear concept than equality,[83] but easier for politicians to manage if they are seeking to avoid fractious debate. In New York City, mayor Ed Koch
tried to find ways to maintain the "principle of equal treatment" while
arguing against more substantive and abrupt transfer payments called
minority set-asides.
Cultural diversity of lifestyles, value systems, traditions, and beliefs can explain differences in outcomes between subgroups.
Measures
Many economists measure the degree of equal opportunity with measures of economic mobility. For instance, Joseph Stiglitz
asserts that with five economic divisions and full equality of
opportunity, "20 percent of those in the bottom fifth would see their
children in the bottom fifth. Denmark almost achieves that – 25 percent
are stuck there. Britain, supposedly notorious for its class divisions,
does only a little worse (30 percent). That means they have a 70 percent
chance of moving up. The chances of moving up in America, though, are
markedly smaller (only 58 percent of children born to the bottom group
make it out), and when they do move up, they tend to move up only a
little". Similar analyses can be performed for each economic division
and overall. They all show how far from the ideal all industrialized
nations are and how correlated measures of equal opportunity are with income inequality and wealth inequality. Equal opportunity has ramifications beyond income; the American Human
Development Index, rooted in the capabilities approach pioneered by Amartya Sen, is used to measure opportunity across geographies in the U.S. using health, education, and standard of living outcomes.
There is little income mobility – the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth.
— Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2012
Difficulties with measurement
The consensus view is that trying to measure equality of opportunity is difficult whether examining a single hiring decision or looking at groups over time.
Single instance. It is possible to reexamine the procedures
governing a specific hiring decision, see if they were followed, and
re-evaluate the selection by asking questions such as "Was it fair? Were
fair procedures followed? Was the best applicant selected?". This is a
judgment call and biases may enter into the minds of decision-makers.
The determination of equality of opportunity in such an instance is
based on mathematical probability:
if equality of opportunity is in effect, then it is seen as fair if
each of two applicants has a 50 percent chance of winning the job, that
is, they both have equal chances to succeed (assuming of course that the
person making the probability assessment is unaware of all variables –
including valid ones such as talent or skill as well as arbitrary ones
such as race or gender). However, it is hard to measure whether each
applicant had a 50 percent chance based on the outcome.
Groups. When assessing the equal opportunity for a type of job or company or industry or nation, then statistical analysis is often done by looking at patterns and abnormalities, typically comparing subgroups with larger groups on a percentage basis.
Averaging opportunities over subgroups allows to determine if there are
statistically significant differences in outcomes between subgroups. For factors where blinded experiments
are feasible, the equality or lack of equality of opportunity due to
this factor can be determined up to statistical significance. While substantive equality
for group outcomes can be measured by comparing statistically
significant differences in subgroup outcomes, formal equality of
opportunities does not require equal outcomes between groups. If
equality of opportunity is violated, perhaps by discrimination
which affects a subgroup or population over time, it is possible to
make this determination using statistical analysis, but there are
numerous difficulties involved. Nevertheless, entities such as city governments and universities have hired full-time professionals with knowledge of statistics to
ensure compliance with equal opportunity regulations. For example, Colorado State University
requires the director of its Office of Equal Opportunity to maintain
extensive statistics on its employees by job category as well as minorities and gender. In Britain, Aberystwyth University
collects information including the "representation of women, men,
members of racial or ethnic minorities and people with disabilities
amongst applicants for posts, candidates interviewed, new appointments,
current staff, promotions and holders of discretionary awards" to comply
with equal opportunity laws.
It is difficult to prove unequal treatment although statistical
analysis can provide indications of problems, it is subject to conflicts
over interpretation and methodological issues. For example, a study in
2007 by the University of Washington examined its treatment of women. Researchers collected statistics about female participation in numerous aspects of university life, including percentages of women with full professorships (23 percent), enrollment in programs such as nursing (90 percent), engineering (18 percent). There is wide variation in how these statistics might be interpreted.
For example, the 23 percent figure for women with full professorships
could be compared to the total population of women (presumably 50
percent) perhaps using census data, or it might be compared to the percentage of women with full
professorships at competing universities. It might be used in an
analysis of how many women applied for the position of full professor
compared to how many women attained this position. Further, the 23
percent figure could be used as a benchmark or baseline figure as part
of an ongoing longitudinal analysis to be compared with future surveys
to track progress over time. In addition, the strength of the conclusions is subject to statistical issues such as sample size and bias. For reasons such as these, there is considerable difficulty with most forms of statistical interpretation.
