educational opportunity essay

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Equality of Educational Opportunity

It is widely accepted that educational opportunities for children ought to be equal. This thesis follows from two observations about education and children: first, that education significantly influences a person’s life chances in terms of labor market success, preparation for democratic citizenship, and general human flourishing; and second, that children’s life chances should not be fixed by certain morally arbitrary circumstances of their birth such as their social class, race, and gender. But the precise meaning of, and implications for, the ideal of equality of educational opportunity is the subject of substantial disagreement (see Jencks 1988). This entry provides a critical review of the nature and basis of those disagreements.

To frame the discussion we introduce three key factors that underscore the importance of treating equality of educational opportunity as an independent concern, apart from theories of equality of opportunity more generally. These factors are: the central place of education in modern societies and the myriad opportunities it affords; the scarcity of high-quality educational opportunities for many children; and the critical role of the state in providing educational opportunities. These factors differentiate education from many other social goods. We follow this with a brief history of how equality of educational opportunity has been interpreted in the United States since the 1950s and the evolving legal understandings of equality of opportunity. Our subsequent analysis has implications for issues that are at the center of current litigation in the United States. But our philosophical discussion is intended to have wider reach, attempting to clarify the most attractive competing conceptions of the concept.

1.1 The Value of Education

1.2 the scarcity of high-quality educational opportunity, 1.3 the state regulation of education, 2. a brief history of equality of educational opportunity in the united states, 3.1 what is educational opportunity, 3.2 formal equality of educational opportunity, 3.3 meritocratic equality of educational opportunity, 3.4 fair equality of educational opportunity, 3.5 debates about fair equality of educational opportunity, 3.6 equality of educational opportunity for flourishing, 3.7 equality of educational opportunity for the labor market, 3.8 equality of educational opportunity for citizenship, 3.9 equality and adequacy in the distribution of educational opportunities, 4.1 education and the family, 4.2 disability, 4.3 the target of equal educational opportunity: individuals or groups, 5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. equality of educational opportunity as an independent concern.

Education has both instrumental and intrinsic value for individuals and for societies as a whole. As the U.S. Supreme Court stated in its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education”. The instrumental goals of K–12 education for individuals include access to higher education and a constellation of private benefits that follow college education such as access to interesting jobs with more vacation time and better health care; greater personal and professional mobility, better decision-making skills (Institute for Higher Education Policy 1998) and more autonomy at work. Research further shows that education levels are correlated with health and wealth: the more education a person has, the healthier and wealthier she is likely to be. At the same time, education is also considered intrinsically valuable. Developing one’s skills and talents can be enjoyable or good in itself and a central component of a flourishing life, regardless of the consequences this has for wealth or health.

In addition to the instrumental and intrinsic value of education to an individual, education is also valuable for society. All societies benefit from productive and knowledgeable workers who can generate social surplus and respond to preferences. Furthermore, democratic societies need to create citizens who are capable of participating in the project of shared governance. The correlation between educational attainment and civic participation is strong and well-documented: educated citizens have more opportunities to obtain and exercise civic skills, are more interested in and informed about politics, and in turn, are more likely to vote (Verba, Schlozman, & Brady 1995: 432–437, 445; Dee 2004).

It is therefore relatively uncontroversial to say that education is a highly valuable good to both individuals and to society, especially to democratic societies. This makes questions about who has access to high-quality educational opportunities, and how educational opportunities should be distributed, particularly important.

Questions about the just distribution of educational opportunity are especially vexing given the scarcity of resources allocated to education. Although developed societies provide some education for free to their citizens, funding for education is always in competition with the need to provide citizens with other social goods. As Amy Gutmann writes: “The price of using education to maximize the life chances of children would be to forego these other social goods” (Gutmann 1999: 129). Other basic welfare needs (e.g., housing, healthcare, food), as well as cultural goods (e.g., museums, parks, concert halls), must be weighed against public funds allocated to education, thereby making high-quality education—even in highly productive societies—scarce to some degree.

This scarcity is evident on several fronts with respect to higher education in the United States, which attracts applicants from all over the world. There is fierce competition for admission to highly selective colleges and universities in the U.S. that admit fewer than 10% of applicants. In this arena, wealthier parents sometimes go to great lengths to bolster their children’s applications by paying for tutoring, extracurricular activities, and admissions coaching—activities that can put applicants without these resources at a significant disadvantage in the admissions process. The recent “varsity blues” scandal, in which wealthy families paid millions of dollars to a college coach who promised admission to elite U.S. universities, is an extreme case in point about the degree of competition attached to selective universities.

A more urgent demonstration of the scarcity of educational opportunity in the U.S. and many other societies is evident in how access to high-quality primary and secondary education is effectively limited to children whose families can afford housing in middle-class neighborhoods, or who have access to private schools via tuition or scholarships. Despite the Brown decision’s eradication of de jure , or state-sanctioned, segregation by race in schools, public schools in the U.S. remain sharply segregated by race and by class due to de facto residential segregation. This segregation has significant consequences for poor and minority students’ educational opportunity. Given the strong correlation between school segregation, racial achievement gaps, and overall school quality, poor and minority students are disproportionately educated in lower performing schools compared to their white and more advantaged peers (Reardon 2015 and Reardon, Weathers, Fahle, Jang, and Kalogrides 2022 in Other Internet Resources ). The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these systemic background inequalities, with prolonged school closures in the U.S. disproportionately impacting low-income children who rely on schools to provide an array of social welfare services, including meals (Levinson, Cevik, and Lipsitch 2020; Levinson, Geller, and Allen, 2021).

In view of the constellation of intrinsic and instrumental goods that flow from educational opportunity, and in the context of relative scarcity, questions about how educational resources should be distributed are especially pressing as a matter of social and economic justice.

A third consideration that underscores the importance of thinking about the distribution of educational opportunities is that in most developed societies, the vast majority of such opportunities are provided through and regulated by the state. All developed societies have a legal requirement that children attend school for a certain number of years. This means that, unlike other policy levers, education is typically under the control of state institutions and has the potential to reach the vast majority of the nation’s children across racial, religious, class, and gender-based divides. And given the myriad benefits that flow from education, it is arguably a state’s most powerful mechanism for influencing the lives of its members. This makes education perhaps the most important function of government.

Since education is an integral function of government, and because it is an opportunity that government largely provides, there are special constraints on its distribution. Justice, if it requires nothing else, requires that governments treat their citizens with equal concern and respect. The state, for example, cannot justly provide unequal benefits to children on the basis of factors such as their race or gender. Indeed, such discrimination, even when it arises from indirect state measures such as the funding of schools from property taxes, can be especially pernicious to and is not lost on children. When poor and minority children see, for example, that their more advantaged peers attend better resourced public schools—a conclusion that can be drawn in many cases simply by comparing how school facilities look—they may internalize the view that the state cares less about cultivating their interests and skills. Children in this position suffer the dignitary injury of feeling that they are not equal to their peers in the state’s eyes (Kozol 1991, 2005). This harm is especially damaging to one’s self-respect because it is the development of one’s talents that is at stake; whether or not one has opportunities to gain the skills and confidence to pursue their conception of the good is central to what Rawls calls “the social basis of self-respect” (Rawls 1999: sections 65 and 67; Satz 2007: 639).

Given the importance of education to individuals and to society, it is clear that education cannot be distributed by the market: it needs to be available to all children, even children whose parents would be too poor or too indifferent to pay for it. Furthermore, if education is to play a role in equipping young people to participate in the labor market, to participate in democratic governance, and more generally to lead flourishing lives, then its content cannot be arbitrary but rather must be tailored to meet these desired outcomes. We address considerations of education’s content in subsequent sections, turning first to how equality of opportunity has been interpreted in the U.S., where we can see some of the implications of a truncated understanding of equality of opportunity in stark form.

The United States Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, in finding racially segregated public schools unconstitutional, declared that the opportunity for an education, when provided for by the state, is a “right which must be available to all on equal terms”. But de facto racial segregation persists in the U.S. and is coupled today with ever-growing class-based segregation (Reardon & Bischoff 2011). Black students are far more likely to attend high-poverty schools than their white peers (see school poverty, in the National Equity Atlas, Other Internet Resources ). The resulting, compounded educational disadvantages that poor, minority children face in the U.S. are significant. As research continues to document, the racial/ethnic achievement gap is persistent and large in the U.S. and has lasting labor market effects, whereby the achievement gap has been found to explain a significant part of racial/ethnic income disparities (Reardon, Robinson-Cimpian, & Weathers 2015; Reardon 2021 in Other Internet Resources).

Efforts to combat de facto segregation have been limited by U.S. jurisprudence since the Brown decision. Although the Supreme Court previously allowed plans to integrate schools within a particular school district (see Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education , 1970), in Milliken v. Bradley (1974) the Court struck down an inter-district busing plan that moved students across district lines to desegregate the Detroit city and surrounding suburban schools. This limitation on legal remedies for de facto segregation has significantly hampered integration efforts given that most school districts in the U.S. are not racially diverse. More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court further curtailed integration efforts within the small number of districts that are racially diverse. In its Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District decision (2006), the Court prohibited districts from explicitly using individual students’ race as a factor in school assignment plans, thereby condoning only race-neutral integration plans in what many regarded as the Court’s final retreat from redressing de facto segregation (e.g., Rebell 2009; Ryan 2007).

The persistence of race and class-based segregation in the U.S. and the educational disadvantages that follow are rooted in the U.S. system of geographically defined school districts, whereby schools are largely funded by local property taxes that differ substantially between communities based on property values. This patchwork system compounds the educational disadvantages that follow from residential segregation. The 50 states in the United States differ dramatically in the level of per pupil educational funding that they provide; indeed some of these interstate disparities are greater than the intra-state inequalities that have received greater attention (Liu 2006). The system for funding schools and the residential segregation it exacerbates—itself the product of decades of laws and conscious policies to keep the races separate—has produced and continues to yield funding inequalities that disproportionately affect poor Americans of color. The segregation of resources, with greater resources flowing to children from families in the upper quintiles of society, makes it highly unlikely that children from the lower quintiles can have an equal chance of achieving success. This is evident in research documenting the growing achievement gap between high and low-income students, which is now 30–40% greater among children born in 2001 than those born twenty-five years before (Reardon 2011: 91; Reardon 2021 in Other Internet Resources).

Given the judicial retreat from remedying de facto segregation, many advocates have shifted their attention to the school finance system. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in this arena was an initial setback to efforts to advance educational equality via federal school finance litigation. In this case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court found that there is no federal right to education, and that funding inequalities among school districts due to variations in property tax revenue are not unconstitutional. This decision further entrenched the educational inequalities that follow from the geographic happenstance of a child’s home. In contrast to the U.S., many other countries do not finance their schools through local property taxes (e.g., Finland funds its schools at the national level based on the number of students they educate, and it provides more funding to schools that educate more students who are immigrants or whose parents are unemployed or uneducated; Sahlberg 2011). Many other societies distribute educational resources in a more centralized way than does the United States, which leaves educational funding, and even educational standards, to a large extent in local hands (for a recent volume on the idea of a federal right to education in the U.S., see Robinson 2019).

The U.S. Supreme Court did, however, leave an opening for state courts to act, and so legal advocates have adopted a state-by-state approach in the decades since Rodriguez . As this litigation has unfolded in almost every U.S. state, a policy debate with philosophical underpinnings has emerged around the question: Should educational resources be distributed on an equal basis (an equity model), or according to a sufficiency threshold (adequacy model)? State constitutions differ as to the basis they suggest for the state’s interest in funding education.

In the legal and political sphere, the adequacy approach has been more successful in school finance litigation at the state level. But the philosophical elaboration of equity and adequacy as competing ideals is somewhat distinct from how they are used in legal battles and political discourse. As we describe below, some theorists challenge the cogency of the sharp distinction often made between these two ways of justifying the distribution of educational resources.

3. The Meaning of and Debates about Equality of Educational Opportunity

Debates about the meaning and value of equality of educational opportunity—and about whether equal educational opportunity requires equality or adequacy—can be considered in the light of two questions.

The first question is that given the diverse goals of education—preparing individuals for the job market, for democratic citizenship, and to experience the intrinsic goods of education—is there only one justified rubric for distributing educational resources? For instance, distributional policies that support career preparation may be very different from those that support other goals like preparation for democratic citizenship. Since the labor market is a highly competitive sphere, education for labor market success appears to be a positional good, understood as a good whose value depends on one’s relative standing (i.e., the quality of my education for labor market success depends to a great extent on how good your education in this realm is since we will be vying for jobs). In a highly competitive job market with high stakes, distributing educational resources equally becomes especially important.

Conversely, education for human flourishing can be seen as a non-positional good because an individual’s attainment of the intrinsic goods of education (e.g., to enjoy literature, to be intellectually curious) is not compromised by others’ success in this realm; it is not a competitive field. In fact, one’s ability to enjoy the arts might be increased by others’ ability to do so too. An adequacy threshold for distributing educational opportunities directed at human flourishing may therefore be justified. As our educational goals vary, so too might the distributive principles for educational resources need to change.

The second question we must consider is about the best interpretation of the ideal of equality of educational opportunity. Is equality of opportunity achieved when everyone with similar talent gets the same results? When per pupil expenditures are equalized? When those with the same natural talent potential get the same opportunities?

Answers to these two fundamental questions enable philosophers to construct a conception of equality of educational opportunity. Of course, philosophical controversies remain even supposing the content of the conception can be settled. Some of these controversies concern clashes with other values, including that of the family and diversity: What limits do parental rights put on the pursuit of equality of educational opportunity? Is affirmative action required by or contrary to equality of educational opportunity? Other issues arise when we try to interpret what equality of educational opportunity means for those with disabilities, or when we attempt to define “merit” and “native talent potential”.

The following sections of this entry will describe the key maneuvers in different ways of answering these two questions: first, what the ideal can mean and what distributive principles realize it; and second, how to navigate tensions between this ideal and other values. The first section below introduces debates about the various definitions of equality of educational opportunity and its associated distributive principles. Some of the material covered in this section comes from the literature on equality of opportunity more generally, which we apply to educational aspects of these debates (for a recent article in this spirit written for the education policy and research community, see Levinson, Geron, and Brighouse, 2022). The subsequent section surveys debates about how to negotiate the challenges faced by those looking to realize the ideal of equality of educational opportunity, including whether equality of educational opportunity can be reconciled with respecting the private sphere of the family.

Before we can say what an equal educational opportunity is, we need to say what an opportunity is in general. Peter Westen (1985) provides a helpful definition of an opportunity that can be applied to the education sphere. For Westen, an opportunity is a relationship between an agent or a set of agents, and a desired goal, mediated by certain obstacles, none of which are insurmountable. For instance, Alice has an opportunity to become educated mediated by obstacles such as enrolling at a school, putting in hard work, and the quality of her teachers.

To employ this concept in the context of education, we need to answer questions about who the proper agents are, what the appropriate goal or goals are, and what, if any, obstacles are legitimate. For example, if we take admission at a highly selective college as our goal, and the citizens of some country as our agents, we might think that meeting a certain academic requirement, such as passing an entrance exam, is a relevant obstacle that should be permitted to stand in the way of the goal. In this context, we will also think that an applicant’s race, sex or religious affiliation should not be obstacles. When the appropriate group faces only the relevant obstacles with respect to the appropriate goal we can say that equality of opportunity obtains between the members of that group.

For instance, Alice and Belle have equal opportunity to attend a selective university if, all other things being equal, the only obstacle they face is passing an entry test, which is a relevant obstacle. They do not have equal opportunity if Alice also faces an irrelevant obstacle, such as race-based discrimination, that Belle does not face.

Educational opportunities are those opportunities that aim to enable individuals to acquire knowledge and certain skills, and to cultivate certain capacities. As noted above, we may value educational opportunity in some instances for the intrinsic value of acquiring knowledge, while in other cases we may care more about its instrumental effects on individual welfare (e.g., labor market success). Whatever our rationale for caring about educational opportunity, in order for an individual to be said to have this opportunity, she must have no insurmountable, irrelevant obstacles to the particular educational goal we have in mind.

Most commonly we associate the goals that constitute educational opportunities with access to educational institutions such as schools and universities, but apprenticeships and professional development and training also provide educational opportunities. In addition, there are many informal types of educational opportunity. These include public debates and lectures as well as time spent reading, practicing, or thinking outside of a school context.

Most contributors to debates about equality of educational opportunity focus on opportunities that are made available through public K–12 and higher education institutions. The reasons for this are similar to our reasons for being concerned with educational opportunity in the first place. Those institutional opportunities are more easily regulated and under the state’s control, they educate the vast majority of children in the developed world, and they have a profound effect on the quality of our lives. As a result, most of the literature primarily concerns K–12 educational institutions and colleges. Nevertheless, a crucial question concerns the extent to which the state should try to address inequalities in educational opportunities that are generated through the family. For example, we know that parents who read to their children give their children an educational advantage (Hutton et al. 2015). Should the state seek to correct for the disadvantages of those children whose parents could not (or would not) read to them? More generally, parents pass on not only genetic traits to their children, but also characteristics that differentially prepare children for success at school, and even at jobs. Again, how should the state respond to these and other factors that influence children’s likelihood of success at school? Are these appropriate obstacles for children to face or not?

The next sections survey different interpretations of equal educational opportunity in view of these questions.

Formal equality of opportunity is the view that formal rules that make reference to personal or ascriptive characteristics should not be obstacles to achieving certain goals. Such characteristics include race, socio-economic class, gender, religion, and sexuality. It is essentially a concept of equality before the law. It is often understood as an anti-discrimination principle (See the entry on equality of opportunity for more discussion).

As applied to educational opportunity, formal equality of opportunity requires the removal of formal obstacles, in the form of laws or entrance criteria for educational institutions, which refer to ascriptive characteristics. For instance, formal equality of opportunity is opposed to legally segregated schools whose admissions policy states that students be white, male or belong to a certain religion. This conception is likewise opposed to laws that endorse or require segregation in schools. The Brown decision is certainly consistent with at least formal equality of opportunity. At the same time, it is worth noting that formal equality of opportunity is at odds with the tolerant attitude many societies take toward schools and colleges that are segregated by sex and religion. One possible way in which these practices might be reconciled with formal equality of educational opportunity would be to argue that this principle applies only to public educational institutions and not private schools and colleges. Some people accept that formal equality of opportunity is a sufficient norm to guide the distribution of educational opportunities, but most political and moral philosophers accept it as necessary but not sufficient. A principle of non-discrimination leaves open whether and to what extent the state needs to provide the resources that are required for education, or how those resources should be distributed (see Gutmann 1999: 127ff). Since resources are necessary for education—whether in the form of books and materials, teachers, facilities, and so on—formal equality of opportunity is compatible with some children failing to actually receive an education. Formal equality of opportunity fails to provide effective equality of opportunity.

Additionally, formal equality of educational opportunity is not concerned with the informal rules, social norms, or private discrimination that people in a society face that can have a profound effect on a child’s opportunities for education. Consider that formal equality of opportunity is compatible with school segregation, if school attendance zones were determined by residence and residence were segregated by race and social class (as is typically the case in the U.S.). If integration is a moral imperative, formal equality of opportunity cannot achieve this goal (Anderson 2010). Many people believe that insofar as informal discrimination is an unfair obstacle to educational opportunity, it is a serious problem that requires policy attention.

Even if formal equality of opportunity could be defended as a just distributional principle outside of the educational context, perhaps because going beyond it violates certain rights (see Nozick 1997), it cannot be defended in the context of schooling. No democratic society can justify failing to educate the children of its poorest students. (Additionally, see Friedman & Friedman, 1990, for a libertarian argument for universal education based on its third party effects.)

Proponents of meritocratic equality of opportunity argue that no other obstacle besides merit should stand in the way of achievement of the desired goals. This view requires that educational goods be distributed solely in accordance with individual merit. In the context of education, merit is often measured by entrance requirements, aptitude tests, or grades on exams. Of course, merit could be defined in some other way—by how hard a student works, by how much a student improves, or by classroom participation, although all of these indicators pose measurement challenges.

Meritocratic equality of opportunity has well-known limitations, especially with respect to children. If educational opportunities should be given to those who have the most merit in terms of the best scores on entrance tests, we will overlook the fact that merit is endogenous to education, which is to say, educational opportunity itself creates merit (Satz 2007). The more educational opportunities an individual child has, the more “merit” that child may come to have. This might suggest that we should pay more attention to individuals’ underlying potential rather than to their assessed merit. Yet few people believe that we should give opportunities to those who have the most underlying but uncultivated ability at the expense of those who have less underlying ability or who are less qualified but have worked hard (Miller 1996).

To illustrate a second limitation with the meritocratic conception of equal educational opportunity, imagine that all highly selective university places have been awarded to members of the upper class through cronyism, and that a progressive new government is suddenly elected into power to enforce meritocratic admissions. After generations of consolidating superior education, jobs and wealth at the expense of the poor, the upper-classes are in a far better place, particularly if private schooling is available, to ensure that their children end up being the most meritorious, thereby preserving vast social inequalities between members of different classes. Although some opportunities are open to all equally, opportunities to develop “merit” are not distributed equally (Williams 1962). Intergenerational transmission of opportunities to cultivate merit would generate a deeply divided and unequal society, which is at odds with the ideal of equality of educational opportunity.

Two further limitations concerning meritocratic equality of opportunity in the context of education are worth noting, aside from the possible toxic consequences of engaging in meritocratic rhetoric (Young 1958; Sandel 2020). The first, as has already been mentioned, is that the definition of merit itself can be contentious. Is there an account of merit that is wholly independent of conceptions of justice (Sen 2000)? Is merit simply what maximizes productivity? Should merit be based solely on test scores or also take into account moral attributes like the ability to work cooperatively with others?

The second is that while conditioning educational opportunities on “merit” may look compelling when dealing with young adults, it is deeply problematic when applied to very young children. As Michael Walzer (1983: 203) notes, the job of the reading teacher is to teach children to read, not merely to offer the opportunity to learn to read. And this job presumably includes all children in a classroom—even those who are not especially “meritorious”. Perhaps this is also why the educational “tracking” of very young children on the basis of ability seems especially objectionable—there are certain capacities that need to be cultivated in all children (Satz 2007).

Because of the limits of formal equality of opportunity, John Rawls developed a conception he calls Fair Equality of Opportunity (FEO). FEO requires that social offices and positions be formally open to all, and that individuals who are similarly talented and motivated should have a roughly equal chance to attain these positions, independent of their social class background (Rawls 2001: 42–44). FEO holds that all citizens of a society count as the relevant agents, the desired goal is offices and positions, and the obstacles people should not face includes their social class background. The obstacles people may legitimately face include having fewer developed abilities or less willingness to use them.

