:<i>The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory</i>

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsMartin, Christopher. The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 272. $74.00 (cloth).Jennifer MortonJennifer MortonUniversity of Pennsylvania Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHigher education is in a moment of crisis. The promise of a college degree as a vehicle of upward mobility has met a reality that seems to reinforce rather than redistribute inequalities. The ballooning costs of colleges and universities leave too many students—mostly low-income and working-class students—saddled with massive debt and, in the worst cases, no degree. Activists calling for “free college” insist that higher education ought to be a universal right on a par with compulsory K–12 education. But this plea has been met with skepticism by higher education scholars, many of whom tend to see the issues saddling the sector as those of distribution, completion, and access (William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009], pt. 2). These scholars argue that free higher education mostly benefits those students who are already on the path to college—middle-class and upper middle-class students—rather than those who are the worst off—for example, students who will not complete high school. Despite the truth of this claim, I share Christopher Martin’s frustration with the way this kind of argument normatively flattens the value of higher education. Higher education offers many students an opportunity to cultivate new values, relationships, and talents that will reshape who they are. When we focus solely on distribution, we miss out on having a genuinely rich conversation about the value of higher education.Christopher Martin’s ambitious book rejects the narrow focus on distribution. Instead, aligning with activists who call for free college, he lays out a philosophically careful argument in support of higher education as a universal right. Martin is well aware that his argument runs counter to the received view among scholars of higher education who sharply distinguish between compulsory K–12 education, which is seen as a matter of right, and postsecondary education, which is seen as a matter of choice. Colleges and universities tend to view themselves as part of a market catering to families and young adults who are choosing to pursue higher education for individual, idiosyncratic goals. However, unlike other consumer markets, the benefits individuals reap from higher education build on and reinforce inequalities that take shape early in a person’s life, threatening equality of opportunity. For this reason, we see it as permissible for the government to fund higher education and to have some say in its distribution. These two interests—consumer sovereignty and distributive fairness—have dominated how we think about higher education, Martin argues. The problem, he claims, is that this way of thinking about higher education relies on a very narrow view of individual autonomy—the consumer making choices from which they will benefit, potentially unfairly. As I will suggest later on, there is another diagnosis we might offer—higher education is generally too focused on understanding its role through the lens of the educational goods it offers individuals, ignoring the many other kinds of goods it can offer communities.In chapter 2 Martin considers civic arguments for higher education that develop an alternative to the individual autonomy-based argument he favors. Civic arguments for state-provided education typically turn on two ideas. The first is that education is necessary to ensure the autonomy of future citizens. The second is that education is a public good insofar as educated citizens contribute to our society in a myriad of ways. What scholars call the convergence thesis posits that education can jointly satisfy these two aims. Consequently, the state can compel and should provide education for future citizens. The problem, Martin argues, is that in the case of adults, the convergence thesis falls apart. Adults should be free to choose whether to engage in higher education and what kind of education to pursue. To insist otherwise runs afoul of a central liberal commitment to respecting citizen’s autonomy.Chapters 3 and 4 lay out the central tenets of Martin’s autonomy-based argument for higher education as a right. Martin argues that “citizens have an individual and equal interest in access to post-secondary education” over the course of their life (70). Martin’s argument relies on two important claims. The first is a widely accepted tenet of liberalism—autonomy is essential to flourishing. The second is that education can promote autonomy over the course of a person’s life, not just in the childhood years. Education instills the internal conditions necessary for pursuing a conception of the good, but it also can create environments that support that pursuit over a lifetime. It is the second half of this claim that is central to Martin’s novel theory of higher education as a right.Compulsory K–12 education offers students many of the internal conditions critical to autonomy, but a high school diploma does not transform a student from a nonautonomous being into a fully autonomous one. Once we notice the oddity of thinking of autonomy as a capacity that doesn’t need sustaining over time, Martin argues, we can start to appreciate the limitations of our current way of thinking about the role of postsecondary educational institutions. Martin claims that the environment is critical to supporting the development of autonomy. Postsecondary education, he says, has a critical role to play in creating such an environment. It offers students not just paths to employment but also opportunities to develop their talents, gain knowledge, and encounter values that they might not have previously encountered. Thus, postsecondary education has a critical role in sustaining our autonomy.Note, however, that if we accept Martin’s autonomy-promoting argument, it’s not clear, as he himself acknowledges, that higher education as traditionally conceived is the only or even primary vehicle through which to support adult education. That is, universities and colleges will be but a part, potentially a very small one, of a postsecondary educational sector that supports diverse ways of life. Vocational schools, art schools, and nondegree programs targeting retirees should all play a role in an educational system that is autonomy maximizing. Under Martin’s view, the retiree who hopes to learn more about philosophy and the low-income student who wants to achieve socioeconomic mobility through education both have a claim to postsecondary education.Martin’s account of higher education offers a welcome departure from the labor-market-focused discussion of higher education to which we have become accustomed. He supports a postsecondary education sector guided by the goal of giving all citizens “access to social forms and practices … that run broader than labor market access” (116). This means that the state would exert control over the postsecondary sector to make sure that it not only focuses on responding to labor market incentives but also offers a variety of paths for adults of all ages to pursue. As Martin notes in chapter 5, postsecondary education is a basic right because of the critical role it plays in enabling citizens to pursue a wide variety of ways of life. He argues that this means that the state ought to have significant authority in shaping the opportunities it offers its citizens.This argument would seem to cut against the institutional independence that scholars have typically thought colleges and universities enjoy. Martin accepts this claim but also suggests that it is compatible with colleges and universities enjoying a great deal of authority