A computerized statistical analysis suggested nepotism and practice of unequal opportunity within Italy's academic community. (photo: University of Bari)
Statistical analysis of equal opportunity has been done using
sophisticated examinations of computer databases. An analysis in 2011 by
University of Chicago researcher Stefano Allesina examined 61,000 names of Italian
professors by looking at the "frequency of last names", doing one
million random drawings and he suggested that Italian academia was
characterized by violations of equal opportunity practices as a result
of these investigations. The last names of Italian professors tended to be similar more often than predicted by random chance. The study suggested that newspaper accounts showing that "nine
relatives from three generations of a single-family (were) on the
economics faculty" at the University of Bari were not aberrations, but indicated a pattern of nepotism throughout Italian academia.
Substative equality is typically measured by the criteria of equality of outcome for groups, although with difficulty. In one example, an analysis of relative
equality of opportunity was done based on outcomes, such as a case to
see whether hiring decisions were fair regarding men versus women – the
analysis was done using statistics based on average salaries for
different groups. In another instance, a cross-sectional statistical analysis was conducted to see whether social class affected participation in the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War: a report in Time by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that soldiers came from a variety of social classes and that the principle of equal opportunity had worked, possibly because soldiers had been chosen by a lottery process for conscription.
In college admissions, equality of outcome can be measured directly by
comparing offers of admission given to different groups of applicants:
for example, there have been reports in newspapers of discrimination against Asian Americans regarding college admissions in the United States
which suggest that Asian American applicants need higher grades and
test scores to win admission to prestigious universities than other
ethnic groups.
Marketplace considerations
Equal opportunity of opportunity has been described as a fundamental basic notion in business and commerce and described by economistAdam Smith as a basic economic precept. There has been research suggesting that "competitive markets will tend
to drive out such discrimination" since employers or institutions which
hire based on arbitrary criteria will be weaker as a result and not
perform as well as firms that embrace equality of opportunity. Firms competing for overseas contracts have sometimes argued in the
press for equal chances during the bidding process, such as when
American oil corporations wanted equal shots at developing oil fields in
Sumatra; and firms, seeing how fairness is beneficial while competing for
contracts, can apply the lesson to other areas such as internal hiring
and promotion decisions. A report in USA Today
suggested that the goal of equal opportunity was "being achieved
throughout most of the business and government labor markets because
major employers pay based on potential and actual productivity".
Fair opportunity practices include measures taken by an
organization to ensure efficiency effectiveness and fairness in the
employment process. A basic definition of equality is the idea of equal
treatment and respect. In job advertisements and descriptions, the fact
that the employer is an equal opportunity employer is sometimes
indicated by the abbreviations EOE or MFDV, which stands for Minority,
Female, Disabled, Veteran. Analyst Ross Douthat in The New York Times suggested that equality of opportunity depends on a rising economy which brings new chances for upward mobility and he suggested that greater equality of opportunity is more easily achieved during "times of plenty".[107] Efforts to achieve equal opportunity can rise and recede, sometimes as a result of economic conditions or political choices.[108]
Empirical evidence from public health research also suggests that
equality of opportunity is linked to better health outcomes in the
United States and Europe.[109][110]
History
According to professor David Christian of Macquarie University, an underlying Big History
trend has been a shift from seeing people as resources to exploiting
towards a perspective of seeing people as individuals to empower.
According to Christian, in many ancient agrarian civilizations, roughly
nine of every ten persons was a peasant exploited by a ruling class. In
the past thousand years, there has been a gradual movement in the
direction of greater respect for equal opportunity as political
structures based on generational hierarchies and feudalism broke down during the late Middle Ages and new structures emerged during the Renaissance. Monarchies were replaced by democracies: kings were replaced by parliaments and congresses. Slavery was also abolished generally. The new entity of the nation state emerged with highly specialized parts, including corporations, laws, and new ideas about citizenship as well as values about individual rights found expression in constitutions, laws, and statutes.