When applied to education, this principle may support educational measures that close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor with the same high talent potentials, assuming that these children can be identified. This is because such students from poorer backgrounds should fare as well as their wealthier peers with the same potentials. The Rawlsian principle of FEO aims to eliminate the effects of social background and economic class on educational achievement. Fair equality of opportunity therefore offers a radical interpretation of equality of educational opportunity.

Debates about FEO have focused on the relative importance of the goods it regulates (i.e., access to offices and positions) and the fact that it regards inequalities in inborn potential as relevant obstacles generally, and in the education arena.

In A Theory of Justice , Rawls accords the fair equality of opportunity principle priority over access to other types of advantages such as income and wealth. Disputing this priority, some have argued that the opportunities that FEO regulates are not more important than these other goods and that we should prefer a principle (known, for example, in Rawls’ work as the difference principle) that ensures that the least advantaged are as well-off as possible in terms of income (or according to some critics, well-being) (Alexander 1985; Arneson 1999; Clayton 2001; Miklosi 2010). Richard Arneson presses this complaint forcefully in his paper “Against Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity”. Rawls’ argument for FEO over the difference principle comes from a commitment to individuals’ self-respect and the contribution that the ability to compete for offices and social positions on fair terms make to that self-respect. But Arneson argues that those among us with lesser capacities might reasonably reject according such weight to the self-respect of the talented. After all, the self-respect derived from the results of a “natural lottery” is unequally distributed. The untalented among us, Arneson argues, would prefer increases in well-being to a principle of self-respect that confers no benefit to them.

In terms of education, rather than ensuring that those with the same inborn talent potential and ambition have the same level of educational achievement, Arneson would emphasize that educational opportunities should aim at promoting the welfare of the least advantaged. This is more important, as he sees it, than ensuring that future competitions for jobs are fairly structured. But Rawls and his defenders have argued that wealth and welfare are different in kind from the goods that FEO regulates, and that FEO pertains to more important goods that are closely connected to autonomy, the social bases of self-respect, and what he calls the two moral powers. This explains their priority and irreducibility (Taylor 2004; Shields 2015; Shiffrin 2004). Further, if everyone had a decent minimum, then the additional contribution of wealth to well-being is less significant. In subsequent work however, Rawls does acknowledge that the priority of FEO over his difference principle may be less stringent than he thought.

Some philosophers criticize FEO as insufficiently egalitarian. This criticism has taken two forms. First, some claim that by making fair opportunities relative to motivation, FEO has insufficient bite in a non-ideal world in which inequality frequently produces diminished aspirations in the oppressed. If women have been socialized for centuries to think that certain positions in society are beyond their capacities, and accordingly they are not motivated to pursue such positions, does FEO have the resources to criticize this?

A second objection points out that inequalities in social luck (e.g., being born into a poor family, which FEO requires institutions to correct for) and inequalities in natural luck (e.g., being born with less talent potential, which FEO does not require institutions to correct for) should be treated the same. It is easy to think that both types of luck are equally arbitrary from a moral point of view, and that this arbitrariness is a source of injustice. Indeed, some of Rawls’ own remarks seem to suggest this. Why, we might ask, should educational institutions help close the gap between the talented rich and talented poor but do nothing to close the gap between talented and untalented students, when being untalented is, just like social class, totally unavoidable. Matthew Clayton and Richard Arneson press this complaint against Rawls. Clayton claims that Rawls’ own reasoning appears to privilege consistency about both types of luck. So Rawls should either accept a different principle applying to both natural and social luck, or else he must condone a type of natural aristocracy for both talent and wealth.

Part of a response to these objections would have to defend the resources that Rawlsian theory has for dealing with race and gender as obstacles to fair equality of opportunity as well as the importance of the specific goods that FEO protects. Rawls himself singled out certain goods as having a higher priority than the goods of income and wealth alone. In defense of Rawls on the first objection, Seana Shiffrin (2004) has argued that FEO is a “robust anti-discrimination principle”, which should not be read out of its context within Rawls’ two principles as a whole. Moreover, it

would be difficult to provide the sort of educational training necessary to fulfill the principle’s commands without thereby engaging in teaching that also combatted the stereotypes that produce significant differentiation of ambitions. (2004: 1650, fn31)

On her view, the social bases of self-respect require the robust anti-discrimination principle that FEO provides. In defense of Rawls on the second objection, Robert Taylor (2004) has attempted to show that self-realization has a crucial place in the hierarchy of goods on the Kantian interpretation of Rawls’ principles. He claims that FEO therefore has priority over the difference principle because it regulates goods that are more central to the exercise of our moral powers and our highest order interests. However, his defense of Rawls has been criticized for being overly perfectionist and therefore not politically liberal. If this criticism is sound, then it may seem to imply that while perfectionist Rawlsians can justify FEO, political liberal Rawlsians cannot. Liam Shields (2015) argues that there is a non-perfectionist account of self-realization and that this leads us to supplement the principle of FEO with a principle of sufficient self-realization. This may be one way to defend FEO against those who favor a strict focus on welfare.

However, these responses would not satisfy those who believe that we should adopt prioritarianism with respect to especially important goods, distributing them in a way that gives priority to those who have the least (Schouten 2012). Prioritarianism is a controversial view, and has some controversial implications for the distribution of K–12 education. For example, a prioritarian view might endorse providing no state supported educational resources at all for those who are extremely talented, unless it could be shown that doing so improves the lot of the least well off. But many people will reject this implication, believing that the state does have educational obligations to the talented in their own right. Prioritarianism is also inattentive to inequalities that obtain elsewhere in the distributional scheme, for example, between those at the median and those at the very top. Many egalitarians will be disturbed by disproportionate opportunities going to the top 1%, even if the very bottom of the distribution is improved. Rawls’ view is not a simple prioritarian one, but instead endorses a complex set of principles—some of which are egalitarian such as FEO, and some of which give special attention to the least well off, such as the difference principle.

A final issue with FEO concerns our understanding of, and ability to determine, natural levels of talent. It can be very hard to know who has the most potential even when children are well into their schooling. This suggests that it is not an appropriate or feasible benchmark for the regulation of social institutions since we could never know whether it was satisfied (Gomberg 1975). In addition, the focus on natural talents has led some to consider the interaction between epigenetic traits and social environmental factors, calling into question the integrity of this distinction. This expands our sense of the arbitrariness of natural inequalities and may provide important insights on how to redress these inequalities (Loi, Del Savio and Stupka 2013).

One goal of education is to enable young people to grow into adults who have flourishing lives. What would it mean to give children the equal opportunity for flourishing lives? Again, that depends on the view one should have about the appropriate obstacles. At the most extreme, some have argued all people should face only the obstacle of their own choices. The view makes sense of many of our intuitions. For example, we tend to think that victims of bad luck, those born with disabilities, or those who are severely harmed by natural disasters, are entitled to aid. Meanwhile, those who gamble and lose are not usually viewed as having any case for compensation.

The view so stated has very radical implications for educational institutions since it charges them with ensuring that all students have equal prospects for living well, regardless of differences in their natural potentials. Thus, educational institutions organized in accordance with equality of opportunity for flourishing would not only have to provide compensatory support and resources for those from disadvantaged family backgrounds, but also for those who have genetic disadvantages.

Many philosophers have taken issue with this general view. Some have argued that its unmitigated emphasis on choice and responsibility would lead to stigma (e.g., Anderson 1999; Wolff 1998). Imagine a letter to parents saying that the state is offering your child extra opportunities because your genes create significant disadvantages. Moreover, as has already been noted, any view emphasizing choice so heavily seems especially out of place when dealing with young children.

We also need an account of the flourishing that should be the aim of educational opportunities. Is it to be understood in terms of preference satisfaction? Or something else? Would it require autonomy? In choosing an account of flourishing, we have to respond to these questions and also be attentive to concerns about sectarianism. How can an undoubtedly controversial account of what makes a human life valuable (e.g., that a good life is an autonomous life) be a suitable basis for educational policy in a pluralistic society? Many liberals argue that families may justifiably reject, and request exemption from, an education that conflicts with their religious, cultural, or political views. They argue that an educational system driven by a principle of equality of opportunity for flourishing will not respect individuals’ entitlement to pursue their own account of how they wish to live, in accordance with their own reason (Rawls 2005). Of course, it might be pointed out in reply, that educational decisions made by parents affect not only their own views of how to live but also, and more importantly, their children’s.

A second key goal for education, which plays a prominent role in public discourse, is to prepare individuals for productive employment. Education for the labor market has significant benefits for the state (e.g., GDP growth) and for individuals (e.g., remunerative and rewarding employment and all its associated benefits, including more discretionary income, more leisure time, and in the U.S., better healthcare). This function of education is critically important as a matter of justice. Education aimed at preparing individuals for employment has become especially pressing in view of the income inequalities that leading economists have highlighted (Piketty 2014; Saez & Zucman 2014). And since education for employment is a highly positional good given a competitive labor market, it matters all the more how educational opportunity in this arena is distributed.

Although there is a clear correlation between educational attainment, income, and employment rates (see 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Other Internet Resources ), the link between academic achievement as measured on tests and labor market outcomes has been found to be more attenuated (Bowles, Gintis, & Osborne 2001). Research has shown that “soft skills” (e.g., personality traits like tenacity; individual’s goals and preferences) may be more predictive of success than cognitive abilities measured by test scores (Heckman & Kautz 2012). Moreover, schooling that is most directly targeted at employment—vocational education—has a history in the U.S. of entrenching race and class-based inequalities (e.g., Oakes 1985). Although the relationship between traditional academic skills and labor market success may be less significant than previously thought, and despite the checkered history of vocational education, formal schooling still has a critical role to play toward equipping individuals for labor market success on several fronts.

First, students do acquire soft skills in formal school settings. One study found that student achievement on tests accounts for just 20% of the effects of educational attainment on earnings (Bowles, Gintis, & Osborne 2001), which indicates that schools are cultivating non-cognitive skills that tests do not measure, and that are consequential in the labor market (Levin 2012). Second, educational attainment has long been seen to have a signaling function in the labor market (Spence 1973), whereby employers rely upon job candidates’ educational credentials as a proxy for future productivity. Educational attainment itself, then, apart from applicants’ demonstration of particular skills, is central to screening and differentiating candidates. Finally, a college diploma has become especially consequential in recent years as the income gap between those with and without one has grown; individuals with a bachelors degree earn 84% more over their lifetime than those with just a high school diploma (see Carnevale, Rose & Cheah 2011). Lesley Jacobs’ notion of stakes fairness (2004) underscores the importance of equality of educational opportunity when it comes to preparation for the labor market. Ideally, the stakes attached to education for labor market success would not be nearly as high as they are now, whereby a winner-takes-all competition for a job can determine an individual’s access to social goods like healthcare, leisure time, and discretionary income. When the (non-ideal) stakes are this high, equality of educational opportunity matters all the more (Jacobs 2010).

Another important goal for providing educational opportunities is the development of students’ capacities associated with being a good citizen and maintaining democratic institutions over time (Callan 1997; Galston 2001; Gutmann 1999). It might be argued that just as equality of opportunity to become a flourishing individual is a matter of justice, so too is equality of opportunity to develop civic skills, and to participate effectively in political deliberations.

The structure and appropriate content of civic education is debated extensively. While some argue that citizenship education can be narrowly construed so as to not encroach upon individuals’ private commitments, others claim it is a far more demanding educational endeavor. A key part of this debate is the extent to which education requires the cultivation of autonomy, and if does, the nature of the autonomy that is required. Some claim that since some groups in pluralistic democracies reject the idea of an autonomous life, education for autonomy cannot be imposed upon them even for civic purposes, and so education should not entail the cultivation of individual autonomy (Galston 1989). Rawls’ own solution to the potential clash between civic education for autonomy and individuals’ private commitments is to advocate only a limited form of autonomy, political autonomy, which “leaves untouched all kinds of doctrines—religious, metaphysical, and moral” and yields a relatively thin civic education (Rawls 2005: 375). Others take issue with this view, arguing that civic education requires an encompassing form of autonomy that has unavoidable spillover effects into the private sphere of individuals’ lives, and that may clash with some religious convictions (Callan 1997; Gutmann 1995; see also Arneson & Shapiro 1996, for a discussion of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), a U.S. Supreme Court case about religious exemptions from compulsory education).

Another dimension of ongoing debates about equality in the realm of civic education concerns the scope of the community for which we are educating students to become members. Is the right unit of analysis a particular nation state or the global community? If it is a particular nation state, how can we cultivate in students a sense of their national identity and the disposition to respect their state’s institutions and laws (and to advocate reform when needed), while also making them sensitive to what they owe non-citizens as a matter of justice? A key component of this debate is whether students should receive a patriotic civic education—that is, one that prioritizes shoring up their allegiance to their state over their capacity to reflect critically upon its potential shortcomings. Galston (1989) has notably argued that students need a civic education that is more rhetorical than rational, while a number of liberal theorists have criticized his view on grounds of democratic legitimacy, its status-quo bias, and the related possibility of ossifying existing inequalities (e.g., Brighouse 1998; Callan 1997; see also the related entry on civic education ). On the other hand, if we instead have a cosmopolitan view of civic education and aim to cultivate “citizens of the world” (e.g., Nussbaum & Cohen 1996), what are the relevant capacities that need to be made effective? There is no world state for students to participate in.

Whatever one believes about the appropriate scope and content of civic education, a pressing issue is students’ extremely uneven access to educational opportunities that prepare them for participatory citizenship. Meira Levinson’s work on the “civic achievement gap” highlights this corollary to the much-more discussed achievement gap and underscores vast inequalities across student groups in terms of what youth know about how government works, and their ability to participate effectively in civic life (Levinson 2012). These low rates of participation and engagement also have consequences for how the interests of the poor are treated. Indeed, even if one rejects equality of opportunity in this domain, there is ample evidence that many societies are not doing enough to enable their poorer and less educated citizens to effectively and competently participate in public life.

A longstanding debate in the literature juxtaposes the view that we should prioritize equality in the distribution of educational opportunities with the view that an “adequacy” approach is the right one (on this debate, see Reich 2013). Those who advocate the equality view may insist on equal outputs (i.e., educational outcomes, like the mastery of particular skills) or inputs (i.e., educational resources, like equal per pupil funding or qualified teachers). The adequacy view, by contrast, is seen as holding that what matters most is meeting a specified educational threshold.

In the context of school finance litigation in the U.S., advocates often invoke these two distributive ideals together rather than regarding them as being at odds (Rebell 2009: 21–22; Ryan 2008: 1232–1238). Although most school finance litigation in the U.S. today is pursued from an adequacy framework given its greater political viability, litigators often make comparative claims about students’ educational opportunities to bolster their case. Conversely in contexts where lawyers pursue equality claims, they frequently appeal to a conception of educational quality (e.g., achieving literacy, numeracy, and civic skills) to anchor their claims, and to avoid the leveling-down problem whereby equality is achieved by making everyone worse off, without regard for the realization of particular educational goals.

Some philosophical work has similarly undercut the sharp equality/adequacy distinction and shows how the two ideals are closely intertwined in the pursuit of educational justice. These approaches (e.g., Satz 2007; Anderson 2007) argue that adequacy in education has a relative and comparative component because the educational threshold depends on the knowledge and skills that others have, and so it is necessarily a moving target. For example, what it takes to serve on a jury, or to have an adequate opportunity for college, depends on the knowledge and skill levels of others. This “relational” approach to adequacy can respond to one of the strongest concerns proponents of equality raise: that because many of the benefits of education are positional, which is to say, their value depends upon one’s position relative to others, equality is the right distributive principle for educational opportunities. The meritocratic distribution of jobs, where the most qualified candidate is appointed (rather than the individual who is merely well-qualified), ensures that positionality is decisive in many cases. Conceptions of adequacy that are attentive to relevant comparative claims can address this issue and thereby deflate the tension between adequacy and equality approaches to distributing educational opportunities.

However one interprets equality of educational of opportunity, a number of important challenges face anyone who believes that the ideal is a crucial component of a fair and just society. Several of these challenges are philosophical in nature. For instance, one can ask whether certain values (e.g., respecting family autonomy) compete with the demands of equality of opportunity in education in ways that trump or are trumped by concerns about educational equality. One can also ask whether equal educational opportunity requires affirmative action, and what it may require for students with disabilities and special educational needs. One can accept equality of educational opportunity with respect to some goods and adequacy of educational opportunity with respect to others (Callan 2016). There are other challenges that are not philosophical but practical, such as how we can convince policymakers to allocate sufficient funds to meet students’ educational needs, and how we might increase public support for the ideal of equality of educational opportunity more generally.

4. Equality of Educational Opportunity’s Tensions with Other Values

Family background has long been recognized as a source of significant inequalities. Even before we consider that children have quite different personalities and needs, inequality in family wealth and differences in family priorities and wield influence over a child’s prospects in the labor market, in civic participation, and in overall well-being. Although the number of parents who choose to pay tuition to have their children educated in private schools may be relatively small, purchasing elite private schooling can result in compounding advantages for some students (and thus relative disadvantages for others). Only about 10% of primary and secondary students in the U.S. attend private schools (see NCES’s the Condition of Education 2016 in Other Internet Resources ), while students who attended private secondary schools have comprised nearly 30% or more of matriculating classes at some highly selective American universities in recent years (see, for example, online profiles of the 2016 freshman class at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale listed in Other Internet Resources ). Students at some public schools may also suffer more immediate disadvantages from the absence of the positive peer effects of being in a school with higher achieving students and more engaged parents. Smaller class sizes, more highly qualified teachers, and more extra-curricular opportunities may enable private school students to benefit from the compounding advantages of greater success in the college admissions process and subsequent labor market. And since employment opportunities and elite college places are scarce goods that are closely linked to other benefits in health, wealth, and overall well-being, these inequalities can be highly consequential.

While some of these inequalities might be remedied by social policies that address employment practices, gender and racial inequality, and wealth inequality, we have reasons to think that some inequality in opportunity will remain in a just society simply because parents should be able to treat their children differently from other people’s children in ways that are to their children’s advantage. For example, a parent may read bedtime stories to his children but if he does he does not also need to read them to other children, even if a failure to read to everyone exacerbates inequality. There are limits to what the state can do without intruding on the life of the family. At the same time, concern for mitigating inequality that is rooted in familial relations has to grapple with the fact that different parenting styles have value as well as downsides, and that the middle-class norm of trying to maximize children’s potential (“concerted cultivation”; Lareau 2011) is no exception in terms of having certain disadvantages for children.

There are several possible approaches to the conflict between equal educational opportunity and the family. One approach subordinates our concern for equality of educational opportunity to our concern with the family. To support this view we might try to argue that the goods of family life are especially weighty, or, that as a matter of value pluralism, the state cannot impose complete uniformity on childrearing practices. Conversely, we could subordinate our concern for the family to our concern with equality of educational opportunity. If this were to happen, however, we could end up abolishing the family as we know it, since the family and partiality run contrary to equal opportunity. One cannot, it seems, have the family and have perfect equality of opportunity. Plato famously advocated raising children in common within communities in The Republic (though not out of concern for equality). But most philosophers, including Rawls, believe that abolishing the family is far too high a price to pay for equality (this is discussed in Munoz-Dardé 1999; Brighouse & Swift 2009; Schoeman 1980; Schrag 1976; see also Miller 2009 on different conceptions of equality of opportunity and how the family fits within them).

Alternatively, we might think that some careful weighing of the values at stake is required. For instance, we might think that only some of the demands of familial partiality, those related to intimacy such as reading bedtime stories, are sufficient to outweigh concern for equality of educational opportunity. Other aspects of familial partiality that appear to be unconnected to intimacy, such as paying tuition for private schools, would not be justified. This view would enjoin us to equalize children’s educational opportunities whenever we can, without sacrificing the goods central to the family (Brighouse & Swift 2014). Yet it can be very difficult in practice to determine whether an advantage parents provide their child is constitutive of the family or not.

Individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities have been marginalized, denied resources, and even denied an education. Can a conception of equality of educational opportunity accommodate those with cognitive and physical disabilities? Some critics claim that theories of justice focus unduly on meeting the demands of reciprocity and cooperation as a pre-condition to equal opportunity and other demands of justice, and in doing so, exclude some individuals with disabilities from those entitlements. Some argue that we need new theories (Kittay 1999; Barnes 2016) while others argue that existing theories and approaches can be applied to or extended to include individuals with disabilities (Stark 2013; Robeyns 2006; Brighouse 2001). In education, treating individuals with disabilities the same as those without does not always suffice to treat all equally, for disabilities sometimes give rise to special needs and requirements and this raises challenges for ‘inclusion’ (Warnock 2005). In order to avoid these challenges it seems that we might need to endorse differential treatment, which can lead to stigma and division and has been associated with educational segregation. This gives rise to what has been called the “dilemma of difference” and pertains to decisions about whether students with disabilities should be educated in the same class as students without disabilities. Placing disabled children in mainstream schools or classes may lead to bullying, as Mary Warnock (2005) has noted, but placing disabled children in separate settings may further entrench the wide-spread social stigma associated with disability, even when there is much that can be done to ensure disability is not an obstacle to learning. Further debates focus on the extent to which (at least some of) the disadvantages of disability may be detached from the disability itself and the extent to which they are attached only in virtue of social organization or social attitudes, which we could and should alter. For instance, if the dominant modes of communication in our society were sign-based rather than spoken, perhaps deafness would not be considered a disability. Likewise, where braille translations are readily available, the blind do not face a disability with respect to reading (Sparrow 2005). In the case of education, the design of the school or the curriculum can determine whether a disability is an obstacle to learning. For some discussion of this debate see Terzi 2005.

