POLS 1101H: American Government (Mitchell): Equality of Opportunity

John Roemer points out that there are two views of equality of opportunity that are widely held in the late-20th century. The first, which he calls the nondiscrimination principle, states that in the competition for positions in society, individuals should be judged only on attributes relevant for the performance of the duties of the position in question. Attributes such as race or sex should not be taken into account. The second states that society should do what it can to level the playing field among persons who compete for positions, especially during their formative years, so that all those who have the relevant potential attributes can be considered.

The government documents included in this book are comprised of reports and testimonies from June 2018 to September 2018 on equal opportunity. The first analyzes the federal advertising obligations to small disadvantaged businesses and those owned by minorities and women. The second reviews how public high schools encourage equal athletic opportunities. The third report examines gender-related price differences, which occur when consumers are charged different prices for the same or similar goods and services because of factors related to gender. The fourth report discusses actions needed to ensure workforce diversity strategic goals are achieved.

Despite legal and social advances over the past two decades, sexual and gender minorities (or LGBTI people) continue to experience widespread discrimination and violence. A forthcoming report by the World Bank—Equality of Opportunity for Sexual and Gender Minorities (EQOSOGI)—examines the laws and regulations that affect the lives of LGBTI people in 16 countries, offering numerous policy recommendations designed to prevent and eliminate discriminatory practices.

The movement to broaden access to public universities, the dominant strategy during the 1970s and 1980s, has largely shifted to enable the marketplace, rather than the government, to shape the contours of higher education. Government funding is being reduced, affirmative action and other programs designed to insure broader access are in decline and personal fulfillment is replacing a public good designed to insure greater equality of opportunities. This book explores the impact of diminishing government resources and expanding market forces in developing and developed countries to either foster or lessen equality of opportunities in higher education for different racial, ethnic, religious and gender groupings. What are the consequences of a market-driven higher education for student access, teaching and scholarship? Through case studies, this book explores issues such as access of minority groups within the larger societies, the place of foreign students in a national system, and access for students with mental health difficulties, and evaluates the success of funding schemes designed to expand opportunities and access.

This volume contains both theoretical and applied on the concept of equality of opportunity which says that a society should guarantee its members equal access to advantage regardless of their circumstances, while holding them responsible for turning that access into actual advantage by the application of effort. Theoretical papers discuss to what extent some of the measures of inequality of opportunity meet the reward and the compensation principles, a new methodology for evaluating long-term income distributions, the implications of partial observability of individuals' circumstances on the measurement of inequality of opportunity and the advantages of applying segregation indices to study inequality in life chances. The applied work investigates how governments affect inequality of opportunity through the design of their tax and transfer schemes in 15 European countries, the changing role of circumstances for measuring inequality of opportunity in Chile, the existence of a poverty trap in Haiti and its consequences for equality of opportunity, and the correlation between circumstances and effort in the measurement of inequality of opportunity in U.S. during the period 1969-2007.