In the United States, one legal analyst suggested that the real beginning of the modern sense of equal opportunity was in the Fourteenth Amendment which provided "equal protection under the law". The amendment did not mention equal opportunity directly, but it helped
undergird a series of later rulings which dealt with legal struggles,
particularly by African Americans
and later women, seeking greater political and economic power in the
growing republic. In 1933, a congressional "Unemployment Relief Act"
forbade discrimination "based on race, color, or creed". The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision furthered government initiatives to end discrimination.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925 which enabled a presidential committee on an equal opportunity, which was soon followed by President Lyndon B. Johnson's Executive Order 11246. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became the legal underpinning of equal opportunity in employment. Businesses and other organizations learned to comply with the rulings
by specifying fair hiring and promoting practices and posting these
policy notices on bulletin boards, employee handbooks, and manuals as
well ain s training sessions and films. Courts dealt with issues about equal opportunities, such as the 1989
Wards Cove decision, the Supreme Court ruled that statistical evidence
by itself was insufficient to prove racial discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
was established, sometimes reviewing charges of discrimination cases
which numbered in the tens of thousands annually during the 1990s. Some law practices specialized in employment law. The conflict between formal and substantive approaches manifested itself in backlashes, sometimes described as reverse discrimination, such as the Bakke case
when a white male applicant to medical school sued based on being
denied admission because of a quota system preferring minority
applicants. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibited discrimination against disabled persons, including cases of equal opportunity. In 2008, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prevents employers from using genetic information when hiring, firing, or promoting employees.
Equal opportunity issues are discussed at an army roundtable in Alabama.
Many countries have specific bodies tasked with looking at equality of
opportunity issues. In the United States, for example, it is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; in Britain, there is the Equality of Opportunity Committee as well as the Equality and Human Rights Commission; in Canada, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women has "equal opportunity as its precept"; and in China, the Equal Opportunities Commission handles matters regarding ethnic prejudice. In addition, there have been political movements pushing for equal
treatment, such as the Women's Equal Opportunity League which in the
early decades of the twentieth century, pushed for fair treatment by
employers in the United States. One of the group's members explained:
I
am not asking for sympathy but for an equal right with men to earn my
own living in the best way open and under the most favorable conditions
that I could choose for myself.
Global initiatives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 and Goal 10
are also aimed at ensuring equal opportunities for women at all levels
of decision making, and reducing inequalities of outcome.
Criticism
There is agreement that the concept of equal opportunity lacks a precise definition. While it generally describes "open and fair competition" with equal chances for achieving sought-after jobs or positions as well as an absence of discrimination, the concept is elusive with a "wide range of meanings". Formal equality is hard to measure, and implementation of substantive equality poses problems as well as disagreements about what to do.
There have been various criticisms directed at both the
substantive and formal approaches. One account suggests that
left-leaning thinkers who advocate equality of outcome fault even formal
equality of opportunity because it "legitimates inequalities of wealth
and income". John W. Gardner
suggested several views: (1) that inequalities will always exist
regardless of trying to erase them; (2) that bringing everyone "fairly
to the starting line" fails to deal with the "destructive
competitiveness that follows"; (3) that any equalities achieved will
entail future inequalities. Substantive equality of opportunity has led to concerns that efforts to
improve fairness "ultimately collapses into the different one of
equality of outcome or condition".
Economist Larry Summers
advocated an approach of focusing on equality of opportunity and not
equality of outcomes and that the way to strengthen equal opportunity
was to bolster public education. A contrasting report in The Economist
criticized efforts to contrast equality of opportunity and equality of
outcome as being opposite poles on a hypothetical ethical scale, such
that equality of opportunity should be the "highest ideal" while
equality of outcome was "evil". Rather, the report argued that any difference between the two types of
equality was illusory and that both terms were highly interconnected. According to this argument, wealthier people have greater opportunities
– wealth itself can be considered as "distilled opportunity" – and
children of wealthier parents have access to better schools, health
care, nutrition and so forth. Accordingly, people who endorse equality of opportunity may like the
idea of it in principle, yet at the same time, they would be unwilling
to take the extreme steps or "titanic interventions" necessary to
achieve real intergenerational equality. A slightly different view in The Guardian
suggested that equality of opportunity was merely a "buzzword" to
sidestep the thornier political question of income inequality.