Disability may be thought to pose problems for various conceptions of equality of educational opportunity and can strengthen well-known objections. For example, it poses problems for those who endorse a meritocratic allocation of advantageous positions, such as FEO. If one of the primary goals of an education system is to ensure fair competition for jobs, many people with disabilities will likely face greater and even insurmountable obstacles to becoming the most meritorious candidate. Recall that FEO requires equal prospects for the equally naturally talented and ambitious. Some of those with disabilities do not have similar or equal natural talent with others vying for opportunities, even if these differences could be compensated for through education. Meritocratic equality of opportunity also appears to neglect some people with disabilities, by interpreting merit in terms of inborn potentials. FEO and meritocratic equality of opportunity are consistent with providing very low or even no educational opportunities to some cognitively disabled persons, but that hardly seems like an acceptable outcome. Adequacy accounts may also struggle to explain what to do when disabilities are so severe that individuals cannot achieve adequate educational levels, or do so only at enormous cost. If an adequate education involved at least acquiring a high school diploma, it is not possible for some cognitively impaired persons to reach this level. Since the focus of adequacy is on achieving that level, and these people cannot do so, it appears that when educational adequacy is set at these levels no entitlement to education for the cognitively disabled can be derived from it. This sort of example puts a lot of pressure on accounts of adequacy to explain at what cost adequacy is worth pursuing, and also challenge those who deny that native ability is relevant to equality of opportunity.

One way to avoid such outcome would be to supplement these views of equality or adequacy of educational opportunity with other principles. For example, it might be held that we owe some educational resources even to the severely cognitively disabled not on grounds of equality of opportunity but on grounds of humanity.

Opportunities belong to agents. However, when we are concerned with equality of opportunity we may be concerned that each individual has the same opportunities or that certain groups (classified by race, gender, socio-economic class, sexuality or religion) have the same opportunities. In other words, our concern may be that people’s opportunities are not affected by their membership of some disadvantaged group rather than being concerned that each individual has equal opportunity within groups. Imagine two societies. In society A , all those who gain entrance to selective colleges on the basis of test scores are white. In society B , all those who gain entrance on the basis of test scores are white or non-white in proportionate to their percentages in the overall population. Should we care about whether we are in society A or B ? If our concern is with individuals alone, then so long as our conception of equality of opportunity is met, then there is no difference between society A and B . Of course, we may suspect that society A violates our conception of equality of opportunity. But suppose that it does not.

Do we have any reason to favor a college admissions policy that moves us from A to B ? Those who advocate for affirmative action in admissions argue that we have reason to depart from a color-blind standard. Some of those arguments appeal to the illegitimacy of the standards used (e.g., tests scores), which critics say are biased. Others argue that we should expect to see equality of outcomes with respect to relevant social groups. For example, John Roemer (1998) defends a conception of equality of opportunity according to which members of groups that have been subordinated (women, racial minorities) should have the same probabilities of achieving success as the members of the dominant group. This is because he thinks the obstacles these groups face should be the same and if we assume that they have equal distributions of talent within them, then different outcomes means there are different obstacles. Roemer uses the example of smoking to illustrate this. Smoking rates vary by social class: the poorer you are, the more likely it is that you will smoke. On Roemer’s view, this means that it is harder for a poor person to stop smoking than a wealthy person. So we should not penalize a poor person who smokes to the same extent that we penalize a wealthy person. Of course, which social groups should be included in this exercise is controversial. Conservatives and liberals differ as to whether individuals face different obstacles simply by virtue of their group membership.

A different argument for moving to society B is given by Glenn Loury (1987) who argues that the dynamic effects of a society like A would prevent poor but talented minorities from achieving equality of educational opportunity because they would lack access to the social networks upon which jobs and other opportunities depend. In society A , disadvantages would cluster. Because equality of opportunity does not, as we have seen, easily extend to the private sphere of family and intimate associations, it is compatible with the continued practice of racial discrimination in such practices, even when there is legal, formal equality.

Loury thus sees a role for preferential policies in higher education that would move us from a society like A to a society like B . One of the more controversial reforms associated with higher education and equality of opportunity is affirmative action, which reserves preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged groups. Affirmative action has been criticized by those who think that merit, and not race or class, should be the only criterion for selecting college applicants. Others argue that it can lead to the unintended stigmatization of members of disadvantaged groups who attend college as not deserving of their place. However, this is to forget that opportunities to develop merit are themselves unfairly distributed between groups historically. Notwithstanding this response, affirmative action remains a controversial response to a very difficult social problem (Guinier 2016).

This entry has provided analysis of key positions in debates about equality of educational opportunity. We began by describing the reasons for being concerned about equality in this arena and then surveyed debates about the value and distribution of such opportunities. As the above discussion highlights, the realization of the ideal of equality of educational opportunity may be frustrated by competing conceptions of what equality itself entails, and also by other important values that are in tension with equalizing education opportunities (e.g., respecting family autonomy). Social scientific advances in recent years have clarified our understanding of the mechanisms behind children’s unequal access to educational opportunities, and the consequences of those inequalities for social mobility (e.g., Chetty et al. 2014; Duncan & Murnane 2011). This knowledge enables policymakers to target interventions to areas that will be most impactful (e.g., growing recognition of the importance of early childhood education). But value tensions of the sort highlighted in this entry will persist, and they warrant ongoing attention by philosophers as our understanding of the causes and consequences of educational inequalities sharpens.

• Alexander, Larry A., 1985, “Fair Equality of Opportunity: John Rawls’ (Best) Forgotten Principle”, Philosophy Research Archives , 11: 197–208. doi:10.5840/pra19851111
• Anderson, Elizabeth S., 1999, “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics , 109(2): 287–337. doi:10.1086/233897
• –––, 2007, “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective”, Ethics , 117(4): 595–622. doi:10.1086/518806
• –––, 2010, The Imperative of Integration , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Arneson, Richard J., 1999, “Against Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity”, Philosophical Studies , 93(1): 77–112. doi:10.1023/A:1004270811433
• Arneson, Richard and Ian Shapiro, 1996, “Democratic Autonomy and Religious Liberty: A Critique of Wisconsin v. Yoder”, in Political Order (Nomos 38), Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin (eds.), New York: New York University Press, pp. 365–411.
• Barnes, Elizabeth, 2016, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne, 2001, “The Determinants of Earnings: A Behavioral Approach”, Journal of Economic Literature , 39(4): 137–1176. doi:10.1257/jel.39.4.1137
• Brighouse, Harry, 1998, “Civic Education and Liberal Legitimacy”, Ethics , 108(4): 719–745. doi:10.1086/233849
• –––, 2001, “Can Justice as Fairness Accommodate the Disabled?”, Social Theory and Practice , 27(4): 537–560. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract200127433
• Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift, 2009, “Educational Equality Versus Educational Adequacy: A Critique of Anderson and Satz”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 26(2): 117–128. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00438.x
• –––, 2014, Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Callan, Eamonn, 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198292589.001.0001
• –––, 2016, “Democracy, Equal Citizenship, and Education”, Theory and Research in Education , 14(1): 77–90. doi:10.1177/1477878515619789
• Carnevale, Anthony P., Stephen J. Rose, and Ban Cheah, 2011, The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings , Washington, DC: Center on Education and the Workforce. [ Carnevale, Rose, & Cheah 2011 available online ]
• Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, & Emmanuel Saez, 2014, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 129(4): 1553–1623. doi:10.3386/w19843
• Clayton, Matthew, 2001, “Rawls And Natural Aristocracy”, Croatian Journal Of Philosophy , 1(3): 239–259.
• Dee, Thomas S., 2004, “Are There Civic Returns to Education?”, Journal of Public Economics , 88(9–10): 1697–1720.
• Duncan, Greg J. and Richard J. Murnane (eds.), 2011, Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances . New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Friedman, Milton and Rose Friedman, 1990, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement , New York: Harcourt.
• Galston, William, 1989, “Civic Education in the Liberal State”, in Nancy Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 89–102.
• –––, 2001, “Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education”, Annual Review of Political Science , 4(1): 217–234. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.4.1.217
• Gomberg, Paul, 1975, “IQ and Race: A Discussion of Some Confusions”, Ethics , 85(3): 258–266. doi:10.1086/291965
• Guinier, Lani, 2016, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Gutmann, Amy, 1995, “Civic Education and Social Diversity”, Ethics , 105(3): 557–579. doi:10.1086/293727
• –––, 1999, Democratic Education . Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Heckman, James J. and Tim D. Kautz, 2012, “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills”, Labour Economics , 19(4): 451–464. doi:10.3386/w18121 doi:10.1016/j.labeco.2012.05.014
• Hutton, John S., Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Alan L. Mendelsohn, Tom DeWitt, Scott K. Holland, & C-MIND Authorship Consortium, 2015, “Home Reading Environment and Brain Activation in Preschool Children Listening to Stories”, Pediatrics , 136(3): 466–478. doi:10.1542/peds.2015-0359
• Institute for Higher Education, 1998, Reaping the Benefits: Defining the Public and Private Value of Going to College , Washington, DC: Institute for Higher Education.
• Jacobs, Lesley A., 2004, Pursuing Equal Opportunities: the Theory and Practice of Egalitarian Justice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2010, “Equality, Adequacy, And Stakes Fairness: Retrieving The Equal Opportunities In Education Approach”, Theory And Research In Education , 8(3): 249–268. doi:10.1177/1477878510381627
• Jencks, Christopher, 1988, “Whom Must We Treat Equally for Educational Opportunity to be Equal?” Ethics , 98(3): 518–533. doi:10.1086/292969
• Kittay, Eva, 1999, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency , New York: Routledge
• Kozol, Jonathan, 1991, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools , New York: Broadway Books.
• –––, 2005, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America , New York: Broadway Books.
• Lareau, Annette, 2011, Unequal childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life , Oakland: University of California Press.
• Levin, Henry M., 2012, “More Than Just Test Scores”, Prospects , 42(3): 269–284. doi:10.1007/s11125-012-9240-z
• Levinson, Meira, 2012, No Citizen Left Behind , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Levinson, Meira, Tatiana Geron, and Harry Brighouse, 2022, “Conceptions of Educational Equity”, AERA Open , 8. doi:10.1177/23328584221121344
• Levinson, Meira, Alan C. Geller, and Joseph G. Allen, 2021, “Health Equity, School Hesitancy, and the Social Determinants of Learning”, The Lancet Regional Health – Americas , 2: 100032. doi:10.1016/j.lana.2021.100032
• Levinson, Meira, Muge Cevik, and Marc Lipsitch, 2020, “Reopening Primary Schools During the Pandemic”, New England Journal of Medicine , 383: 981–985. doi:10.1056/NEJMms2024920
• Liu, Goodwin, 2006, “Interstate Inequality in Educational Opportunity”, New York University Law Review , 81(6): 2044–2128.
• Loi, Michele, Lorenzo Del Savio, and Elia Stupka, 2013, “Social Epigentics and Equality of Opportunity”, Public Health Ethics , 6(2): 142–153. doi:10.1093/phe/pht019
• Loury, Glenn C., 1987, “Why Should We Care About Group Inequality”, Social Philosophy and Policy 5(1): 249–271. doi:10.1017/S0265052500001345
• Miklosi, Zoltan, 2010, “How Does the Difference Principle Make a Difference?”, Res Publica , 16(3): 263–280. doi:10.1007/s11158-010-9123-1
• Miller, David, 1996, “Two Cheers for Meritocracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 4(4): 277–301. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.1996.tb00053.x
• –––, 2009, “Equality Of Opportunity And The Family”, in Debra Satz and Rob Reich (eds.), Toward A Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy Of Susan Moller Okin , New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 93–112. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337396.003.0006
• Munoz-Dardé, Véronique, 1999, “Is the Family to be Abolished Then?”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 99: 37–56. doi:10.1111/1467-9264.00044
• Nozick, Robert, 1997, “ Life is Not a Race ”, in Louis P. Pojman and Robert Westmoreland (eds.), Equality: Selected Readings , New York: Oxford University Press, 167–169.
• Nussbaum, Martha C., 2007, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. and Joshua Cohen, 1996, For Love of Country? , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Oakes, Jeannie, 1985, Keeping Track . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Phillips, Anne, 2004, “Defending Equality of Outcome”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 12(1): 1–19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2004.00188.x
• Piketty, Thomas, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Rawls, John, 1999, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• –––, 2001, Justice as Fairness: a Restatement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2005, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Reardon, Sean F., 2011, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations”, in Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane (eds.), Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances , New York, NY: Russel Sage Foundation, pp. 91–116.
• Reardon, Sean F. and Kendra Bischoff, 2011, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation”, American Journal of Sociology , 116(4): 1092–1153. doi:10.1086/657114
• Reardon, Sean F., Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian, and Ericka S. Weathers, 2015, “Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Academic Achievement Gaps”, in Helen F. Ladd and M.E. Goertz (eds.), Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy (2nd Ed.) , New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 497–516.
• Rebell, Michael A., 2009, Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Reich, Rob, 2013, “ Equality, Adequacy, and K12 Education ”, in Danielle Allen and Rob Reich (eds.), Education, Justice, and Democracy , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 623–648.
• Robeyns, Ingrid, 2006, “Three Models of Education: Rights, Capabilities and Human Capital”, Theory and Research in Education , 4(1): 69–84. doi:10.1177/1477878506060683
• Robinson, Kimberly Jenkins (ed.), 2019, A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy , New York: New York University Press.
• Roemer, John E., 1998, Equality of Opportunity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Ryan, James E., 2007, “The Supreme Court and Voluntary Integration”, Harvard Law Review , 121(1): 131–157.
• –––, 2008, “Standards, Testing, and School Finance Litigation”, Texas Law Review , 86: 1223–1262.
• Saez, Emmanuel and Gabriel Zucman, 2014, Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data (NBER Working Paper no. 20625), Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w20625
• Sahlberg, Pasi, 2011, Finnish lessons , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Sandel, Michael, 2020, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Satz, Debra, 2007, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship”, Ethics , 117(4): 623–648. doi:10.1086/518805
• Schoeman, Ferdinand, 1980, “Rights of Children, Rights of Parents, and the Moral Basis of the Family”, Ethics , 91(1): 6–19. doi:10.1086/292199
• Schouten, Gina, 2012, “Fair Educational Opportunity and the Distribution of Natural Ability: Toward a Prioritarian Principle of Educational Justice”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 46(3): 472–491. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00863.x
• Schrag, Francis, 1976, “Justice and the Family”, Inquiry , 19(1–4): 193–208. doi:10.1080/00201747608601791
• Sen, Amartya, 2000, “ Merit and Justice ”, in Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles, and Steven Durlauf (eds.), Meritocracy and Economic Inequality , Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 5–16.
• Shields, Liam, 2015, “From Rawlsian Autonomy to Sufficient Opportunity in Education”, Politics, Philosophy & Economics , 14(1): 53–66. doi:10.1177/1470594X13505413
• Shiffrin, Seana Valentine, 2004, “Race, Labor, And The Fair Equality Of Opportunity Principle”, Fordham Law Review , 72(5): 1643–1676.
• Sparrow, Robert, 2005, “Defending Deaf Culture: the Case of Cochlear Implants”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 13(2): 135–152. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2005.00217.x
• Spence, Michael, 1973, “Job Market Signaling”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 87(3): 355–374.
• Stark, Cynthia A., 2013, “Luck, Opportunity and Disability”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 16(3): 383–402. doi:10.1080/13698230.2013.795701
• Taylor, Robert S., 2004, “Self-realization and the Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity”, Journal of Moral Philosophy , 1(3): 333–347. doi:10.1177/174046810400100307
• Terzi, Lorella, 2005, “Beyond the Dilemma of Difference: The Capability Approach to Disability and Special Educational Needs”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 39(3): 443–459. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2005.00447.x
• –––, 2010, Justice and Equality in Education: A Capability Perspective on Disability and Special Educational Needs , New York: Continuum.
• Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E. Brady, 1995, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Walzer, Michael, 1983, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality , New York: Basic.
• Warnock, Mary, 2005, “Special Educational Needs: A New Look”, Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.
• Westen, Peter, 1985, “The Concept of Equal Opportunity”, Ethics , 95(4): 837–850. doi:10.1086/292687
• Williams, Bernard, 1962, “ The Idea of Equality ”, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 112–17.
• Wolff, Jonathan, 1998, “Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 27(2): 97–122. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00063.x
• Young, Michael, 1958,  The Rise of the Meritocracy, New Brunswick, NJ: Thames and Hudson.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Cited Court Cases

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
• Milliken v. Bradley (1974).
• Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2006).
• San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973).
• Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1970).
• Yoder v. Wisconsin (1972).

Other Resources

• “The Condition of Education” , National Center for Education Statistics
• Reardon, Sean F., 2015, “School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps” , (CEPA Working Paper No.15–12). Retrieved from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.
• Reardon, Sean F., 2021, “ The Economic Achievement Gap in the US, 1960-2020: Reconciling Recent Empirical Findings ”, (CEPA Working Paper No. 21.09). Retrieved from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.
• Reardon, Sean F., Erica Weather, Erin Fahle, Heewon Jang, and Demetra Kalogrides, 2022, “ Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps ”, (CEPA Working Paper No.19-06). Retrieved from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.
• National Equity Atlas , PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute. In particular the entry on School Poverty
• 2022 US Bureau of Labor Statistics

affirmative action | childhood, the philosophy of | citizenship | civic education | disability: and justice | discrimination | economics [normative] and economic justice | egalitarianism | equality | equality: of opportunity | justice: distributive | luck: justice and bad luck | rights: of children

Copyright © 2023 by Liam Shields < liam . shields @ manchester . ac . uk > Anne Newman < arnewman @ stanford . edu > Debra Satz < dsatz @ stanford . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

How to Write the “Education Barrier” UC Essay

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Vinay Bhaskara in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

The best type of response.

• Different Types of Barriers

Writing About Covid

• Can Your Extracurriculars Be Barriers?

The University of California system requires you to answer four out of eight essay prompts. The fourth University of California prompt asks, “Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.”

In this article, we will discuss how to define these “Barriers” and how to approach your response. For more tips and advice on how to write the other UC essays, consider reading this article: How to Write the University of California Essays .

This prompt is asking you about an educational opportunity or educational barrier that you’ve overcome. The best kind of response to this prompt is usually about educational work done outside of the classroom. There are so many other places in the UC schools application to talk about your academic achievements inside of school, so take this chance to write about your education beyond the classroom. 

A lot of students get hung up on the word education here, and they think that their response has to be about an academic topic. That isn’t the case here. You can talk about learning a new life skill, taking care of your sibling, or your job. All of these topics are about learning experiences that aren’t necessarily linked to your academics but still contributed to your education. This prompt is going to involve a bit of brainstorming work as you may need to apply an academic mindset to a non-academic topic and think outside the box. 

Different Types of Barriers  

This is a good prompt to discuss structural, personal or environmental barriers to your academic development. A structural barrier could be something that’s happening in your community or in your family. Environmental factors could also encompass family problems or any illnesses you faced. If any of these barriers affected your academic performance, this is a good place to write about that. 

There might even be a specific weakness in your application. You might want to consider addressing the cause of that weakness in this essay if it was caused by a barrier you faced. 

Keep in mind that this approach doesn’t work as well when you’re talking about a specific class; this usage is a bit too cliche to work here as nearly every student has struggled with a specific class before. 

A topic that a lot of students think of with this prompt is the pandemic, or COVID-19. Of course, that is the environmental barrier that affected everyone for nearly two years, but because it affected everyone, this might not be your best approach. Admissions officers are reading hundreds of applications a day, and they are bound to read countless essays about the pandemic. While this is the most relevant barrier, writing about COVID is not the most unique answer, and you risk your essay being lost in the crowd. 

That being said, if writing about the pandemic really speaks to you, then you should go for it. You should, however, try to bring in a unique perspective to your experience. Maybe your parents were essential workers so you had to take care of your younger siblings. Or perhaps you could write about covid being an educational opportunity if you learned something  during the lockdown that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Can Your Extracurriculars Be Barriers? 

To answer this question, it’s important to understand what a barrier is. A barrier is something outside of your control that impedes your ability to learn. Internships , extra classes, and coding courses are all considered opportunities. They allow you to learn even more than you might in school, so if you want to talk about your extracurriculars it should be in a positive light. 

This is different from writing about any difficulties you faced to get those extracurriculars. For example, writing about working an entire summer to pay for coding courses would be a better topic to write about than finding a coding course challenging. 

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

UC Essay Prompt 4: Educational Experiences

by j9robinson | Apr 30, 2016

University of California Personal Insight Question 4: A Chance to Showcase Your Field of Interest

(For those of you just starting the UC application for 2016-17, incoming freshman pick four essays—each under 350 words—out of eight all-new prompts, known as Personal Insight Questions . I’m writing separate posts on ideas about how to write about all eight of them.)

If you know what you want to study in college, I would seriously consider writing about UC essay prompt 4.

It’s your chance to show the University of California that you already know something about this field and were serious enough to learn about it.

They love seeing students who already have some idea of what they want to pursue in college.

If you are uncertain about your future major, you can certainly write about this prompt, too.

Personal Insight Question 4:

Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

The new University of California essay prompt 4, also known as Personal Insight Question 4, contains two different but related topics.

One asks about an educational opportunity and the other about an educational barrier.

Pick one to write about.

From UC Admissions: “Feel free to speak about either an opportunity or a barrier. It’s OK if you’ve experienced one and not the other.”

Both topics want to know about an experience related to your education so far, which can be your school work, or anything related to academics.

My personal opinion is that writing about the educational barrier would produce a more interesting essay since it will have a storyline.

A “barrier” (obstacle) is a form of a problem, and when you write about a problem , things automatically get more interesting.

“A Significant Educational Opportunity” for UC Essay Prompt 4

Start by trying to recall an interesting experience related to academics where you learned something meaningful.

If this experience, and what you learned from it, ties to what you plan to study in college, or the field that interests you at this point, all the better.

It also could simply be an experience that had a meaningful impact on how you see the world.

The most important factor is what you learned from it.

The main pitfall to watch out for with this prompt is writing something super boring.

The best way to nail this prompt is to think of it in two parts.

First, describe the opportunity. Even better, try to think of something specific that happened that involved this experience to start your essay and give it interest.

You don’t want to start something like, “During junior year, I took AP chemistry and really loved it. I liked all the experiments in the lab and … ”

That’s too broad and generic. Sheer dullsville.

Instead, start with one specific experiment or challenge that you participated in, and then go into the overall course and why you liked it.

The second part of this essay needs to go on to explain what you learned from that experience, and briefly how you will use what you learned in the future.

SAMPLE OUTLINE FOR UC ESSAY PROMPT 4

• Describe the educational experience. If possible, start with something specific that happened , then go onto to explain the background of this opportunity. (A paragraph or two.)
• Explain what you learned from this experience. End by sharing how you plan to use what you learned in your future college and career goals. (A paragraph or two.)

Here are the extra suggestions that the UC admissions provided along with this part of UC essay prompt 4:

An educational opportunity can be anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for college. For example, participation in an honors or academic enrichment program, or enrollment in an academy that’s geared toward an occupation or a major, or taking advanced courses that interest you — just to name a few.