over their internal affairs. However, according to Martin, the state can interfere to make sure that the sector is not catering exclusively to a too-narrow range of values. The vision of higher education as a right guaranteed by the state is attractive on several fronts, but it leads inevitably to the question we cannot seem to avoid when discussing higher education—who pays?In chapter 6, Martin argues that postsecondary education should be paid for by all of us and thus should be free. His argument is quite simple—financial barriers undermine autonomy. They distort the choices students make in pursuing higher education—whether to attend and what paths to pursue in college and beyond. Debt, in particular, undermines graduates’ capacity to pursue the lives they want. But what about the wealthy? Shouldn’t they at least pay for their education? Martin’s response here is indicative of the broader vision underlying the right to higher education. He argues that if we ask the rich to pay, we, in effect, give them a free pass from “being a full party to [the] liberal social vision” (183) that underlies the right to postsecondary education. The system of higher education we are considering would be a part of the basic structure of autonomy-supporting institutions that all of us can enjoy. This system generates moral obligations for all of us to be citizens that contribute to the common good. Martin suggests that if we allow some in our society to see education as a good for which they are paying, then this would let them “off the hook” from being a party to the moral reciprocity on which the system depends. Many will not find this argument satisfying, but it is consistent with the radical rethinking of the role of higher education proposed by this book.For Martin the right to higher education is akin to the right to health care. Even though some of us use health care more than others, we all (theoretically) have a right to access health care because of the way in which it supports our ability to lead good, flourishing lives. In health care systems like that of Canada, where Martin is based, everyone contributes to the health care system irrespective of need, and everyone is entitled to make use of it irrespective of their ability to pay. Many would balk at the idea that higher education should be seen in this way. It is, after all, not strictly necessary in the way that health care is. Everyone does eventually need to avail themselves of the doctor, but many people have led good, flourishing lives and never interacted with the system of higher education.However, one cannot deny that higher education is an institution that increasingly affects us all, even those who don’t choose to participate in it. The higher education sector plays an enormous role in the labor market; policy decisions; educating our bosses, lawyers, doctors, and politicians; and producing the knowledge on which our society runs. We might not all want to participate in it as students, but there is a strong claim to be made that we all ought to be invested in how it functions. Along these lines, as much as I admire Martin’s careful and compelling argument, I think that it is a mistake to rest the justification for a robust system of postsecondary education on individual autonomy. By doing so, we fail to understand that colleges, universities, vocational schools, community colleges, and the like are not just education institutions but ones that play important civic, cultural, and economic roles in the communities in which they are located.Consider, for example, the problem of educational deserts. In some rural communities, access to higher education is limited, as is access to a variety of well-paying, stable employment opportunities. This can push young people to seek educational and career opportunities elsewhere (Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018]). As I have argued in previous work (Jennifer Morton, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019]), this dynamic leads to potential costs to the ethical life of those communities. When young people see the incentives of moving far from home, those communities lose valuable members. For example, one might make it easier for young people in a rural community to access higher education by offering free tuition, travel, and admission to existing colleges and universities far from home. Some students might not take up those opportunities, preferring to stay close to home, but many will, and if all goes well, they’ll find that this path leads to the flourishing lives they envisioned elsewhere. The autonomy of the fortunate students is enabled by this intervention, but the conditions for flourishing in the community that they leave behind are not.Would increasing access to postsecondary education in this community enable those who stay there to lead more autonomous lives? One might argue that it would insofar as it would offer those people who want higher education access closer to home. The knowledge and skills that they will now have access to will open up different pursuits, thus increasing their autonomy. This might be a very small cohort, however, and the intervention—a new postsecondary institution—could be quite costly. What about those citizens whose autonomy would be more meaningfully increased by better working conditions or a more generous safety net? When we consider cost, it might seem to make more sense to make it less expensive for young people to leave home than to bring postsecondary education to their communities. However, if we broaden our thinking beyond the benefit to those individuals who are seeking education as a means to pursuing their interests and goals, we see that institutions of higher education can do more for the public good. It can also improve communities.In many cities, including my own, universities and colleges are among the largest employers and own vast swathes of property. These institutions play an outsized role in shaping the residential neighborhoods around them, including funding public schools and the arts, creating employment, and a myriad of other goods that affect the lives of community members in ways that go beyond the educational benefits they confer on students. When these institutions are private, they exercise this power with little government oversight. I agree with Martin that the civic argument in favor of higher education falls short when we narrow our thinking to the civic benefit that graduates will generate when we respect their autonomy. However, this doesn’t require that we give up on evaluating institutions of higher education using a civic lens: perhaps we should think of them not only as educational institutions but also as employers, landowners, and entities with immense political power. This isn’t true of all institutions of higher education, of course, but even a community college in a small town is positioned to further important civic goals. The fact that many are not able to do so because of a lack of financial support is a missed opportunity.The crisis in higher education is not only limited to access or cost; it also involves how we are perceived outside of our institutional walls. There is increasing skepticism of colleges and universities, the expertise we produce, and our social value. To regain our place as a vital institution, we need to reorient the postsecondary sector toward serving the public good more broadly, not just to serving our students and colleagues. Still, Martin’s carefully argued book is a welcome contribution to helping us reimagine the place of higher education in an increasingly unequal and fractured world. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 133, Number 2January 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722129 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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