There is speculation that since equality of opportunity is only one of
sometimes competing "justice norms", there is a risk that following
equality of opportunity too strictly might cause problems in other
areas. A hypothetical example was suggested: suppose wealthier people gave
excessive amounts of campaign contributions; suppose further that these
contributions resulted in better regulations, and then laws limiting
such contributions based on equal opportunity for all political
participants may have the unintended long term consequence of making
political decision-making lackluster and possibly hurting the groups
that it was trying to protect. Philosopher John Kekes makes a similar point in his book The Art of Politics
in which he suggests that there is a danger to elevating any one
particular political good – including equality of opportunity – without
balancing competing goods such as justice, property rights and others. Kekes advocated having a balanced perspective, including a continuing dialog between cautionary elements and reform elements. A similar view was expressed by Ronald Dworkin in The Economist:
It
strikes us as wrong – or not right – that some people starve while
others have private jets. We are uncomfortable when university
professors earn less, for example than junior lawyers. But equality
appears to pull against other important ideals such as liberty and
efficiency.
Economist Paul Krugman
sees equality of opportunity as a "non-Utopian compromise" which works
and is a "pretty decent arrangement" which varies from country to
country. However, there are differing views such as by Matt Cavanagh, who criticised equality of opportunity in his 2002 book Against Equality of Opportunity. Cavanagh favored a limited approach of opposing specific kinds of
discrimination as steps to help people get greater control over their
lives.
Conservative thinker Dinesh D'Souza
criticized equality of opportunity on the basis that "it is an ideal
that cannot and should not be realized through the actions of the
government" and added that "for the state to enforce equal opportunity
would be to contravene the true meaning of the Declaration and to subvert the principle of a free society".[129] D'Souza described how his parenting undermined equality of opportunity:
I
have a five-year-old daughter. Since she was born ... my wife and I
have gone to great lengths in the Great Yuppie Parenting Race. ... My
wife goes over her workbooks. I am teaching her chess. Why are we doing
these things? We are, of course, trying to develop her abilities so that
she can get the most out of life. The practical effect of our actions,
however, is that we are working to give our daughter an edge – that is, a
better chance to succeed than everybody else's children. Even though we
might be embarrassed to think of it this way, we are doing our utmost
to undermine equal opportunity. So are all the other parents who are
trying to get their children into the best schools
Equal
opportunity theorists generally agree that once the race begins, who
wins is a function of talent, hard work, and competitive drive. (photo:
runner Billy Mills crossing the finish line in the 1964 Olympics)
D'Souza argued that it was wrong for the government to try to bring
his daughter down, or to force him to raise other people's children, but a counterargument is that there is a benefit to everybody,
including D'Souza's daughter, to have a society with less anxiety about
downward mobility, less class resentment, and less possible violence.
An argument similar to D'Souza's was raised in Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick,
who wrote that the only way to achieve equality of opportunity was
"directly worsening the situations of those more favored with
opportunity, or by improving the situation of those less well-favored". Nozick gave an argument of two suitors competing to marry one "fair
lady": X was plain while Y was better looking and more intelligent. If Y
did not exist, then "fair lady" would have married X, but Y exists and
so she marries Y. Nozick asks: "Does suitor X have a legitimate
complaint against Y based on unfairness since Y did not earn his good
looks or intelligence?". Nozick suggests that there are no grounds for complaint. Nozick argued against equality of opportunity because it violates the rights of property since the equal opportunity maxim interferes with an owner's right to do what he or she pleases with a property.
Property rights were a major component of the philosophy of John Locke and are sometimes referred to as "Lockean rights". The sense of the argument is along these lines: equal opportunity rules
regarding, say, a hiring decision within a factory, made to bring about
greater fairness, violate a factory owner's rights to run the factory
as he or she sees best; it has been argued that a factory owner's right
to property encompasses all decision-making within the factory as being
part of those property rights. That some people's "natural assets" were
unearned is irrelevant to the equation according to Nozick and he argued
that people are nevertheless entitled to enjoy these assets and other
things freely given by others.
Friedrich Hayek
felt that luck was too much of a variable in economics, such that one
can not devise a system with any kind of fairness when many market
outcomes are unintended.[23]
By sheer chance or random circumstances, a person may become wealthy
just by being in the right place and time and Hayek argued that it is
impossible to devise a system to make opportunities equal without
knowing how such interactions may play out. Hayek saw not only equality of opportunity, but all of social justice as a "mirage".
Some conceptions of equality of opportunity, particularly the
substantive and level playing field variants, have been criticized on
the basis that they make assumptions to the effect that people have
similar genetic makeups. Other critics have suggested that social justice is more complex than mere equality of opportunity. Nozick made the point that what happens in society can not always be
reduced to competition for a coveted position and in 1974 wrote that
"life is not a race in which we all compete for a prize which someone
has established", that there is "no unified race" and there is not
someone person "judging swiftness".