This is from the freshman guide from the UC admissions to help you brainstorm UC Prompt 4:

Educational opportunities: List any programs or additional classes that have better prepared you for college:

How did you find out about these programs or classes?

How did you take what you learned and apply it to your schoolwork or other aspects of your life?

An “Educational Barrier” in UC Essay Prompt 4

Here’s how I would start to brainstorm ideas to write about an educational barrier:

Think of a time in school, or during any school-related activity, where you faced some type of problem.

Again, it’s optimal if you can write about one of your main areas of interest, although it’s not necessary.

Remember, problems come in many forms, such as a challenge, an obstacle, a mistake, a personal hang-up, flaw or phobia, a change, a set-back.

Don’t get hung up on the word “barrier.” Just replace that with “problem,” and you will be on the right track.

The reason they want you to share a time you faced an education-related problem is that you can then elaborate on how you dealt with it and what you learned.

• Start by describing the problem. If possible, share a specific example of the problem, and then background it. (A paragraph or two.)
• Explain how you handled it, what personal quality you used or developed in the process, and what you learned in the process. End with how you plan to use what you learned in the future. (A paragraph or two.)

Here’s the additional questions the UC admissions folks included with this UC essay prompt 4:

If you choose to write about educational barriers you’ve faced, how did you overcome or strived to overcome them? What personal characteristics or skills did you call on to overcome this challenge? How did overcoming this barrier help shape who are you today?

Here’s the additional brainstorming questions the UC admissions shared in the freshman guide  for UC prompt 4:

Educational barriers: Have you faced any barriers or challenges related to school and/or your schoolwork?

How did you overcome or strive to overcome them?

List three personal characteristics or skills you had to call on to overcome this challenge:

How did overcoming this barrier help shape who are you today?

Some Red Flags

I must warn you that I believe there are a lot of potential cliche or overdone topics that students would write about for this topic, such as times they flunked a test or got a terrible grade.

Like all topics, what counts the most is what you have to say about your experience. So focus on what you learned about yourself, others and the world—even if what happened wasn’t the most unique experience.

Writing about UC essay prompt 4 is your best chance to showcase your main academic interest, such as computer science, history, business, fashion, art, engineering, etc.

So spend time thinking about any and all past experiences you have had that related to your interest, including ones that inspired you or helped your understand it better or improve your skills at it.

Write it up and chances are it will be a strong piece for your set of four essays (Personal Insight Questions) for the UC application.

Check out these 21 Tips for UC Personal Insight Questions to help you think about how to write four essays that complement each other and together form a “personal statement” that helps set you apart from other students.

Check Out These Related Posts!

34 Comments

Hi! Is a Carnegie course considered a educational opportunity?

Hi! Is Carnegie course considered an educational opportunity?

Yes, I would think so. JR

Hello, does an internship count as an educational opportunity?

Hi Sabrina,

Yes! If you can learn from the opportunity, it can be considered educational. Good luck! Janine

Would talking about having an opportunity at education at all be considered an educational opportunity? I am from a whole different country where women are oppressed and do not have the opportunity to an education, (gender and women’s studies is my major btw) but I am afraid this isn’t specific enough?

For the educational barrier question can I write about how I’m not good at science and describe the courses I took and how I struggled to get by but also show that I didn’t give up and that I ended up taking an AP science course?

Would medical camps count as an educational opportunity? I primarily shadowed doctors, but a lot of the doctors sat down and explained a lot about anatomy and other things.

In general, I think that any experience where you learned something, especially in a deliberate fashion, could be considered educational. JR

Hi, is mathematics module considered as an educational opportunity?

Math module in my college is a series of practice exercises that allows students to re-take placement exam.

I finished the module and took a placement exam that earned me the highest possible placement in the class. ( I skipped 3 classes as a result)

Hi, I was just wondering if what I was thinking of writing about was a good idea. My freshman year I went to a National Student Leader Conference (NSLC) for Engineering at Berkeley and that’s what made me fall in love with the idea of doing that as my major. Is the fact that it was at a certain UC school too specific i.e. will it turn away other UC schools? Obviously my focus isn’t on the fact that it was at Berkeley, but I just want to make sure I’m not inadvertently making a mistake.

Is Internship an educational opportunity? Thank you.

Would being rescinded from a school before going to community college be considered an educational barrier?

Would visiting another school not in the UC system be considered an educational opportunity?

I don’t think that’s what they have in mind; unless you attended some type of internship or educational program there. Good luck. JR

Hi! Would having an intimidating math teacher and struggling in that subject be an educational barrier?

I am in the Medical Academy and we get to do experiments and learn about different careers. I also got to shadow a nutritionist at a hospital for a day through the academy. Should I talk about how the academy allowed me to shadow her, even if I don’t want to major in nutrition? (I wasn’t able to choose who I wanted to shadow)

Is moving to US from a different country to attend high school considered an educational experience?

Would attending a college-prep school be an educational opportunity?

Would volunteering in community service be considered an educational opportunity?

Hi May, Yes, I believe it would be if you learned something. That’s how I define an “educational opportunity”–as an activity or experience where you had the chance to learn something, about yourself, others and/or the world. Janine

Hello! I attended a one week camp about learning leadership skills, do you think this would still be considered an “educational opportunity” if it doesn’t directly connect to my field of interest (a biological science)?

Hi Ann, Yes, I think you could write about what you learned at this camp as an “educational opportunity.” I would make sure to make what you write highly personal and share what you learned. You could also use this for UC Prompt 1, I would think. I don’t believe these prompts all need to directly link to your field of interest, although that’s optimal if you can swing it. Good luck! Janine

Hi Is summer session in duke university considered an educational experience?

hello, is writing about getting a job considered educational experience?

Hi, does taking college courses at a local college while in high school count?

Is a dual enrollment course an educational experience?

I would think so.

I believe so. If you learned something from an experience, it’s educational.

Hello, is a diagnosed illness considered an educational barrier if it affected my academics as well

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Click logo to visit Home Page!

Need More Help?

As a professional writing coach, I help students, parents, counselors, teachers and others from around the world on these dreaded essays! Learn about my in-person and online tutoring, editing, workshops, books, and online courses, ... READ MORE... .

Online Course

Learn to write your essay in one hour.

My on-demand, fast-and-easy online e-course: How to Write a College App Essay (Click lightbulb for details.)

Perfect for The Common App, UCs, grad school, transfer and scholarship essays!

Buy Course for $99 and Start Now!

Find helpful posts.

• About Admissions Officers
• Add a Twist
• Admissions Advice
• Affordability and Success
• Anecdote How-To
• ApplyTexas Essays
• Avoid "English-ese"
• Beware English teachers
• Brainstorm Guide
• Bump Up a Dull Essay
• Cappex Application essays
• Another Trick to Try
• Defining Qualities
• Focusing Your Topic
• Good Topics vs Bad Topics
• How to Stand Out
• Jumpstart Guide!
• Mundane Topics
• Risky Topics
• Show Your Grit
• The "Unexpected"
• Top Five Topic Tips
• Topic of Choice
• Topics to Avoid!
• Twilight as a Topic?
• Coalition for Access
• Coalition for Access Essay Strategies
• College Rejection
• Common App Prompt 7
• Common App: Prompt 1
• Common App: Prompt 2
• Common App: Prompt 3
• Common App: Prompt 4
• Common App: Prompt 5
• Common App: Prompt 6
• Commonly Asked Questions
• Conclusions
• Create Pathos
• Creative Writing
• English Teachers Help
• Essay Cheat Sheet
• Essay Contest
• Essay Hell's Writing Guides
• Essay Myths
• Essay Writing Guides
• Essay Writing Training
• Find Core Values
• First drafts
• Grabber Introductions
• Heavenly Essays Book
• Homeschooling
• How Format Common App Essay
• How to Describe a Place/Setting/World
• How to Recycle Essays
• How to Write a Conclusion
• How to Write Short Essays
• International Students
• Journal Writing
• Jumpstart Essay Experts
• Lesson Plans
• Math and Science Students
• How to manage your parents
• Personal Insight Questions
• Personal Statements
• Favorite Books
• Sample Essays
• Scholarship Essays
• Storytelling
• Supplemental Essay Tips
• Tufts Supplemental Essays
• University of Colorado Supp
• Why College X?
• Texas Essay Prompts
• How to Answer Prompt #1
• Golden Advice from a College Insider
• Title Your Essay
• TMI in Essays
• Top Essay Fears
• Transfer Essays
• Transfer Students
• UC Prompt #1
• UC Prompt #2
• UC Transfer Essays
• Uncategorized
• Underprivileged Students
• UC Prompt 4
• UC Prompt 5
• UC Prompt 8
• University of Texas essays
• Video Tutorials
• Waitlist Essays and Letter
• Warning to Top Students
• What Makes a Great Essay?
• When You Are Done
• Where to Start
• Why Essays Matter
• Be Specific
• Black and white thinking
• Don't Impress
• Final checklist
• Grabber introductions
• How Find Your Main Point\
• How to Add Depth
• How to add intellectual vitality
• How to Tell a Story
• How to Write an Anecdote
• Ladder of Abstraction
• Mini-Memoirs
• Online course for writing college admissions essays
• Self-editing
• Show AND Tell
• Show Don't Tell
• Tone and Voice
• Universal Truths
• Use Emotion
• Writing Contests

Bestselling Writing Guide!

Click book image to learn about all four of my popular writing guides!

Home of the  Perfect Score  Tutor

(949) 563 1009     [email protected]

• Feb 16, 2022

Guide to UC Personal Insight Question #4: Greatest Educational Opportunity/Barrier

Welcome to Thinque Prep's series on the UC Personal Insight Question responses. You can access other posts in the series at the following links...

10 Top Tips for Your Best UC Personal Insight Question Responses

Guide to UC PIQ #1: Leadership Experience

Guide to UC PIQ #2: Creativity

Guide to UC PIQ #3: Greatest Talent

Guide to UC PIQ #5: Greatest Challenge

Guide to UC PIQ #6: Favorite Academic Subject

Guide to UC PIQ #7: Community Service

Guide to UC PIQ #8: Free Response

This post will focus on the fourth Personal Insight Question option, which is concerned with educational opportunities/barriers.

Question Breakdown

Here's the text of PIQ #4 , straight from UC's website :

Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

Let's establish one fundamental thing: this prompt asks that you write about an education opportunity OR barrier - not both! So you've got to make a choice. Before doing so, let me define what this PIQ's important terms even mean.

UC defines an "educational opportunity" as "anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for college." They provide a few examples: "honors or enrichment program[s], enrollment in an academy that's geared toward an occupation or major, or taking advanced courses that interest you."

I know I always benefit from a little more specificity, so let me provide a few more concrete examples of what an educational opportunity might look like:

A summer science program during which you created a research project in molecular biology

An internship with a state legislator that allowed you to pursue your interests in political science/law

Dual enrollment at a community college so you can take more advanced math courses than what's offered at your high school

To be honest, writing about an educational opportunity for PIQ #4 is easier if you already feel confident about your choice of major. This is because you can really demonstrate your interest in and dedication to your intended area of study. Of course, you can still write a good opportunity essay if you're undeclared, but if you're sure about your major and you have a suitable opportunity in mind, responding to this PIQ is a great choice.

Before getting into more detail about the educational opportunity option, let me first clarify this prompt's second part: the option to write about an "educational barrier." In their Guide for Freshman Applicants worksheet UC defines educational barriers as "any barriers or challenges related to school and/or your schoolwork." In other words, an educational barrier is something that interfered with your learning and performance at school.

Here's a list of examples that would qualify as educational barriers:

Your school didn't offer a particular AP you wanted to take

You had to take ESL classes before or alongside taking regular courses

You struggled with a learning difference like ADD, ADHD, or dyslexia

You had to care for your younger siblings over the summer, so you couldn't take part in a particular summer enrichment program you were interested in

That list is NOT exhaustive; even if none of the above apply to you, you can definitely still write a strong barrier essay. However, a couple of topics I notably excluded from the list are failing an exam and/or not doing well in a particular class because you didn't do your homework, ditched classes, zoned out during lectures, etc. Think of educational barriers as things that were outside of your control, not a result of your own behaviors.

What does have to do with your behavior is the way you overcame the barrier you encountered. If you choose to write about an educational barrier for this PIQ, its focus should be how you faced the problem and what you learned in the process.

Questions to Consider

If you choose to write about an educational opportunity, your response should address these essential questions:

What was the opportunity?

What did the opportunity allow you to do (IN DETAIL)?

How did you seize this opportunity to the fullest?

What did you learn?

How have you already applied what you learned?

How can you apply what you learned in the future?

*#6 is optional. Describing how you can apply what you learned in your academic/professional future is certainly on-topic, but I wouldn't say it's strictly necessary.

If you choose to write about an educational barrier, your response should address these essential questions:

What was the barrier?

What challenge did it present to your learning and/or performance at school?

What did you do about it?

What kinds of skills did you use or develop in the process?

What was the outcome?

How can you apply what you learned from this experience in the future?

Whether you choose to write about an opportunity or a barrier, I suggest you simply copy/paste the 6 questions appropriate to your topic in a document and start answering all of them with some brief sentences and/or bullet points. Don't rush. Don't be anxious about getting wording or structure "perfect." Be thoughtful. Take time for reflection.

Once you've thoroughly answered the questions above, you will have formed a solid rough draft. Just keep coming back to your writing, adding more detail, cutting material that might have gone a little off-topic, organizing your writing into paragraphs, and polishing your spelling and grammar.

My other suggestion? Ask someone to read your writing. Give them the 6 questions above and ask how thoroughly you answered each of them. Also consider showing them the thesis you came up with and asking them how well they think you stayed true to it throughout the essay. Friends and family can be excellent readers. You should also consider having a professional writing coach check out your work. Thinque Prep's college counseling and essay help services can help you out at any step in the essay-writing process, from brainstorming to your final draft.

Example PIQ #4 Response

Finally, let's check out a real example response to PIQ #4 .

Despite facing some initial prejudices, being a girl in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) program has significantly built me up. Growing up as a Girl Scout, I was frustrated with the differences in programs offered to the boys and girls; I longed for the chance to get my hands dirty and participate in typically "masculine" activities. When I learned that BSA was accepting female members for the first time in history, I immediately joined.

However, excitement quickly turned to intimidation as the large group of all boys flaunted long lists of scouting achievements. I had no Boy Scout awards or badges to prove my worth as a girl in a traditionally boys' program; I stuck out like a sore thumb. At that moment, I decided that I would not try to blend in. I will always be the different one in the group due to my gender, and I will emphasize my differences by showing them that a girl can do all that they do and better.

I set my eyes on the Thomas Edison Award, the highest and rarest STEM award for Boy Scouts. Over the course of one year, I did all I could to be considered for the award. I completed Supernova-approved merit badges, worked on two STEM projects on the eruption patterns of the Old Faithful Geyser and on the science of movie-making, and entered in a regional science fair with a demonstration of the relationship between the width of planes and their gliding time. Afterwards, I organized a Space Exploration day for cub scouts and researched G5 technology, presenting my hypothesis on how it might further affect our society.

I loved the combination of STEM and outdoor work that Boy Scouts offered, completely immersing myself in these offerings. My hard work finally paid off, and I was honored to receive the award in 2020! Besides proving that I was just as capable as the boys, my journey taught me that opportunities will present themselves to those who seek them, and that I have a life-long responsibility to develop myself and learn all I can.

Ready to get more in-depth with the next question? Check out Guide to UC Personal Insight Question #5: Greatest Challenge for more insight on how to make your UC application essays shine.

Nina Calabretta is a college English instructor, tutor, and writer native to Orange County, CA. When she’s not writing or helping students improve their skills as readers, writers, and critical thinkers, she can be found hiking the local trails with friends and family or curled up with a good book and her cat, Betsy. She has been part of the ThinquePrep team since 2018.

With offices located in beautiful Orange County, ThinquePrep specializes in the personalized mentorship of students and their families through the entire college preparation process and beyond. With many recent changes to college admissions - standardized tests, financial aid, varied admissions processes - the educational landscape has never been more competitive or confusing. We’re here from the first summer program to the last college acceptance letter. It’s never too early to start thinking about your student’s future, so schedule your complimentary consultation today!

Recent Posts

Mastering the Orange County Common App Essay: Expert Guidance

Exam Prep 101: How Private High School Tutoring in Irvine Boosts Test Scores

Mastering AP Calculus: A Comprehensive Guide to Success in Irvine

• Ideas for Action
• Join the MAHB
• Why Join the MAHB?
• Current Associates
• Current Nodes
• What is the MAHB?
• Who is the MAHB?
• Acknowledgments

Why Is Education So Important in The Quest for Equality?

Gerald Nelson | April 14, 2022 | Leave a Comment

Image: Pikist

Education is vital. We can all agree on this but where we fall out of the agreement is why exactly education is so necessary for equality. Without education, there can be no progress, no development, and no improvement. 

In today’s world, we are ever more aware of the issues surrounding sexism, racism, and inequality, allowing for a greater understanding of the importance of educating people to avoid these biases occurring in the first place.

What is Educational Equality and why is it necessary? 

Equality isn’t always so simple. Some may assume, for example, that educational equality is as simple as providing children with the same resources. In reality, however, there’s a lot more to it than this. We will check what governments are doing to achieve this goal. What actions they are taking to advance the cause of equality? Education is crucial because it’s a toolkit for success:

• With literacy and numeracy comes confidence, with which comes self-respect. And by having self-respect, you can respect others, their accomplishments, and their cultures.
• Education is the fundamental tool for achieving social, economic, and civil rights – something which all societies strive to achieve.

Educational Inequality is usually defined as the unequal distribution of educational resources among different groups in society. The situation becomes serious when it starts influencing how people live their lives. For example, children will be less likely to go to school if they are not healthy, or educated because other things are more urgent in their life.

Categorical Educational Inequality

Categorical Education Inequality is especially apparent when comparing minority/low-income schools with majority/high-income schools. Are better-off students systematically favored in getting ahead? There are three plausible conditions:

• Higher-income parents can spend more time and money on private tutoring, school trips, and home study materials to give their children better opportunities. Therefore, better-off students have an advantage due to access to better schools, computers, technology, etc. (the so-called opportunity gap).
• Low-income schools lack the resources to educate their students. Therefore their students tend to have worse educational outcomes.
• Although the public school system is a government-funded program to allow all students an equal chance at a good education, this is not the case for most schools across third world countries – see UNESCO statistics below:

How Educational Inequality is fueling global issues

Educational inequality is a major global crisis. It has played a role in economic problems, amplified the political deadlock, exacerbated the environmental predicament, and threatens to worsen the human rights crisis. If equality in education is not addressed directly, these crises will only deepen because: 

• Educational Inequality is also about  race and gender . Those who are less privileged are condemned to poverty and unemployment because of a lack of quality educational resources. 
• Without a sound education, people have  less knowledge  of the world around them or the issues facing their communities. They are less likely to vote or to pay attention to politics. This leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by those who represent narrow interests and promote fear, hatred, and violence. The result is an erosion of democratic values and an increase in authoritarianism.
• Without correction,  human rights abuses  will continue due to a lack of legal representation among those with no or low education levels.
• Poverty, unemployment, crimes, and health issues: A lack of education and skills forces children into poverty because they can’t get jobs or start a business. It also leaves them without hope and is one of the reasons for unemployment, lower life expectancy, malnutrition, a higher chance of chronic diseases, and crime rates.
• Limited opportunities: The most significant issue is that lack of education reduces the opportunities for people to have a decent life. Limited options increase the division of social classes, lower social mobility, and reduce the ability to build networks and social contacts. Students in poor countries also spend a lot of time working to support their families rather than focusing on their school work. These factors also worsen the upbringing of coming generations.
• Extremism:  Inequality can also lead to increased violence, racism, gender bias, and extremism, which causes further economic and democratic challenges.  
• Inability to survive pandemics:  Unlike developed nations after COVID, underdeveloped countries are stuck in their unstable economic cycles. Inequality causes a lack of awareness and online educational resources, lower acceptance of preventive measures, and unaffordable vaccines, for example. According to the  United Nations , “Before the coronavirus crisis, projections showed that  more than 200 million children would be out of school , and only 60 percent of young people would be completing upper secondary education in 2030”.
• Unawareness of technological advancements: The world is becoming more tech-savvy, while students in underdeveloped countries remain unaware of the latest technological achievements as well as unable to implement them. This also widens the education gap between countries.
• Gender inequality in education:  In general, developing countries compromise over funds allocation for women’s education to manage their depletion of national income. As such, they consider women less efficient and productive than men. Meanwhile, many parents do not prefer sending their daughters to school because they do not think that women can contribute equally to men in the country’s development. However, if we have to overcome this, there should be an increase in funding and scholarships for women’s education.
• Environmental crises:  People are usually less aware of the harmful emissions produced in their surroundings and are therefore less prepared to deal with increased pollution levels. This also affects climate change. The less educated the children, the more likely they are to contribute to climate change as adults. This is because education is not just about learning facts and skills but also about recognizing problems and applying knowledge in innovative ways. 
• A child who has dropped out of school will generally  contribute less to society  than a child who has completed secondary school. A child who has completed secondary school will contribute less than a child who went to university. This difference increases over time because those with higher levels of education tend to be more open-minded, flexible thinkers and are therefore better able to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

Equality in education is therefore essential for addressing international issues including economic inequality, climate change, social deprivation, and access to healthcare. Many children in poor regions are deprived of education (see chart below) which is the only way out of poverty .

Proposed Solutions 

The United Nations Development Program says that access to education is a human right, and should be individually accessible and available to all by 2030. It demands:

• International collaborations to ensure that every child has the same quality education and to develop joint curricula and academic programs. The quality of teaching methodologies should not be compromised and includes providing financial assistance and tools for equal access.
• Running campaigns to discourage race, gender, and ethnicity differences, arranging more seminars to reach low-income groups, and providing adequate financial assistance, training, and part-time jobs for sole earners.  
• Modifying scholarship criteria to better support deserving students who cannot afford university due to language tests and low grades. 
• Increasing the minimum wage so that sole breadwinners can afford quality education for their children.  
• Schools should bear transportation costs and offer free grants to deserving kids from low-income families.
• Giving more attention to slum-side schools by updating and implementing new techniques and resources. 
• Allowing students to learn in their own language with no enforcement of international languages and offering part-time courses in academies and community colleges in other languages. 

Resolving educational inequality has many benefits for the wider society. Allowing children from disadvantaged backgrounds to get an education will help them find better jobs with higher salaries, improving their quality of life, and making them more productive members of society. It decreases the likelihood of conflict and increases access to health care, stable economic growth, and unlimited opportunities.

Conclusion:

It’s been said that great minds start out as small ones. To level the playing field, we need to focus on best educating our next generation of innovators and leaders, both from an individual and a societal standpoint. If we want equality to become a reality, it will be up to us to ensure that equality is at the forefront of our education system.

References:

Environmental Conscience: 42 Causes, Effects & Solutions for a Lack of Education – E&C (environmental-conscience.com)

School of Education Online Programs: What the U.S. Education System Needs to Reduce Inequality | American University

Educational Inequality: Solutions | Educational Inequality (wordpress.com)

Giving Compass: Seven Solutions for Education Inequality · Giving Compass

Science.org: Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline

Research Gate: Inequality and Economic Growth

University of Munich: pdf (uni-muenchen.de)

Research Gate: Effects-of-inequality-and-poverty-vs-teachers-and-schooling-on-Americas-youth.pdf (researchgate.net)

Borgen Magzine

United Nations: Education as the Pathway towards Gender Equality

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – Education

This article has been edited in line with our guidelines

Gerald Nelson is a freelance academic essay writer at perfectessaywriting.com who also works with several e ducational and human rights organizations. 

The MAHB Blog is a venture of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. Questions should be directed to [email protected]

Think you can get into a top-10 school? Take our chance-me calculator... if you dare. 🔥

Last updated March 21, 2024

Every piece we write is researched and vetted by a former admissions officer. Read about our mission to pull back the admissions curtain.

Blog > Essay Examples , UC Essays > 8 Outstanding UC Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

8 Outstanding UC Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Kylie Kistner, MA Former Willamette University Admissions

Key Takeaway

We talk a lot about essays in the college application process. And for good reason. Essays are one of the most critical parts of your application, and the University of California Personal Insight Questions are no different. Even though they’re quite different from personal statements or supplemental essays , UC essays serve a similar purpose: to help admissions officers get to know you and envision you on their campus.

But the tricky thing about UC essays is that they have a very particular style and form. If you don’t write your UC essays in the right way, you risk tanking your application.

Writing them the right way, however, can land you in the admit pile.

So how do you write your own outstanding UC essays? We recommend you start by reading outstanding examples.

As writing coaches, we know that the best way to become a better writer is to read. More specifically, if there’s a type of writing you want to improve on, then you should read more in that genre.

For you, that means reading UC essays to help prepare you to write your own.

And in this post, you won’t just be reading example UC essays. You’ll also see commentary from former admissions officers that will help guide you through why each essay works.

Let’s get started.

The UC Personal Insight Question Prompts

The University of California system, which consists of nine campuses across the state, requires students to apply directly via their institutional application portal. That means that you won’t be submitting your Common Application to them or writing school-specific supplemental essays. Instead, you’ll choose four of the following eight prompts to respond to.

Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time.

Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.

What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?

Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?

Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?

Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California?

Once you have your prompts chosen, the essays themselves should be no greater than 350 words each.

Together, your essays should be different but cohesive enough to tell a fairly complete story of who you are.

Before we get to the examples, we have a few tips to keep you on track.

How to Write the UC Personal Insight Questions

Okay, so we actually have a whole other comprehensive guide to the UC essays that breaks down the process in extreme detail.

So for now, we’ll just go over the essentials.

What’s helpful about the UC PIQs is that we don’t have to guess what admissions officers are looking for—the UCs tell us directly in the Points of Comprehensive Review . Read through all thirteen points, but pay special attention to #10. That’s where your essays will be doing the heaviest lifting.

With that in mind, there are four rules for writing UC essays that you should stick to like glue:

Answer the prompt.

We’ll say it again for the people in the back: answer the prompt! The UC essay prompts ask very specific questions and contain multiple parts. If you misinterpret the prompt, you may end up writing the completely wrong essay.

You might find that diagramming or annotating the prompts helps you pull out the important pieces. Break down what each of your chosen prompts asks you to do, and list out all the questions in order. That way, you’ll make sure you’re not missing anything.

Skip the fluff.

Your personal statement likely has some creative descriptions or metaphors. You may have even incorporated figurative or poetic language into your supplementals. And that’s great. In fact, that’s encouraged (within reason, of course).

But UC essays are different. They’re all business.

Whereas your personal statement might open with an attention-catching hook that describes a scene in vivid detail, your UC essays should jump straight in. In general, your essay should be organized in a clear way that tells a straightforward story.

Focus on action steps.

As we saw in the Points of Comprehensive Review, admissions officers want to learn about how your concrete experiences have shaped you. That means that your essays should revolve around action steps rather than, say, 350 words of intense personal reflection. What those action steps should look like will depend on the prompts you’ve chosen. But by the end of your essay, your admissions officers should know what you’ve done and why.

Show a strength.

In the UC essays, it’s easy to get caught up in the details of the prompt and style of the essay. But don’t lose sight of the purpose of any college essay in the process: to showcase a strength to your admissions officers.

Every UC essay you write should correspond with a specific strength. That might be wisdom, artistry, good judgement, entrepreneurship, leadership—you get the idea.

Let’s say you want one of your essays to demonstrate leadership. The idea isn’t that you come out and say, “This shows that I am a leader.” Instead, by the end of the essay, after reading about everything you’ve done and reflected on, your admissions officers should sit back in their chair and say, “Wow, that student is a leader.” You’ll see what we mean in the examples.

Because of all these golden rules, your UC essays will look quite different than your Common Application essay or supplementals. They’ll probably look quite different from any essay you’ve written.

That’s where examples come in handy. Ready to dive in?

UC Prompt 1: Leadership

1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time.

Prompt 1 Example Essay

When we moved to a new neighborhood, my dad always complained about the house next to us. Full of weeds and random objects, it had clearly been neglected(( Notice how, at least compared with common application personal essays, the tone of this essay is much more staid?)) .

I didn’t pay much attention to his complaints until one day when I saw that our neighbor was an elderly man. He was struggling to bring his trash to the bins outside. Suddenly, it all clicked. If taking out the garbage was a challenge, then surely he wasn’t able to do yard work. That’s why it looked neglected.

My dad always taught me that leadership isn’t about giving orders. It’s about doing what needs to be done(( A direct, succinct definition of leadership.)) . With this advice in mind, I decided that I would help our neighbor.

After my realization, I went and knocked on our neighbor’s door. I introduced myself and learned that his name was Hank. When the time was right, I informed him that I’d be cutting our grass the following weekend and would love to cut his as well. Hank initially refused.

Speaking with Hank, I learned that leadership is also about listening to people’s needs(( Showing a lesson from the experience.)) . In that moment, Hank needed to be reassured that I wanted to help. I told him it would be easy for me to cross over to his yard while I had the equipment out. He finally agreed.

The next Saturday, I got to work. The job would be bigger than I expected. All the objects needed to be picked up before I could mow. I decided to enlist the help of my two younger siblings. At first, they said no. But a good leader knows how to inspire, so I told them about Hank and explained why it was important to help. Together, we cleaned up the yard. Now, each time I mow our lawn, I mow Hank’s afterward.

Through this experience, I learned that leadership is about seeing problems and finding solutions. Most importantly, it’s about attitude and kindness(( The author of this essay does a good job staying focused on a clear definition.)) . The neighborhood is grateful that the eyesore is gone, Hank is grateful for the help, and I am grateful for my new friend.

Word Count: 343

UC Essay Checklist

Does the writer convey a strength?

Yes. The writer shows initiative in seeking out the neighbor and willingness to help in all the hard work they did.

Is every part of the prompt answered?

Yes. Since this prompt has an “or,” we know that the writer doesn’t have to meet every single criterion listed. They respond to the “positively influenced others” part of the prompt, which we can see through their interactions with their neighbor.

Does the writer adhere to UC conventions?

Yes. The essay is straightforward and clearly organized. The writer lists action steps in chronological order.

UC Prompt 2: Creativity

2. Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.

Prompt 2 Example Essay

As a cellist, I express my creativity through music(( Directly answering the prompt up front. )) . Whether I’m playing in a symphony, chamber orchestra, quartet, or solo performance, I bring my art to the world with my instrument. My creativity has transformed me from a small child playing out of tune to a solo artist featured in my state’s youth symphony.

I’ve loved music from a young age, and I began playing the cello when I was six years old. What began as a hobby to keep an energetic child engaged has become my life’s purpose.

At first, I only played along with my private lesson teacher, Ms. Smith. I loved dancing my fingers across the fingerboard, plucking the strings, and making screeching noises with my bow. Ms. Smith told my parents that I had promise but needed to develop discipline. Despite my young age, I listened. By the time I reached middle school, I had made principal cellist in my school’s orchestra. Leading a section of fellow cellists brought my creativity to a whole new level. Not only was I expressing myself through my own music, but I also expressed myself through my leadership. With a subtle nod or an expressive sway, I learned to shape the music those behind me played. I felt most comfortable and free when I was playing my cello.

That feeling only grew as I moved into high school. In ninth grade, I landed my first solo. With it came a new creative sensation: stage fright(( This part of the essay distracts a bit from the main theme.)) . Until then, I’d only experienced positive emotions while playing. I needed to make solo performance more positive. With endless practice and exercises like playing for the public on the sidewalk, I learned that solo performance is simply a way to share my love of music with those around me.

Now, as principal cellist of my state’s youth orchestra, I jump at the chance to perform any solo I can get. Getting to this point has taken me countless late nights practicing in my bedroom and weekends spent in rehearsals. But without my cello to express my creative side, I wouldn’t be me.

Word Count: 347

Yes. The writer is an artist—a musician specifically. Their creativity shines through.

Yes. This prompt is pretty straightforward: “Describe how you express your creative side,” which the writer does by describing their love of the cello. Notice how the writer doesn’t just say they’re creative because they play the cello. They describe that creativity in detail.

Mostly. The short paragraph about stage fright takes us on a slight detour from the prompt. To make this essay even better, the writer could have eliminated that anecdote or reframed it to be more about creative expression.

UC Prompt 3: Talent or Skill

3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?

Prompt 3 Example Essay

How many toes does an armadillo have? What were the main causes of the Crimean War? Who discovered atoms? When my friends or family have questions, they come to me for answers. I am an expert researcher. Although my passion for research began as a fun hobby, it has evolved into one of my greatest skills(( The writer opens with an interesting but not too out-there hook and then gets straight to answering the prompt.)) .

My first real mystery came when I was in ninth grade. My mom wanted to track down an old friend from high school but hadn’t had any luck searching on her own. Having grown up with the internet, I was my mom’s best chance. Not sure where to begin, I took to YouTube tutorials. Using the few family details my mom remembered, I tracked down the friend’s brother then found the friend’s married name(( Here’s a great example of what the skill looks like.)) . Alas–we found her on social media. I felt triumphant as I saw the happiness wash over my mom’s face.

Since then, my skill has grown exponentially(( And here the writer gets at the “developed and demonstrated the talent over time” part of the prompt.)) . Combining my natural curiosity with my love of history, I’ve advanced my research skills by volunteering with my local library for the past two years. I have learned about how keywords and search engines work, practiced cataloging and archiving, and waded my way through the intricacies of the library’s database technology. Suddenly, researching wasn’t just about finding people’s Facebook profiles. It was about having any information I wanted to find at my fingertips.

Access to information is more important now than ever. That’s why I decided to put my research knowledge to work. Part of being a good researcher is teaching others how to access information too, so I founded the SOHS Research Club. We begin each meeting by raising the hardest question we can think of, and I use the projector in the library to walk club members through my research process. Members have all gone on to share their knowledge with their friends and family. The SOHS Research Club has spread information literacy to my whole community(( Gesturing to the greater significance of the skill)) .

Looking ahead to all the ways my research skills will improve in college, I know that I’ll be ready to find an answer for anything.

Word Count: 350

Yes. We see that they’re not only skilled at research but also that they want to support their community.

Yes—but. The prompt asks about your greatest talent or skill . It also asks how you have developed and demonstrated that talent over time. The writer does answer these questions, but I’d like to see more about when the SOHS Research Club took place as part of this development.

Yes. The essay is clear, organized, and to-the-point.

UC Prompt 4: Educational Opportunity or Barrier

4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

Prompt 4 Example Essay

I jump at any chance to get my hands dirty. I am an aspiring ecologist. I’m lucky enough to live in a college town, so I was elated last semester when a postdoctoral fellow invited me to join her research team(( Okay, looks like this writer is addressing the “how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity” part of the prompt.)) .

Although at first(( Good signposting and transitions. UC essays should be clear and straightforward. This writer easily walks us through the step-by-step of what happened.)) I was intimidated by the prospect of working alongside college students and faculty, I decided to embrace the opportunity to learn what being an ecologist is really like.

The project involved studying Asclepias syriaca populations in my local park. More commonly known as Milkweed, this flower species has a long and important history in North America, particularly for Indigenous people. After learning about its history as a food source, medicine, and critical part of ecological function, I couldn’t wait to be part of the research.

As a research assistant, I helped with data collection. We began by using twine to section off population groups in the park. Then, every week I returned to the populations to collect information about population growth. I counted the number of flowers in the population, and, with a clear ruler, I measured and recorded the height of every individual flower.

The work was tedious. On my hands and knees, I squinted at the millimeter markings, trying to obtain the most accurate measurements possible. Each week, I’d return home with muddy jeans and a smile on my face.

Participating in this research project taught me that being an ecologist is about much more than looking at plants(( Going beyond the research to reflect on lessons learned—nice!)) . It’s also about learning from mentors and engaging with and having respect for the historical context of the plants we study. Being a scientist is also not as glamorous as movies like Jurassic Park lead on. Instead, science requires careful planning, patience, and hard work.

But what I learned the most from this educational opportunity is that science doesn’t exist in some nebulous place. It exists right here in front of me. I look forward to continuing to use science to serve my community.

Word count: 328

Yes. We see their intellectual curiosity and willingness to learn through their research journey.

Yes. We have another “or” prompt! This time they’ve chosen to focus on an “educational opportunity,” which is the research project. They certainly explain how they “took advantage” of it.

Yes. There’s no fluff, just a coherent narrative focused on actions the writer took.

UC Prompt 5: Challenge

5. Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?

Prompt 5 Example Essay

While most kids fear monsters, my greatest fear has always been tests. Since elementary school, I’ve dealt with incapacitating test anxiety. I’d sit down for a spelling test and faint from anxiety(( Straight into answering the prompt)) . Math tests in middle school would make me run to the bathroom ill. By the time I reached high school, where the testing stakes became even higher, my test anxiety increased exponentially.

More than normal feelings of nervousness or anxiousness, it is a diagnosis I wrestle with daily. Test anxiety caused me to miss a number of tests that I had no option to re-take. It’s caused me to receive abysmal scores on standardized and state tests, which has had repercussions in the classes I’m allowed to take(( Strategically, this was a good prompt for this student to answer because it gives them a way to contextualize any poor grades they earned early in high school. It also gets at the “academic achievement” part of the prompt.)) . My test anxiety has been the greatest challenge of my life. In a school system so reliant on testing, it has completely affected my ability to achieve academically.

By the time I took the PSATs, I couldn’t even move my hand to write my name. I knew something had to change. I reached out for help. My mom knew I had been struggling but didn’t understand the extent of my illness. Together, we contacted my school counselor, who told us how to find a therapist.

With my doctors, I worked to mitigate the effects of my test anxiety on a medical and psychological level(( Action steps! This prompt requires you to talk about the specific steps you took to overcome the challenge. The writer does exactly that in this paragraph.)) . I began taking beta-blockers that helped slow my heart rate, thus tricking my body into being less anxious. Alongside that, I spent months working through the reasons my brain interpreted testing as such a threat. I learned to appreciate my intrinsic value instead of relying on external factors like test scores. And rather than viewing tests as chances to fail, I began to understand them as opportunities to showcase my growth.

Now, after two long years of effort, I can take any test with ease. Since learning how to manage my disorder, I’ve successfully taken my driver’s test, SATs and ACTs, and all seven of my AP exams. I’m looking forward to all the tests I’ll take in college(( And we end on a very positive note that shows lots of growth)) .

Yes—which is difficult with this prompt. The writer doesn’t get bogged down in the challenge of having test anxiety. Instead, they use this prompt as an opportunity to show a strength: resilience to overcome such a difficult problem.

Yes. And this prompt has multiple parts, too. It wants you to describe 1) a challenge, 2) the steps you’ve taken to overcome the challenge, and 3) how the challenge affected your academic achievement. This writer does all three.

Yes. The writer doesn’t provide any poetic descriptions or metaphors. They say what they mean.

UC Prompt 6: Academic Interest

6.  Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

Prompt 6 Example Essay

Sitting in front of my baby cousin, I held my hands in front of my face. I quickly snapped them down and exclaimed, “Peek-a-boo!” Delighted, he erupted into laughter. From the perspective of my more developed brain, this game is quite boring. It’s overly repetitive, and the outcome—my face reveal—is basic and consistent. But to a brain that hasn’t yet gone through the sensorimotor phase of development, the game is a downright hoot. What I perceive as boring is actually magic to a baby’s mind. Without the concept of object permanence, my cousin thinks that I disappear completely behind my hands. When my face returns, he marvels as I inexplicably materialize in front of him. It’s no wonder he can play peek-a-boo for hours.

Since I took IB Psychology my sophomore year, I have been fascinated with child psychology(( It takes a paragraph before we get to the prompt (a bit too long), but I like the nerdiness the writer shows in the intro)) . No matter when or where we are born, we all undergo similar stages of development that help us understand the world around us. Imagine Albert Einstein chewing on a rock or Genghis Khan taking his first steps. Researching child development unlocks something universal and equalizing about the human experience.

Because of my interest in child psychology, I decided to get more involved with my community. I began by volunteering in a psychology lab at my local university. While there, I get our child participants settled before sessions. Occasionally I get to help with data collection. I also landed a job as a teacher’s aide at a nearby Head Start, where I feed lunches, play, and read. In both of these activities, I’ve learned so much about how to interact with toddlers, to think like they think, and to help them grow into kind and happy children(( This paragraph shows exactly how they’ve furthered their interest.)) .

My school doesn’t offer any additional psychology courses, so I took a community college class this summer. I’m looking forward to taking more advanced psychology classes as a psychology major, and I’m eager to bring the research skills I’ve been developing to one of the UC’s many child development labs. One day, I hope to use all these skills as a child therapist.

Word Count: 348

Yes. The student is very intellectually curious about child development—a perfect strength for this prompt.

Yes. The writer talks about an academic subject, child development, and describes how they advanced that interest through a research lab, classes, and a job at Head Start.

Yes—but. Overall, the essay does a great job adhering to UC essay conventions. But the first paragraph almost doesn’t. As it is, the writer stays focused on telling the story. However, it takes up quite a bit of space in the essay without really conveying much about the writer’s journey. If there were a metaphor or any poetic language in there, it would have been too far. Same goes for the snippet about Einstein and Genghis Khan—it adds personality but is close to overdoing it.

UC Prompt 7: School or Community

7. What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?

Prompt 7 Example Essay

Nourishing loved ones by cooking for them is one of my biggest passions. But my hobby has become more difficult since moving to a food desert. Food deserts are areas without easy access to grocery stores or healthy foods. These disparities are clear in the school cafeteria, with the majority of students eating processed school lunches or packaged foods brought from home. I decided to do something about it.

The idea came to me one day as I made my way from AP Biology to my cooking elective. We needed a school community garden(( The writer sets up the stakes in the introduction so we truly understand the situation here)) . If we couldn’t access fresh foods in our neighborhood, then we would grow our own. We just needed a space to grow them and money to buy supplies.

I began by finding a spot to plant our garden. My friends and I walked around the entire school and decided that the courtyard would be the perfect place. After explaining my idea to the Assistant Principal, I got permission to proceed.

Next(( This paragraph is full of good action steps)) I raised money for the supplies. With $20 in seed money from my parents, which I promptly paid back, I drew and printed stickers to sell at lunch. The stickers were anthropomorphized vegetables. They cost $0.10 per sticker to make, and I sold them for $1.00 each. Soon enough, I had not only raised enough money to set up the garden, but I had rallied the whole school around my cause. Thirty of my classmates showed up, vegetable stickers on their water bottles, to help me plant the garden.

For the last year, we’ve maintained a spread of seasonal vegetables in the garden. We bring a basket to the cooking elective teacher each week so students can practice cooking with fresh vegetables, and we hold a daily farm stand at lunch(( And we see that they are legitimately improving their community)) . At the stand, students can grab whatever fresh produce they want to add to their lunch.

My school’s garden nourishes my community, and I am nourished every day by the fact that my efforts have made a true difference to those around me.

Word Count: 341

Yes. The writer shows really great initiative and community understanding in their willingness to start a community garden from scratch.

Yes. With only one question, this prompt is pretty straightforward. And the writer’s answer is simple: to make their school community a better place, they made a community garden.

Yes. The writer goes into detail about every step they took to make the community garden come to life. I especially like how the writer goes beyond these details to emphasize how much the community garden impacted the school community.

UC Prompt 8: Additional Information

8. Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California?

Prompt 8 Example Essay

When I posted a TikTok video of myself studying, I didn’t expect anyone but my friends to see it. But within hours, my video had gone viral— tens of thousands of people(( That’s a lot of people. This shows the magnitude and impact of the video.)) saw the carefully-crafted shots I’d taken of my desk setup and homework timelapse. The comment section flooded. People appreciated the work I’d put into curating the perfect desk. They thanked me for inspiring them to get started on their own homework. I was overwhelmed by the response.

At first I felt really shy. What if people from school saw it and made fun of me? I kept questioning myself so much that I completely froze. Finally, one comment caught my attention. It read, “I’ve been having a hard semester and can barely get myself out of bed, let alone to do my homework. But this is so calming! Maybe I’ll try.” That comment made me realize that it didn’t matter what people at my school thought. What mattered was that I loved making that video and it had made an actual difference in the lives of the people who saw it.

And that’s when I decided to make my mark on #StudyTok(( This is a pretty unique topic that wouldn’t have necessarily fit into the other prompt categories, which makes it a good candidate for prompt #8.)) . Since that first video, I’ve posted 318 others and accumulated over 35,000 followers(( More numbers to show impact)) . I’ve had more videos go viral and reach hundreds of thousands of people looking for work inspiration. Even the videos that some would see as “fails” still reach a couple hundred people. That may not be a big deal in the Internet world, but those same people would fill up my high school’s auditorium. My goal for every video is to make my viewers feel relaxed and able to take on whatever work they have to do. It helps me and my viewers complete our work.

These videos have made me more confident and organized, and I can’t wait to continue them in college. When I get an extra assignment or have to stay up late to finish a paper, I become excited instead of frustrated because I know that the little StudyTok community I’ve created will be there right alongside me.(( This conclusion drives home the what “makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the UC” part of the prompt.))

Yes. They show creativity through their video production and leadership through their huge community impact.

Mostly. This prompt is a tricky one to answer because its components aren’t as straightforward as the others. Through such a huge impact, the writer makes it implicitly clear why this story demonstrates that they are a good candidate for admissions to the UC, but the message could be more explicit.

Yes. The writer conveys the sequence of events in a clear and organized way, and they use good metrics to show the impact of their videos.

Key Takeaways

Did you catch our golden rules throughout? Yep. That’s what makes these essays stand out, and that’s what’ll make your essays stand out, too.

And even though these essays come from different students, hopefully you also got a sense of how an admissions officer reads a portfolio of essays for a single student.

Remember: just like your other applications, your overall goal for your UC application is to create a cohesive application narrative that shows your core strengths.

Having read all these essays, you’re now well on your way to writing your own. Try jumping into the Essay Academy or our UC essay writing guide  for help getting started.

Liked that? Try this next.

20 College Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

How A Selective Admissions Office Reads 50k Applications In A Season

How to Write Supplemental Essays that Will Impress Admissions Officers

"the only actually useful chance calculator i’ve seen—plus a crash course on the application review process.".

Irena Smith, Former Stanford Admissions Officer

We built the best admissions chancer in the world . How is it the best? It draws from our experience in top-10 admissions offices to show you how selective admissions actually works.

UC Prompt #4: Embracing Opportunities, Overcoming Barriers

• October 7, 2023
• College Essays

UC prompt #4: Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

This one is a double prompt, so choose your own adventure. You could write about your favorite honors course, a special trip you took, an after-school activity, or anything else that shaped you into the student you are today. On the other hand, you could write about a time you had to dig deep to achieve success despite the odds. Either path is fine.

But it might be worth considering why the UCs are inviting you to address this prompt in the first place. Think about it from their point of view: to offer someone admission to the best public university system in the country is a pretty significant educational opportunity, right? If they sense that you are someone who can take full advantage of their courses, programs, and resources, they’re more likely to let you in.

On the flip slide, first-year college students can face any number of challenges: new expectations, difficult courses, the exciting but also grueling process of choosing a different major. These universities want to know that you have what it takes to persevere in tough situations.

Here are a few tips to make your UC Essay Prompt #4 stand out:

• If you write about an educational opportunity, be sincere. An essay that truly communicates what the opportunity meant to you will be stronger than one that simply mentions an honors course or a school trip without much reflection.
• If you write about an educational barrier, don’t forget the part about overcoming that barrier—or at least your effort to do so. What aspects of your character did you draw on? What did you learn? How? Make sure to be specific.
• As always, try not to repeat material from your other UC essays.
• Remember your audience. These colleges want to know about the experiences that shaped you into the student you are today—and also the student you might become once you step foot on their campus.

Forgot your password?

Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education

Subscribe to governance weekly, linda darling-hammond ld linda darling-hammond.

March 1, 1998

• 13 min read

W.E.B. DuBois was right about the problem of the 21st century. The color line divides us still. In recent years, the most visible evidence of this in the public policy arena has been the persistent attack on affirmative action in higher education and employment. From the perspective of many Americans who believe that the vestiges of discrimination have disappeared, affirmative action now provides an unfair advantage to minorities. From the perspective of others who daily experience the consequences of ongoing discrimination, affirmative action is needed to protect opportunities likely to evaporate if an affirmative obligation to act fairly does not exist. And for Americans of all backgrounds, the allocation of opportunity in a society that is becoming ever more dependent on knowledge and education is a source of great anxiety and concern.

At the center of these debates are interpretations of the gaps in educational achievement between white and non-Asian minority students as measured by standardized test scores. The presumption that guides much of the conversation is that equal opportunity now exists; therefore, continued low levels of achievement on the part of minority students must be a function of genes, culture, or a lack of effort and will (see, for example, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White).

The assumptions that undergird this debate miss an important reality: educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Despite stark differences in funding, teacher quality, curriculum, and class sizes, the prevailing view is that if students do not achieve, it is their own fault. If we are ever to get beyond the problem of the color line, we must confront and address these inequalities.

The Nature of Educational Inequality

Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely. The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement. On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.

Related Books

Tom Loveless

October 22, 2000

Dick Startz

January 15, 2019

Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero

July 10, 2018

Even so, educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. As William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche noted in a 1991 report to Congress: Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter-state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra-state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts which fare the worst in educational expenditures (or) in rural districts which suffer from fiscal inequity.

Jonathan Kozol s 1991 Savage Inequalities described the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs. Contrast MacKenzie High School in Detroit, where word processing courses are taught without word processors because the school cannot afford them, or East St. Louis Senior High School, whose biology lab has no laboratory tables or usable dissecting kits, with nearby suburban schools where children enjoy a computer hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions and science laboratories that rival those in some industries. Or contrast Paterson, New Jersey, which could not afford the qualified teachers needed to offer foreign language courses to most high school students, with Princeton, where foreign languages begin in elementary school.

Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools. In combination, these policies leave minority students with fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum. Many schools serving low-income and minority students do not even offer the math and science courses needed for college, and they provide lower-quality teaching in the classes they do offer. It all adds up.

What Difference Does it Make?

Since the 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, another debate has waged as to whether money makes a difference to educational outcomes. It is certainly possible to spend money ineffectively; however, studies that have developed more sophisticated measures of schooling show how money, properly spent, makes a difference. Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has shown that four factors consistently influence student achievement: all else equal, students perform better if they are educated in smaller schools where they are well known (300 to 500 students is optimal), have smaller class sizes (especially at the elementary level), receive a challenging curriculum, and have more highly qualified teachers.

Minority students are much less likely than white children to have any of these resources. In predominantly minority schools, which most students of color attend, schools are large (on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities); on average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall (80 percent larger for non-special education classes); curriculum offerings and materials are lower in quality; and teachers are much less qualified in terms of levels of education, certification, and training in the fields they teach. And in integrated schools, as UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes described in the 1980s and Harvard professor Gary Orfield’s research has recently confirmed, most minority students are segregated in lower-track classes with larger class sizes, less qualified teachers, and lower-quality curriculum.

Research shows that teachers’ preparation makes a tremendous difference to children’s learning. In an analysis of 900 Texas school districts, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson found that teachers’ expertise—as measured by scores on a licensing examination, master’s degrees, and experienc—was the single most important determinant of student achievement, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the measured variance in students’ reading and math achievement gains in grades 1-12. After controlling for socioeconomic status, the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely due to differences in the qualifications of their teachers. In combination, differences in teacher expertise and class sizes accounted for as much of the measured variance in achievement as did student and family background (figure 1).

Ferguson and Duke economist Helen Ladd repeated this analysis in Alabama and again found sizable influences of teacher qualifications and smaller class sizes on achievement gains in math and reading. They found that more of the difference between the high- and low-scoring districts was explained by teacher qualifications and class sizes than by poverty, race, and parent education.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee study found that elementary school students who are assigned to ineffective teachers for three years in a row score nearly 50 percentile points lower on achievement tests than those assigned to highly effective teachers over the same period. Strikingly, minority students are about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers and twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective.

Minority students are put at greatest risk by the American tradition of allowing enormous variation in the qualifications of teachers. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future found that new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools (figure 2). Students in poor or predominantly minority schools are much less likely to have teachers who are fully qualified or hold higher-level degrees. In schools with the highest minority enrollments, for example, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher with a license and a degree in the field. In 1994, fully one-third of teachers in high-poverty schools taught without a minor in their main field and nearly 70 percent taught without a minor in their secondary teaching field.

Studies of underprepared teachers consistently find that they are less effective with students and that they have difficulty with curriculum development, classroom management, student motivation, and teaching strategies. With little knowledge about how children grow, learn, and develop, or about what to do to support their learning, these teachers are less likely to understand students’ learning styles and differences, to anticipate students’ knowledge and potential difficulties, or to plan and redirect instruction to meet students’ needs. Nor are they likely to see it as their job to do so, often blaming the students if their teaching is not successful.

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because a challenging curriculum requires an expert teacher. Research has found that both students and teachers are tracked: that is, the most expert teachers teach the most demanding courses to the most advantaged students, while lower-track students assigned to less able teachers receive lower-quality teaching and less demanding material. Assignment to tracks is also related to race: even when grades and test scores are comparable, black students are more likely to be assigned to lower-track, nonacademic classes.

When Opportunity Is More Equal

What happens when students of color do get access to more equal opportunities’ Studies find that curriculum quality and teacher skill make more difference to educational outcomes than the initial test scores or racial backgrounds of students. Analyses of national data from both the High School and Beyond Surveys and the National Educational Longitudinal Surveys have demonstrated that, while there are dramatic differences among students of various racial and ethnic groups in course-taking in such areas as math, science, and foreign language, for students with similar course-taking records, achievement test score differences by race or ethnicity narrow substantially.

Robert Dreeben and colleagues at the University of Chicago conducted a long line of studies documenting both the relationship between educational opportunities and student performance and minority students’ access to those opportunities. In a comparative study of 300 Chicago first graders, for example, Dreeben found that African-American and white students who had comparable instruction achieved comparable levels of reading skill. But he also found that the quality of instruction given African-American students was, on average, much lower than that given white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest-ability group in Dreeben’s sample was in a school in a low-income African-American neighborhood. These children, though, learned less during first grade than their white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the challenging instruction they deserved.

When schools have radically different teaching forces, the effects can be profound. For example, when Eleanor Armour-Thomas and colleagues compared a group of exceptionally effective elementary schools with a group of low-achieving schools with similar demographic characteristics in New York City, roughly 90 percent of the variance in student reading and mathematics scores at grades 3, 6, and 8 was a function of differences in teacher qualifications. The schools with highly qualified teachers serving large numbers of minority and low-income students performed as well as much more advantaged schools.

Most studies have estimated effects statistically. However, an experiment that randomly assigned seventh grade “at-risk”students to remedial, average, and honors mathematics classes found that the at-risk students who took the honors class offering a pre-algebra curriculum ultimately outperformed all other students of similar backgrounds. Another study compared African-American high school youth randomly placed in public housing in the Chicago suburbs with city-placed peers of equivalent income and initial academic attainment and found that the suburban students, who attended largely white and better-funded schools, were substantially more likely to take challenging courses, perform well academically, graduate on time, attend college, and find good jobs.

What Can Be Done?

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Last year the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future issued a blueprint for a comprehensive set of policies to ensure a “caring, competent, and qualified teacher for every child,” as well as schools organized to support student success. Twelve states are now working directly with the commission on this agenda, and others are set to join this year. Several pending bills to overhaul the federal Higher Education Act would ensure that highly qualified teachers are recruited and prepared for students in all schools. Federal policymakers can develop incentives, as they have in medicine, to guarantee well-prepared teachers in shortage fields and high-need locations. States can equalize education spending, enforce higher teaching standards, and reduce teacher shortages, as Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and North Carolina have already done. School districts can reallocate resources from administrative superstructures and special add-on programs to support better-educated teachers who offer a challenging curriculum in smaller schools and classes, as restructured schools as far apart as New York and San Diego have done. These schools, in communities where children are normally written off to lives of poverty, welfare dependency, or incarceration, already produce much higher levels of achievement for students of color, sending more than 90 percent of their students to college. Focusing on what matters most can make a real difference in what children have the opportunity to learn. This, in turn, makes a difference in what communities can accomplish.

An Entitlement to Good Teaching

The common presumption about educational inequality—that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what the school has to offer—continues to hold wide currency because the extent of inequality in opportunities to learn is largely unknown. We do not currently operate schools on the presumption that students might be entitled to decent teaching and schooling as a matter of course. In fact, some state and local defendants have countered school finance and desegregation cases with assertions that such remedies are not required unless it can be proven that they will produce equal outcomes. Such arguments against equalizing opportunities to learn have made good on DuBois’s prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

But education resources do make a difference, particularly when funds are used to purchase well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum and to create personalized learning communities in which children are well known. In all of the current sturm und drang about affirmative action, “special treatment,” and the other high-volatility buzzwords for race and class politics in this nation, I would offer a simple starting point for the next century s efforts: no special programs, just equal educational opportunity.

Governance Studies

Emily Markovich Morris, Laura Nóra, Richaa Hoysala, Max Lieblich, Sophie Partington, Rebecca Winthrop

May 31, 2024

Online only

9:30 am - 11:00 am EDT

Annelies Goger, Katherine Caves, Hollis Salway

May 16, 2024

• Search All Scholarships
• Exclusive Scholarships
• Easy Scholarships to Apply For
• No Essay Scholarships
• Scholarships for HS Juniors
• Scholarships for HS Seniors
• Scholarships for College Students
• Scholarships for Grad Students
• Scholarships for Women
• Scholarships for Black Students
• Scholarships
• Student Loans
• College Admissions
• Financial Aid
• Scholarship Winners
• Scholarship Providers

Student-centric advice and objective recommendations

Higher education has never been more confusing or expensive. Our goal is to help you navigate the very big decisions related to higher ed with objective information and expert advice. Each piece of content on the site is original, based on extensive research, and reviewed by multiple editors, including a subject matter expert. This ensures that all of our content is up-to-date, useful, accurate, and thorough.

Our reviews and recommendations are based on extensive research, testing, and feedback. We may receive commission from links on our website, but that doesn’t affect our editors’ opinions. Our marketing partners don’t review, approve or endorse our editorial content. It’s accurate to the best of our knowledge when posted. You can find a complete list of our partners here .

How to Answer the UC Personal Insight Questions (with examples!)

Zach Skillings is the Scholarships360 Newsletter Editor. He specializes in college admissions and strives to answer important questions about higher education. When he’s not contributing to Scholarships360, Zach writes about travel, music, film, and culture. His work has been published in Our State Magazine, Ladygunn Magazine, The Nocturnal Times, and The Lexington Dispatch. Zach graduated from Elon University with a degree in Cinema and Television Arts.

Learn about our editorial policies

Cece Gilmore is a Content Writer at Scholarships360. Cece earned her undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from Arizona State University. While at ASU, she was the education editor as well as a published staff reporter at Downtown Devil. Cece was also the co-host of her own radio show on Blaze Radio ASU.

Bill Jack has over a decade of experience in college admissions and financial aid. Since 2008, he has worked at Colby College, Wesleyan University, University of Maine at Farmington, and Bates College.

Maria Geiger is Director of Content at Scholarships360. She is a former online educational technology instructor and adjunct writing instructor. In addition to education reform, Maria’s interests include viewpoint diversity, blended/flipped learning, digital communication, and integrating media/web tools into the curriculum to better facilitate student engagement. Maria earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from Monmouth University, an M. Ed. in Education from Monmouth University, and a Virtual Online Teaching Certificate (VOLT) from the University of Pennsylvania.

If you’re applying to a University of California campus, you may already know that you’ll need to respond to four (out of eight) personal insight questions. The UC personal insight questions will require a good amount of time and effort, but fortunately we’re here to help. In this guide, we’ll dissect each prompt and offer some tips on how to respond. And if you’re looking for a bit of inspiration, be sure to check out our example essays as well. Let’s get started!

Don’t miss: How to write an essay about yourself

“Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time. (max: 350 words)”

You don’t have to be captain of a sports team or president of a school club to be a leader. Titles like those are great (and are definitely worth talking about), but leadership can be demonstrated in more subtle ways as well. Think about the times in which people have looked to you for guidance or support. It could be a group of friends, your coworkers, or even a younger sibling or family member. Whatever the case may be, you should write about what you accomplished and what you learned from the experience. This essay is a great opportunity to demonstrate your ability to make a positive impact outside the classroom. 

Questions to consider: 

• What does being a leader mean to you?
• How has your perspective on leadership changed over time?
• What qualities do you possess that make you a good leader?

“Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. (max: 350 words)”

Creativity takes so many different forms. From music to cooking to fashion, there are countless ways to express creativity. Think about the area of your life in which you exhibit original ideas or unique ways of thinking. It may not be obvious for everyone, but chances are you’re creative in ways that you haven’t even realized. Any time you produce a new thought, idea, or concept, you’re being creative. Once you find your creative niche, focus on your motive. Why do you create? Does it bring you joy? Does it connect to your personal or professional ambitions? Ultimately, your goal in this essay should be to articulate the value of your creativity. 

• How do you define creativity? 
• How does being creative make you feel?
• What impact does your creativity have on yourself and others?

“What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? (max: 350 words)”

Some people have a talent or skill that is central to their identity. Maybe you’re a gifted athlete or you have a knack for making people laugh. Maybe you’re a skilled communicator. Consider your greatest talents and what they mean to you. Think about how your talent has shaped your own life and how it has influenced others. It is important to remember to avoid coming across as boastful. You may be a talented soccer player, for instance, but don’t use the entire essay to talk about how good you are at playing goalie. Instead, focus on how soccer has had a positive impact on your life. 

• How has your talent influenced who you are as a person?
• How did you discover your talent, and how has it grown since then?
• How do you plan to continue to develop your talent?

“Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. (max: 350 words)”

This prompt is interesting because it gives students a couple of options. Students can choose to either write about an educational opportunity or an educational barrier. If you decide to write about an opportunity, think about the experiences that have better prepared you for college. Have you taken any advanced classes, enrolled in any academic enrichment programs, or completed any internships? If so, write about what you gained from the experience and what you learned. 

If you choose to write about a barrier, think about the times in which you’ve faced significant obstacles to your education. Obstacles could include a variety of things, such as family issues, switching schools, or lacking the money needed for school supplies. Whatever the case may be, it’s better to emphasize what you did to overcome the problem rather than focusing on the issue itself. This essay is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate your resilience to adversity. 

• In what ways have you gone above and beyond to further your education?
• Have you faced any disruptions to your education? If so, how did you react?
• How did your opportunity or barrier influence who you are today? 

“Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement? (max: 350 words)”

We all face challenges in life, but the key to overcoming any obstacle is the manner in which we react. Think about a setback in your life that could have derailed you, but instead you persevered. Examples include moving to a new school or town, coping with the loss of a loved one, or dealing with financial hardship. Describe the problem, but avoid lingering on the negative side of things. Similar to the fourth prompt, you should focus the majority of your response on what you actually did to overcome the challenge. 

• Have you ever turned a negative situation into a positive one?
• How have the challenges in your life made you better-equipped to deal with future setbacks? 
• Why are obstacles an important part of life? 

“Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom. (max: 350 words)”

This is your chance to write about your academic passions. Think about your favorite field of study and what excites you about it. Discuss how your interest in the subject has taken shape over time, and what you have done to cultivate that interest. Have you participated in any activities outside the classroom — such as volunteer work, internships, employment, or student clubs — to learn more about your field? If applicable, you can also discuss how your academic interests connect to your future career goals. 

• What’s a topic or idea that you never get bored of? 
• What was the moment that sparked your interest in this subject?
• How do you plan to continue to develop your interest?

“What have you done to make your school or your community a better place? (max: 350 words)”

Colleges love to see candidates who have the potential to make a positive impact on campus, and this essay is a great chance to demonstrate that potential. When brainstorming ideas, remember that the word “community” can mean a lot of different things. It could refer to a sports team, a school club, a neighborhood, a family, a workplace, or even a group of friends. Think about the people and places that constitute your community, and consider what you have done to make a difference. 

• How have your actions benefited your community? 
• How does your community add value to your life? 
• How would members of your community describe you? 

“Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you stand out as a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California? (max: 350 words)”

This is a great prompt for students who have a story or experience that doesn’t fit the mold of the other prompts. It’s essentially a catch-all prompt that allows you to write about anything you want. That being said, it’s important to find a focus and stick with it. Don’t let your essay become too broad. Instead, try to focus on one or two specific experiences and describe how they make you an excellent candidate for UC.

• What should UC know about you that they wouldn’t learn from the rest of your application?
• Do you have any amazing or exceptional stories that don’t fit the mold of the other prompts?
• What sets you apart from other candidates? 

Don’t miss: Tips for a successful college application

Example essays 

We’ve given you some tips on how to respond to each prompt, but sometimes it’s helpful to see how another person approached the prompt. Below you’ll find example essays for each of the eight UC prompts. Check them out if you’re looking for some inspiration! We’ve also included feedback on each example from our seasoned admissions expert Bill Jack .

“Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time.”

Thirty-six hours to plan a triathlon with minimal course congestion and road closure time, write a 30-33 page solution to this problem, and address a two-page letter to the “mayor” summarizing our solution. This was our assigned task as part of the 2016 annual High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling.

This hypothetical triathlon was set to host around 2000 participants, all ranging in skill level. Further, the local roads surrounding the triathlon could only be closed for a maximum of 5.5 hours. Confronting this information, Daisy, Ellen, Megan, and I sat, perplexed. How could we prevent the less experienced competitors from potentially slowing down their faster counterparts? Allowing the less experienced competitors to start last wouldn’t work, we figured, as this would probably close the roads for too long.

After some thought, I figured that initially separating the participants by lanes and implementing a wave-start system would be the best way to go. If those faster competitors were separated from those slower at first, then they would be able to get ahead before the lanes eventually merged – preventing any participants from potentially hindering others’ progress.

While we celebrated having finally figured out an answer to the question, there was a lot of work to go. To me, it seemed reasonable that everyone do the work best suited to their strengths. My teammates agreed. After some deliberation, it was settled: I would complete the bulk of the writing, Ellen and Megan the math, and Daisy the graph and map-making. A mere 30-ish hours later, we were finished.

After a few read-throughs of the finished products, admiration of each other’s work, and an agreement that all looked good, we sent in the completed project. For our work, we were honored with “Meritorious” in the contest, the third-highest possible honor in the competition. Exchanging texts, Daisy, Ellen, Megan, and I took pride in such an honor. The project had not only given me practical knowledge on how to organize a triathlon, but also taught me leadership and teamwork skills that I hope to use in my future endeavors – hypothetical or not. (Word count: 349 words)

Expert analysis from an admissions professional:

While the person at UC who reads this might know about this particular mathematical contest, it is definitely wise to assume they know nothing.  It was super helpful that the writer chose to give some background about what exactly they were tasked to do.  Readers will glean many things in an application relative to a student’s leadership skills.  While leadership skills are certainly quite desirable to admission officers, one reason this personal insight response is particularly… well… insightful (!!), is because it speaks to how the person performs as part of a team. – Bill Jack

“Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.”

A beautiful road, the darkness of the tall trees contrasting the bright orange, pink, and purples hues up above. These are the types of pictures I love on Instagram: beautiful scenes of nature, typically including trees. I am always delighted to see them on my screen, but rarely, if ever, do I get to see such scenes in real life. 

Such photos inspired me to try painting a similar landscape this past summer to capture the scenes I love so much. I decided to use acrylic paints throughout, from the mesmerizing sky, to the trees themselves. It turned out that this wasn’t the best idea; acrylics dry too quickly to be spread across a large area, which made it incredibly difficult to paint the vast, all-encompassing sky. Before moving on, I considered what to do next: keep trudging on, or start anew? 

Eventually, I added some water to the paint, unknowingly thinking that it would help the paint spread more easily. This did not help, and the painting turned out looking like a number of navy green blobs in front of another, pinker blob, rather than green fir trees in front of a beautiful evening sky. 

Despite this setback, I persevered and tried again. I used watercolors and smaller brushes instead, hoping to make the tree branches more distinct. The sky initially turned out better, with the colors mixing more easily this time. However, I hadn’t waited long enough to paint the trees. The dark green of the leaves had mixed with the hues of the far brighter sky, again making the trees nearly indiscernible.

Problem solving is a key part of doing something new. My lack of experience with painting forced me to put careful thought into what I was going to do next, teaching me that I should put more time into what I do, rather than rushing to finish as soon as possible. I hope that whatever comes next, whether it be painting another landscape or preparing for a marathon, is done with the same care and thought that I put into painting those exquisite fir trees. (Word count: 350 words)

Responses that can paint a picture allow the person reading the application to dive into the world of the student.  In this case, painting a picture is literally what is happening!  Using such good adjectives really does a great job describing why they started with acrylics and why they ended with watercolors.  Although the purpose of this response is to showcase the student’s creativity, it is neat how this response also happens to allow the reader to tap into their own creativity, too, because they are invited to imagine what the finished painting might look like. – Bill Jack

“What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time?”

Whether a love song by Taylor Swift or a story about George Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania, I have always enjoyed being completely absorbed in a story. Wanting to recreate this same feeling for others, at nine years old, I attempted to write a story about a little girl who had gotten lost in the woods. I only got a few pages through. However, my next protagonist, Phil the pig, would see some longevity. Whenever I was assigned a creative writing assignment in school, he was always at the forefront, angry. In my 8th grade science class, Phil was mad at some humans who had harbored his friend captive, and in my 9th grade English class, at a couple who robbed him. 

Thus, when I heard about a writing club being opened at my high school, I decided to join to see if my interest had survived. Luckily, it did. The club not only reaffirmed my passion for writing, but introduced me to new means of expression as well. From then on, I started to expand into different types of writing, putting it all down in a journal.

Around the same time, I developed an interest in classic literature. A project in English class had required us to read a classic on our own, then present it to the class in an interesting way. While my book was unique in its own right, nearly everyone else’s novels seemed more captivating to me. So, I took it upon myself to read as many classics as I could the following summer.

One of the books I read during the summer, funnily enough, was Animal Farm, which starred angry pigs, reminiscent of Phil. I had also started going over different ideas in my head, thinking about how I could translate them into words using the new skills I learned. While the club helped reaffirm my interest in writing and develop my abilities, my newfound affinity for classics gave me inspiration to write. Now, I am actually considering writing being part of my future, and hope that Phil will accompany me every step of the way. (Word count: 350 words)

Near the end, we learn that writing is likely to be part of the student’s future.  This is great to learn.  Too often admission officers might not know how a student’s current pursuits relate to their goals.  We learn here about Phil the pig, we learn about their interest in classic literature, and we learn why they joined the writing club.  We are taken on a journey that tells us how writing–and reading–has been part of their life, including how it has evolved and developed over the years. – Bill Jack

“Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.”

Nineteen ninety-nine marked the year my mom moved to the U.S. from South Korea. Stepping off the plane, my mom’s English level was impressive for someone who had never stepped foot outside her native country. Her English speaking skills were quite proficient, and she understood the language with ease. However, having aspirations of becoming a teacher in this new country, she knew she had to brush up on her English. Quick.

To accomplish this goal, my parents decided to speak English at home. Days and years of discussing shows, events, and daily tasks in English were a great source of practice. As my brother and I got older and saw improvements in our English, she did too. All was good.

That was until I realized I didn’t really “know” Korean. Besides the familial terms I used for my obba (older brother) and omma (mom) and a number of other food-related and random words, I was largely clueless. So, I decided it would be nice to be able to speak the native language of, not only my mom, but her entire side of the family.

As my high school didn’t offer Korean language classes, I figured that self-studying would be the best course of action. I did some research online and found an elementary-level Korean workbook. After outlining a quick “study plan,” the following summer was filled with hours of working in my Korean workbook. My mom helped, reading over my completed pages, alerting me to any mistakes I made, and setting me on the right path. 

Around the end of the summer, I was able to form simple sentences and even somewhat communicate with my Korean relatives. Self-studying also had its perks: I learned how to manage my time and motivate myself to study, something that might’ve surprised the former procrastinator in me. My mom was pleasantly surprised too, embracing her role as the teacher and I, the student. As I move into this next part of my life, I hope to continue following in her footsteps, using the new skills – Korean and otherwise – I learned that dear summer. (Word count: 350 words)

This response covers so much ground!  We learn about the student’s family background, about the family’s transition to the United States, and the student’s desire to connect deeper with their Korean culture.  We also learn about personal traits such as motivation, perseverance, and determination.  Often in college students will want to explore a subject further than the curriculum allows, and this response speaks loudly about what the student will do when faced with that barrier.  And that we got to learn a couple of Korean words is just a cherry on top! – Bill Jack

“Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?”

New city, new school, new home — a lot of new things came into my life during my seventh grade year. It wasn’t easy getting used to so many changes, and the circumstances surrounding those changes were tough to wrap my head around. 

To give you some context, my dad was a carpenter and a year earlier he had fallen off a roof on one of his job sites. He severely injured his back, became unable to work, and our family fell into a tough financial situation as a result. Our house in Asheville met foreclosure and the only option was to move to Winston-Salem. Fortunately, my parents owned a second home there. The situation could have been much worse, looking back on it, but that didn’t change the fact that my life in Asheville had been uprooted.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, all my friends were gone, and I was sitting among complete strangers at the lunch table. I was also navigating some unfamiliar cultural territory, being one of the few white students at a school that was largely black and Latino. I was completely out of my element, but looking back on it, it’s probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. 

During my first year in Winston-Salem, I was pushed out of my comfort zone in a way that I had never experienced before. To make new friends, I made a conscious effort to be more outgoing. I connected with my classmates, making jokes and striking up conversations. Eventually I formed some strong friendships, several of which I maintain to this day. On top of that, my new friends were a diverse bunch — black, white, Mexican, male, female — and as a result I gained a different cultural perspective that shaped the way I view the world today. 

The whole experience showed me that change brings discomfort, but it can also bring positive growth. I wouldn’t have become the person I am today if I had never left Asheville. I probably wouldn’t have been as open-minded, and I definitely wouldn’t have been as good at adjusting to new situations. As I prepare for my first year of college, I look forward to embracing all the changes that will come along with it. (Word count: 380 words)

The last sentence of this response really encapsulates why what we learn is relevant to the college search.  For people who work in education, we know all too well how lunchroom dynamics really do have a large impact on a high school student’s life.  As we learn, the student was uprooted, had to make new friends, and absolutely was not in their comfort zone.  Let’s face it: that’s your first semester of college.  Seeing that the student has had success already transitioning into an unfamiliar environment bodes very well for how their transition to college will be. -Bill Jack

“Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.”

I’ve always been fascinated by people. So has my dad. Not in a weird way, but rather in an isn’t-it-interesting-why-people-act-the-way-they-do way. Over the years, this has led to hours of discussing how the environment one grows up in, and a number of other factors, contribute to one’s general disposition. Perhaps expectedly, these talks led me to develop an interest in psychology.

However, they were not my only early exposure to the field. For as long as I can remember, I have tuned in to watch Criminal Minds on CBS at 9 p.m. every Wednesday. Particularly fascinating to me has been how J.J., Morgan, Reid, and the rest of the crew are able to use insights from psychology to create largely accurate assessments about suspects based on evidence alone.

Having gotten a little older, I now realize that this process is called “profiling” and that it shares similarities with abnormal psychology. Wanting to dive deeper and learn more about the subject, I was led to Dr. Roxane Gold’s psychology lab at the University of California, Irvine, the summer after my junior year.

Arriving at the lab, I was assigned to a project wherein participants were exposed to surprising or potentially stressful events through videos or pictures, all while their slight movements were tracked. As a research assistant, I was responsible for the movement data, tracking the peaks which signified surprise on behalf of participants. It was surprising to learn how repeated exposure to shocking or stressful media, even images, could have enduring negative impacts on people.

Such an experience certainly taught me a lot about the realities of conducting psychological research. The results, unlike the discussions with my dad, were not always so lighthearted. However, I hope to eventually use this experience to produce something more positive. If possible, I want to one day apply the knowledge I gained to my own research, to discover methods to help the people suffering from the psychological problems I study. As learning about psychology has brought me much joy, I hope to use it to do the same for others. (Word count: 348 words)

Citing television shows or movies can be risky because the reader might not be familiar.  (Criminal Minds is an awesome show, by the way!)  One reason this response works well is because it is not merely a report about the show.  It is not merely why the student likes watching it.  Instead they explain the show’s influence on their life: they have taken the initiative to be a research assistant already and they want to pursue their own psychology research.  And it is great to learn about their future plans: to bring joy to folks who might be suffering. – Bill Jack

“What have you done to make your school or your community a better place?”

Smiling faces, cheerful conversation, upbeat music – this was the scene surrounding me on that early April afternoon at Corpening Plaza in downtown Winston-Salem. I surveyed the bustling plaza, observing the many food truck vendors, musicians, and small business owners who had come together to celebrate Everyone Matters Day. I smiled to myself, knowing that it was the result of months of hard work.

But let’s rewind. Planning for the event was initiated almost five months earlier by the Winston-Salem Youth Advisory Council, a group in which I was involved for most of my high school career. Also known as YAC, the council is a space for high school students to actively engage the community in partnership with the city government. Throughout my three years on the council, I helped organize several community projects. One year we delivered school supplies and clothes to homeless children, and another year we filmed some commercials speaking out against bullying. 

But for several reasons, the downtown festival celebrating Everyone Matters Day is the project that I cherish the most. For one, I felt the project was especially timely. The idea for the festival spawned in late 2015, during a time when racial tensions in the U.S. were soaring. The council and I wanted to do something that would bring the city together and uplift residents in a positive way. We had caught wind of a recently established holiday called Everyone Matters Day — a day in which people around the world acknowledge everyone’s right to be who they are — and decided to host an event in honor of the day. 

The project was also particularly important to me because it was the one in which I was most involved. This was my third year on the council, and by this point I had taken on more of a leadership role. There was a lot of work that went into making the event a success, and I helped take the lead in the planning process. We needed a venue, volunteers, food truck vendors, live music, and the support of small business owners. It was a lot of hard work, but it paid off when April 2 finally rolled around, and our vision became a reality. For a couple hours, our festival brought joy and positivity into the lives of others, making those months of planning absolutely worth it. (Word count: 392 words)

Often the reader does not learn in great detail about what the student’s outside-of-school activities actually entail.  After all, the college counselor and the teachers might not mention these activities in their letters of recommendation.  So if given the opportunity to tell the reader about one of these activities, please do.  You almost certainly will end up sharing something that cannot be gleaned from other parts of the application, and as we learn here, the Youth Advisory Council clearly is an important part of the student’s life. – Bill Jack

“Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you stand out as a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California?”

Many families have traditions. These range from those more common, like opening up Christmas presents at a specific time each year, to those more unusual – like choosing to ring in the holidays with the consumption of fruitcake. Probably amongst the nerdiest of such traditions, however, is what my family has done every Monday through Friday for as long as I can remember: tune in to watch Jeopardy.

Like a long-time friend, Jeopardy is something that has been by my side since childhood. Thus, tuning in and seeing Alex Trebek’s familiar face quiz contestants on a variety of random subjects is something that has brought me comfort throughout the years, even if I couldn’t always answer many of the questions. As a child, besides during the annual “Kids Week” tournament for those between the ages of 10 and 12, I was often clueless. The rest of my family would typically perform better, having more years of experience and knowledge under their hypothetical belts.

Being a young child, though, I didn’t take my mistakes or lack of knowledge so trivially. After all, how could a 12-year-old be unfamiliar with Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign song? I wasn’t sure, but I did know that I wanted to prove myself. 

So, from then on, I decided to take the pursuit of knowledge more seriously. Rather than learning just to test, I would try to retain the information I learned, putting it in context and understanding its importance. As the years went on, this strategy proved successful – to an extent. I still never quite excelled at the geography questions, but I was certainly able to answer more across the board. 

Today, while I still might not be able to answer every question about Shakespeare out there, Jeopardy has given me something that will likely outlast my retention of any trivia answer: a thirst for knowledge. As I move into this next chapter of my life, I plan to bring this useful tool with me, helping me better understand and appreciate what’s come before me, and what will come after. 

Thanks, Alex! (Word count: 345 words)

This response may not be a tribute to Alex Trebek in the traditional sense, but it certainly demonstrates the power of the show: developing a thirst for knowledge.  Many college and university mottos include “knowledge,” “learn,” or similar words.  As such, it is probably no surprise that an admission officer might be particularly drawn to a student like this because they seem to like learning for learning’s sake.  Clearly this student will be at college to make the most of what they are taught: not just to memorize facts but also to retain what they learn. -Bill Jack

A few last tips

We hope these essay examples gave you a bit of inspiration of what to include in your own. However, before you go, we’d like to send you off with a few (personal insight) writing tips to help you make your essays as lovely as the memories and anecdotes they’re based off of. Without further ado, here are some of our best tips for writing your personal statements:

1. Open strong

College admissions officers read many, many essays (think 50+) a day, which can sometimes cause them to start blending together and sounding alike. One way to avoid your essay from simply fading into the background is to start strong. This means opening your essay with something memorable. Whether an interesting personal anecdote, a descriptive setting, or anything else that you think would catch a reader’s attention (so long as it’s not inappropriate), make sure to “hook” your reader in. Not only might this help college admissions officers better remember your essay, but it will also make them curious about what the rest of your essay will entail.

2. Be authentic

Perhaps most important when it comes to writing personal statement essays is to maintain your authenticity. Your essays should ultimately reflect your unique stories and quirks that make you who you are. Most of all, though, they should help college admissions officers determine whether you’d truly be a good fit for their school or not. So, don’t stress trying to figure out what colleges are looking for. Be yourself, and let the colleges come to you!

3. Strong writing

This one may seem a little obvious, but strong writing will certainly appeal to colleges. Not only will it make your essay more compelling, but it may show colleges that you’re ready for college-level essay writing (that you’ll likely have to do a lot of). Just remember that good writing is not limited to grammar. Using captivating detail and descriptions are a huge part of making your essay seem more like a story than a lecture.

4. Proofread

Last but not least, remember to proofread! Make sure your essay contains no errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. When you’re done proofreading your essay yourself, we would also recommend that you ask a teacher, parent, or other grammatically savvy person to proofread your essay as well.

Final thoughts 

With those in hand, we hope you now have a better sense of how to answer the UC personal insight questions. While your grades and test scores are important when it comes to college admissions, it’s really your essays that can “make” or “break” your application. 

Although this may make it seem like a daunting task, writing an amazing personal insight essay is all about effort. So long as you start early, follow the advice listed above, and dedicate your time and effort to it, it’s entirely possible to write an essay that perfectly encapsulates you. Good luck, and happy writing!

Additional resources

If you’re filling out the UC personal insight questions, you are probably in the thick of your college applications. Luckily, we’ve got a host of resources to help you through the process! Check out our guides on writing a 250 word essay and a 500 word essay . We also have a guide to respond to the Common App prompts , as well as a list of California scholarships to pursue.

And even if you are set on a UC school, remember to apply to a wide range of schools. We can help you choose a school and find a financial safety school as well. Finally, to help you fund your education, check out our free scholarship search tool . It will custom-match you to vetted scholarships and automatically update as opportunities close and new ones open. Good luck!

Frequently asked questions about how to answer the UC Personal Insight Questions 

Is there a right four questions to pick from the personal insight questions list, is there a specific format i should follow for my responses on the uc personal insight questions, how many personal insight questions do i need to answer, which four personal insight questions should i choose to answer, how creative can i get in my responses to the personal insight questions, scholarships360 recommended.

10 Tips for Successful College Applications

Coalition vs. Common App: What is the difference?

College Application Deadlines 2023-2024: What You Need to Know

Trending now.

How to Convert Your GPA to a 4.0 Scale

PSAT to SAT Score Conversion: Predict Your Score

What Are Public Ivy League Schools?

3 reasons to join scholarships360.

• Automatic entry to our $10,000 No-Essay Scholarship
• Personalized matching to thousands of vetted scholarships
• Quick apply for scholarships exclusive to our platform

By the way...Scholarships360 is 100% free!

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, what is eop your guide to educational opportunity programs.

College Info

Traditionally, low-income students have been excluded from higher education, or they have faced obstacles that make graduating from college extremely difficult. Programs like the Educational Opportunity Program are designed to provide the necessary support to disadvantaged students to enable their success in college and beyond.

In this article, I'll describe EOP, detail the advantages of participating in an Educational Opportunity Program, and let you know how to enroll .

What Is EOP?

The Educational Opportunity Program, or EOP, is a counseling and academic support program designed to help low-income and first generation college students succeed in college . (A student is first generation if neither parent went to college.) EOPs are state programs, and they're typically only for in-state residents of public colleges.

The purpose of these programs is to help students who face additional obstacles in higher education succeed academically and graduate. There are EOPs in a number of states, but it's not available in every state or at every college. Look at a school's website or contact its admissions office to see if it has an EOP.

Here's what we mean: in California, multiple universities have EOP programs. EOPs are available at California State University and University of California campuses. However, while each California State University campus has an EOP, the only University of California schools that have an EOP are UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz. Luckily, there are comparable programs at the other UC schools.

The same is true at New York schools. There are EOPs at State University of New York ( SUNY ) schools and in New Jersey at schools like New Jersey Institute of Technology , Rider University , and Seton Hall University . There are similar programs at state colleges in New Jersey through the Educational Opportunity Fund ( EOF ).

I also found EOPs at Oregon State and University of Washington . This is all to say that if you're interested in taking advantage of an EOP, make sure you do your research before you start applying to schools.

Most campuses that offer EOP provide a summer program for EOP students to help them transition to college and prepare for college life . The students get to live on campus and strengthen their academic skills before college ever starts.

During the academic year, EOP offers counseling, mentorship, and academic advising for enrolled students to help them succeed academically . Furthermore, EOP offers students career advice and preparation for graduate studies. Also, some programs provide financial assistance, including offering grants and waiving or deferring certain fees.

Each EOP is a little bit different in terms of the services and opportunities it offers its students, but they all share the same goal: to help traditionally underserved students earn a college degree.

Steven Depolo /Flickr

How Is EOP Eligibility Determined?

Eligibility does vary by campus, but it's typically based on income requirements , meaning that your family's income must be below a certain amount for you to qualify for the program. Each state's income threshold is slightly different.

For example, at California State University schools, you must meet specific EOP income criteria to be eligible for EOP. If your family income exceeds the guidelines, you may still be considered for EOP if your demonstrated Expected Family Contribution is less than $1,500.

Generally, EOP eligibility guidelines are less strict at UC campuses. At UC Berkeley, any low-income, first generation, or historically underrepresented students (African-American, Chicano/Latino, and Native-American) are eligible for EOP . At UCSB , EOP services all students but focuses on low-income and first generation undergraduates.

The income criteria is a bit different for EOPs at SUNY schools. Check this page for the income requirements, which are broken down by family size. At SUNY schools, EOP is also designed for students who don't meet the normal admission requirements but show academic promise.

For most EOPs, only in-state residents and US citizens or permanent residents are eligible for EOP . In California, undocumented immigrants who qualify for in-state tuition through AB540 are also eligible for all California EOPs. You can find out more about how undocumented students can qualify for the EOP here .

Like we mentioned earlier, you'll need to check with your school's EOP office to see if you qualify.

Why Should You Join EOP?

If you apply to a school that has an EOP and you're eligible, I highly recommend trying to join the program. Not only can you receive financial benefits, but the transitional summer program and advising can help jumpstart your success in college...and beyond!

Many EOP students come from under-resourced schools and don't enter college as prepared as their more affluent peers. Furthermore, because these students may not have parents or family members who are knowledgeable about college, they're not able to get the same guidance as other students unless they participate in programs like EOP. EOPs give capable students who might not have the same resources or social privileges the support they need to be successful in college.

Also, low-income, first generation college students can feel isolated on college campuses and have a hard time relating to their fellow students who come from more privileged backgrounds. An EOP can help you find a community of students with backgrounds similar to yours, and you can receive counseling and mentorship to help you deal with the struggles that can come from being a low-income or first generation college student.

Ralph Daily /Flickr

How Do You Enroll in EOP?

Typically, there is an application process to become part of EOP . Your financial information may be verified from your/your parents' tax returns or the information you provide on your FAFSA . Check a school's website or contact the EOP office if you have any questions.

For CSU schools, if you are interested in enrolling in EOP, you must complete a supplemental application, which is more demanding than most schools'. In addition to providing basic information, you have to provide recommendations and answer short answer questions. Not only do you have to meet the basic requirements, but you have to demonstrate that you're a motivated student who would appear to benefit from EOP .

For UC schools, you just have to enter additional information on your UC application if you're interested in EOP. Also, you should indicate your interest in the EOP in your UC personal statement .

For SUNY schools, you'll submit the regular application and indicate your interest in EOP. You may be asked to fill out additional forms and provide documentation.

Remember: these are just a few schools that have EOP. Be sure to check with your individual institution to see how to apply to their EOP (if they have one).

What If a School Doesn't Have EOP or You're Not Eligible?

If you're interested in participating in EOP but the schools you want to apply to don't have an EOP or you're not eligible , you may still be able to take advantage of support services to help you succeed in college.

Many schools have offices dedicated to helping underserved students find success in college. Look on the school's website for support services. If you're a low-income or first generation student, you can contact the admissions office to ask about specific support programs for low-income or first generation students.

On Big Future , you can search for schools with support services for low-income or minority students . Additionally, on each school's profile, you can view the types of support services that are available. Knowing which of your schools offer support.

The big takeaway is this: just because your school doesn't have a formal EOP doesn't mean there won't be services and organizations there to help you succeed.

Paul Townsend /Flickr

What's Next?

If you're stressing the cost of college , read this article to learn how to get a full ride scholarship .

Maybe you're still wondering whether or not college is right for you. Make an informed decision and decide for yourself if you should go to college .

Finally, make sure you know how to research and choose a college. Picking a college that's a good fit for you is key to your future success!

Justin has extensive experience teaching SAT prep and guiding high school students through the college admissions and selection process. He is firmly committed to improving equity in education and helping students to reach their educational goals. Justin received an athletic scholarship for gymnastics at Stanford University and graduated with a BA in American Studies.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

• For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Essay on Equality of Educational Opportunities

Related Papers

QUEST JOURNALS

The Indian government has paid great attention to social justice. The government has been using many instruments to preserve social justice. The Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles of State Policy and Fundamental Duties have highlighted the obligation of state to work for 'the weaker sections of the people' and to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India. This paper will look at how the government has been trying to bring social justice through education and how the Indian constitution highlights the provision of education for the weaker and minority section of the community.

International Policy Review

Autar Dhesi

Jandhyala TILAK

jagannath Dange

Education is the only tool for changing the society. In India education has been recognised as the instrument for national development and for creating a new social order. When education became a formal system of human society for learning, the concept of curriculum came into vogue and it has been enjoying a great prominence throughout. A curriculum provides a framework for learning. Education is the Universal right and Indian constitution guarantees the education as a fundamental right of every child. India's Right to education act (2009) also supports the same. India is known for its unity in diversity, similarly we can see the diversity in different educational boards in India namely State, CBSE and ICSE and many more. Every board has its own structure. In this paper authors have critically analyzed all the three boards by considering the 9 th standard science text books by analyzing the curriculum, Content, General objectives and Curriculum making objectives, Units, Medium of instruction, concept mapping, Activities, medium of Instruction, Co-curricular activities and also the Examination pattern and results with their Fee structure. The analysis found that there is a clear inequality in terms of curriculum, examination and fee structure of these three types of Boards. According to the paradigm 'Education brings Equality', we need to give equal opportunities in providing experiences in learning for all the children irrespective of type of boards and curriculum. The authors also suggest that, to bring the equality through Education India needs to have 'One Nation and One Education system'.

International Journal of Constitutional Law

Arun Thiruvengadam

ruba phukan

Ratna Ghosh

Cheng Nishang

The Indian Journal of Politics --A Quarterly Journal from Department of Political Science, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India

Abdulrahim Vijapur

Minority rights have been accepted into the cannons of both the international human rights law and the constitutional laws in most of the post-colonial nation States. Minorities world over – religious, linguistic and ethnic –have been constitutionally recognised as groups needing special protection and safeguards from the majoritarian attitudes or policies of discrimination towards their legitimate interests. Indian Constitutional law is one of the best in the world to provide a detailed catalogue of human rights to which every individual, including those belonging to religious and linguistic minorities, is entitled to enjoy without any discrimination. Besides this, every minority group enjoys religious, linguistic, cultural and educational rights. This paper deals with the rights of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions under the Constitution of India. It explores the Constituent Assembly debates and text of the Indian Constitution on Article 30, which grants minorities to establish their own educational institutions. Further,the paper looks into the various Supreme Court decisions on the subject in order to better understand the jurisprudence of this fundamental right. The debate in the Constituent Assembly was full of containment as the draft articles on the minority educational institutions were criticised as being group rights and were argued as being against the concept of democracy, justice, and secularism. Also, it was feared by some that it might underpin the national unity. This is one of the reasons behind ambiguous nature of this provision. The biggest loophole of this provision is that it does not define the term “minority”. Despite these problems,the paper argues that Article 30 offers an important space to the minorities to shape their educational situation in accordance to their desires and should be encouraged as it helps the State in dealing with culture-specific factors behind their educational backwardness.

The Indian Journal of Politics

Faisal Mahmood

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights describes the right to education as a fundamental human right as well as a necessary means of realizing other human rights. To reach its goal, education to all, the United Nations (UN) have included the right to education in its various documents. Many regional and national documents also guaranteed this right under their territory. Minority communities are provided with some special provisions for education by the UN as well as by almost all the countries, including India. Despite national and international obligations to make education accessible to all, the reality of implementation of the provisions concerning the right to education of minorities is far different. This paper aims to shed light on the provisions related to the right to education of minorities under various international and national documents and address the issues that become a hurdle for the minorities in enjoying these rights. A detailed discussion about provisions related to minority education in India, both the constitutional and the statutory has been added in the paper. It also includes, with suggested solutions, the failure of governing bodies to eradicate the flaws at the implementation level that has become a barrier in achieving the constitutional motto of equal opportunity. Keywords: Human Rights, Minorities, Right to Education, United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals

RELATED PAPERS

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage

Mayank Vahia

Headache Medicine

Luciane Lacerda Franco Rocha Rodrigues

Lola Maretha

International Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

Tapan Mukherjee

Open-File Report

John Michael

EPiC series in computing

Hans-Christoph Kotzsch

英国文凭 成绩单学历认证录取通知书学生卡

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Helena Brentani

Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology

philippe waldteufel

실시간카지노 토토사이트

David Soskice

Livraria da Física

rodrigo barchi

gopi kaphle

The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery

Heljä-Marja Surcel

Gloria Ribas

Pediatric Nephrology

Sonia Gomez

哪里卖巴拉特大学毕业证 ballarat毕业证文凭学位证书GRE成绩单原版一模一样

Agronomia Colombiana

Gabriel Alvarado

Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad : JAMC

maryam wahid

Proeeedings of the 2nd KDD workshop on Mining Multiple Information Sources

Juan Diego Trujillo

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

What You Need to Know About the Long Fight for Educational Equity

Key takeaways from the 2024 phyllis l. kossoff lecture on education and policy, presented by dr. crystal r. sanders.

Just over 70 years after Brown v Board of Education, educational equity is still elusive, even more so after a rise in book bans and the end of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Offering inspiration for the future by looking to the past, this year’s Phyllis L. Kossoff Lecture on Education and Policy, given by Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, draws connections between the historical struggle for high quality education and the current fight for fair and equitable schooling.

Established in 2007 by distinguished alum Phyllis L. Kossoff , the lecture series has provided a platform to further critical conversations on education, policy and research. For the 10th lecture, the first since Kossoff’s passing in 2022, Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University College of Arts and Sciences, gave an illuminating lecture on an educational migration that occurred during the Jim Crow era. 

Her talk, “A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners and Graduate Education During the Era of Legal Segregation,” outlined the myriad difficulties Black Southerners faced as they sought out graduate education in often hostile environments. She focused specifically on “segregation scholarships,” a term originated by Sanders that describes state funding given to Black students to support their studies at Northern colleges and universities in order to maintain segregation in the South. 

Find takeaways from her lecture — a preview of her upcoming book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs — below.

(Photo courtesy of Sanders)

Many Black scholars, especially recipients of segregation scholarships, came to TC for their studies

It’s unknown precisely how many Black students came to TC on a segregation scholarship however, according to Sanders, the College’s summer continuing studies program was one of the most popular during that time period. Being a top graduate school of education with a history of accepting Black students certainly played a role, but Sanders cites proximity to Harlem and Mabel Carney’s, head of TC’s Rural Education Department from 1918 to 1941 , course on Negro Education as a major draw for scholars. 

Existing relationships with Southern educators combined with a willingness to accept Black students, Sanders noted, made TC a top choice for Black educators at the time. The work of professors like Arthur Linden, who ran summer courses for degree credit in Asheville, N.C., further expanded TC’s reach in the South and made higher education more accessible to Southern scholars.

Post-graduate students conducting a lab experiment, 1942. From left to right: J.S. Newcomer, A.E. Bell, Hiss Trondailer Jones and Samuel Massie. (Photo: FAS/OWI Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Segregation Scholarships offered great opportunities, at a high cost

As explained by Sanders, during legal segregation, virtually all Southern schools with graduate programs refused to accept Black students, while Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were often unable to offer graduate programs due to lack of funding from state legislatures. This forced Black students to journey North for their education which was often out of reach financially. To offset the costs, students leveraged the “separate but equal” doctrine, pushing Southern states to pay for Black students forced to study out of state. Sixteen Southern states started segregation scholarship programs between 1921 and 1948, despite these programs being deemed unconstitutional in 1938 .

Even though scholarships offered needed opportunity, “​​most of [the recipients] felt that there was a disadvantage professionally, [and] a disadvantage personally,” said Sanders. Professional degrees received out of state were met with undue scrutiny and created more hurdles, such as law students who had to study legal codes for two states at one time. Students also encountered racism in the North, struggled to find housing and dealt with extreme pressure to “behave properly” at their new school. The isolation students felt was compounded by their inability to visit home during their studies, as scholarships often didn’t cover basic living expenses, let alone travel expenses for a trip home.

Howard University students on campus, 1942 (Photo: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Pushing Black scholars to study at Northern institutions created an enormous debt at Southern HBCUs

While they have a rich legacy, many HBCUs have crumbling buildings and small endowments . Consistent underfunding plays a major role in this decay — over the course of 33 years, 18 state-run land-grant HBCUs were underfunded by $12.3 billion , adjusted for inflation — as does the legacy of segregation scholarships. Rather than being paid by the state, scholarships were instead taken from the operating budget of Black colleges and universities. 

While individual scholarships weren’t substantial enough to cover each student’s needs, it still cost schools an incredible sum. By Sanders’s calculations, just one year of segregation scholarships cost Mississippi HBCUs $5.3 million dollars in today’s money and they ran scholarships for 20 years. Sanders argued that those funds could have been used to update infrastructure, attract faculty, and support new research. Instead, HBCUs had to foot the bill of segregationist policies. 

To address this lack, Sanders proposes that state governments give HBCUs “equity funding” by making an endowment contribution that matches the amount of money spent by each school on segregation scholarships, adjusted for inflation. “Nothing less is acceptable,” she said.

Despite the financial difficulties, isolation and racism scholars faced, they fought for their education out of a desire for a better life, Sanders explains. When they returned home with their hard-earned degrees, graduates set about “using their credentials and their training to create the type of world they want in these Southern communities,” said Sanders.

Sander’s forthcoming book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs , will be published in October of this year. 

— Sherri Gardner

Tags: Higher Education History of Education

Published Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Teachers College Newsroom

Address: Institutional Advancement 193-197 Grace Dodge Hall

Box: 306 Phone: (212) 678-3231 Email: views@tc.columbia.edu

ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

Assess the view that education policies since 1988 have improved equality of educational opportunity (30)

Table of Contents

Last Updated on May 22, 2023 by Karl Thompson

If you get a question on education policies, the chances are you will be asked about ‘education policies since 1988’. This post is designed to get you thinking about how you could use the info on the New Right’s 1988 Education Act and New Labour’s policies from 1997 onwards to answer an exam question in this area.

The New Right’s 1988 Education Act

Not interested in equal opps, mainly interested in raising standards… 

• Parentocracy – parents get to choose schools • Marketisation – schools have to compete like businesses for students • League tables to be published • The above should raise standards as no parent would send child to failing school • National Curriculum – ensures all schools teach core subjects • OFSTED inspections

How 1988 worsened equality of opportunity… 

• Middle classes had more choice – cultural capital/ skilled choosers • School/ parent alliance (Stephen Ball) • Also selection by mortgage • Polarisation of schools – sink schools

New Labour’s Policies

More interested in equal opps  

• Academies (Mossbourne) – set up in poorer areas • EMA • Sure start • Expanded Vocationalism

Other aims of New Labour/ criticisms of the idea that New Labour’s policies raised standards

• Sure start didn’t work • EMA did work but the Tories have now scrapped it • Academies did work but new Tory academies are more selective • Vocationalism offers more opportunities to the lower classes, but it is regarded as inferior.

The coalition government

• Introduced the pupil premium which was extra funding for schools to take on disadvantaged pupils, with the funding being spent specifically on disadvantaged pupils.
• HOWEVER in the long run there is mixed evidence the pupil premium works as the funding sometimes gets spent generally, rather than on disadvantaged pupils.
• The coalition scrapped the EMA, one of the few policies which seemed to have worked to promote equality of opportunity.

The Tory government since 2015

• T-levels may promote equal opportunity by offering more choice for non academic students, this may also help raise the status of academic subjects, breaking the traditional view that they are inferior to academic A-levels.
• Lockdown policies harmed equal opportunities as poor students lost out on more learning than rich students and then covid-catch up policies were insufficient to actually help students catch up.
• Funding cuts to education over several years harm equal opportunities as state schools fall further behind private schools.
• The tories expanded grammar schools by stealth – this harms equal opportunities as grammar schools are over-attended by the the middle classes.

Other Information you could include…

• Compensatory Education – lots to say here….

• You could talk about Gender and Ethnicity too….

Conclusions: have education policies promoted equality of opportunity?

• The main policy of the last 40 years has been marketisation which allows middle-class parents more freedom to exercise their cultural, material and social capital to get their children into the best schools, which works against equality as it favours the rich.
• There have been policies such as the EMA/ Sure Start and Pupil Premium designed explicitly to tackle inequality but these have mostly been short lived or underfunded and failed to make any significant difference.
• However the attainment gap overall has decreased slightly which suggests that these policies haven’t harmed equal opportunities too much.
• The continued existence of private schools is the policy which harms equality the most as these institutions are vehicles of privilege for the wealthiest to hot house their average kids into the best grades and the top jobs they don’t deserve.

Share this:

• Share on Tumblr

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from ReviseSociology

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

More From Forbes

5 strategies to unlock your winning college essay.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - JUNE 29: People walk through the gate on Harvard Yard at the Harvard ... [+] University campus on June 29, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admission policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution, bringing an end to affirmative action in higher education. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

The college application season is upon us, and high school students everywhere are staring down at one of the most daunting tasks: the college essay. As someone who has guided countless applicants through the admissions process and reviewed admissions essays on an undergraduate admissions committee, I've pinpointed the essential ingredient to a differentiated candidacy—the core of your college admissions X-factor .

The essential ingredient to your college admissions X-factor is your intellectual vitality. Intellectual vitality is your passion for learning and curiosity. By demonstrating and conveying this passion, you can transform an average essay into a compelling narrative that boosts your chances of getting accepted to your top schools. Here are five dynamic strategies to achieve that goal.

Unleash Your Authentic Voice

Admissions officers sift through thousands of essays every year. What stops them in their tracks? An authentic voice that leaps off the page. Forget trying to guess what the admissions committee wants to hear. Focus on being true to yourself. Share your unique perspective, your passions, and your values. Authenticity resonates deeply with application reviewers, making your essay memorable and impactful. You need not have experienced trauma or tragedy to create a strong narrative. You can write about what you know—intellectually or personally—to convey your enthusiasm, creativity, and leadership. Intellectual vitality shines through when you write with personalized reflection about what lights you up.

Weave A Captivating Story

Everyone loves a good story, and your essay is the perfect place to tell yours. The Common Application personal statement has seven choices of prompts to ground the structure for your narrative. The most compelling stories are often about the smallest moments in life, whether it’s shopping at Costco or about why you wear socks that have holes. Think of the Common Application personal statement as a window into your soul rather than a dry list of your achievements or your overly broad event-based life story. Use vivid anecdotes to bring your experiences to life. A well-told story can showcase your growth, highlight your character, and illustrate how you've overcome challenges. Intellectual vitality often emerges in these narratives, revealing how your curiosity and proactive approach to learning have driven you to explore and innovate.

Reflect And Reveal Insights

It's not just about what you've done—it's about what you've learned along the way. When you are writing about a specific event, you can use the STAR framework—situation, task, action, and result (your learning). Focus most of your writing space on the “R” part of this framework to dive deeply into your experiences and reflect on how they've shaped your aspirations and identity.

World No 1 Djokovic Survives 5 Set Epic To Advance In French Open Match That Ends After 3 AM

New android warning shows why iphone is impossible to beat, nsa warns iphone and android users to turn it off and on again.

The most insightful college-specific supplement essays demonstrate depth of thought, and the ability to connect past experiences with your future life in college and beyond. Reflecting on your intellectual journey signals maturity and a readiness to embrace the college experience. It shows admissions officers that you engage deeply with your studies and are eager to contribute to the academic community.

Highlight Your Contributions—But Don’t Brag

Whether it's a special talent, an unusual hobby, or a unique perspective, showcasing what you can bring to the college environment can make a significant impact. Recognize that the hard work behind the accomplishment is what colleges are interested in learning more about—not retelling about the accomplishment itself. (Honors and activities can be conveyed in another section of the application.) Walk us through the journey to your summit; don’t just take us to the peak and expect us know how you earned it.

Intellectual vitality can be demonstrated through your proactive approach to solving problems, starting new projects, or leading initiatives that reflect your passion for learning and growth. These experiences often have a place in the college-specific supplement essays. They ground the reasons why you want to study in your major and at the particular college.

Perfect Your Prose

Great writing is essential. Anyone can use AI or a thesaurus to assist with an essay, but AI cannot write your story in the way that you tell it. Admissions officers don’t give out extra credit for choosing the longest words with the most amount of syllables.

The best essays have clear, coherent language and are free of errors. The story is clearly and specifically told. After drafting, take the time to revise and polish your writing. Seek feedback from teachers, mentors, or trusted friends, but ensure the final piece is unmistakably yours. A well-crafted essay showcases your diligence and attention to detail—qualities that admissions officers highly value. Intellectual vitality is also reflected in your writing process, showing your commitment to excellence and your enthusiasm for presenting your best self.

Crafting a standout college essay is about presenting your true self in an engaging, reflective, and polished manner while showcasing your intellectual vitality. Happy writing.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Equity? Equality? How Educators Can Tell the Difference

• Share article

Today’s post is the latest in a series on the difference between equity and equality .

‘Every Student Doesn’t Need the Same Thing’

Karen Baptiste, Ed.D., a senior consultant at McREL International, is a former special education teacher, instructional coach, and director who now works with K–12 schools across the United States to support improved teaching and learning. She is a co-author of The New Classroom Instruction That Works :

It’s common for educators to believe and teach that everyone should be treated fairly and equally. Having been a special education teacher, and being a person of color, I understand the impact on a child’s life when we treat everyone equally.

Equality, in general terms, is the belief that everyone should get the same treatment, the same resources, and the same starting point. That would be OK if our society did not rank race, gender, (dis)ability, religion, etc. Unfortunately, people of color have dealt with racism and oppression for hundreds of years, and they have not had equal treatment, fairness, nor the same starting point. When teachers say they want equality, what they are saying is that they want all of their students to be treated the same and, therefore, do not see or acknowledge the differences among their students.

When an educator says they believe in equality over equity, they overlook their students’ unique characteristics, abilities, and traits that make them who they are and alleviate themselves from the responsibility of having to address their students’ needs. Most people want to avoid discomfort, especially when the topic of race is surfaced. There is fear of getting it wrong or being accused of being a racist, so it’s easier to say “I treat all of my students the same.”

Equity acknowledges and addresses the unique needs of each student, and it is what we need to work toward. Because of my dark skin, and because of my gender, and because of the texture of my hair, and because of the language I speak, I am born into a world where I am too often dismissed and seen as inferior, not just in school but at work, when buying a home, shopping at the grocery store, traveling, and engaging in any part of living life. There is no part of our lives that has gone untouched by racism and/or discrimination. People of color are still fighting today to be seen and heard as an equal, valued member in the world. Until that happens, we can’t talk about equality.

Equity says I see you.

Equity says I want to understand you.

Equity says I accept your Black and brown skin.

Equity says there is nothing wrong with you or your existence in the world.

Equity says I recognize your learning needs and I am willing to learn the best ways to teach you and provide you with the resources that you need to be successful so that you can feel equal in this space.

Every student doesn’t need the same thing. Equality pushes for everyone to get the same thing, while equity is about giving every student what they need to be successful. Let’s set aside the topic of race momentarily and think about the grave outcomes if we treat students with special needs equal to their peers without special needs. What if the expectation during physical education class is to run two laps in a specified time? Students who use a wheelchair cannot realistically meet that expectation. This is why the federal law requires children designated for special education services to have an individualized education program, because their needs are not equal; they do not need equal treatment, they need equitable treatment and resources in order to access a quality education. Now, think about your student in class who needs to use manipulatives during a math lesson while other students can do mental math.

All students learn differently and can meet mastery when equity becomes part of your practice. Some might consider this pedantic when discussing equality and equity, but it’s not. Providing students with the resources they need to be successful provides them with the psychological safety that is sometimes missing in classrooms but gravely needed.

‘Equity Is Not an Initiative’

PJ Caposey is the Illinois Superintendent of the Year and is a best-selling author, having written nine books for various publishers. PJ is a sought after presenter and consultant who has a widely read weekly newsletter available at www.pjcaposey.com :

Sometimes, I think the concept of equity compared to equality is very difficult and complex. Other times, I think it is straightforward and people out of an act of willful ignorance choose not to understand. I work hard to keep a positive mindset, so my intent in this is to provide six practical examples to demonstrate the difference and how it plays out in schools.

• A student’s grandmother is in the hospital, and their attendance suffers, so you modify some assignments to ensure you are measuring their progress toward standards but limiting the volume to best meet the student’s needs. EQUITY
• A student’s grandmother is in the hospital, and their attendance suffers, and you keep them responsible for the exact work everyone else must complete. EQUALITY
• A student struggles to read and has a documented disability, so their tests are read to them. EQUITY
• A student struggles to read and has a documented disability, but you provide zero assistance to them because it would not be fair to the other students. EQUALITY
• A district analyzes their data and creates plans to close achievement gaps by paying special attention to those groups not performing well. EQUITY
• A district analyzes their data and creates improvement plans that are equally applied to all students. EQUALITY
• Based on benchmark assessment results, some students are placed in intervention groupings to support their learning needs. EQUITY
• Despite assessment results, all students receive the exact same instruction throughout the course of the day. EQUALITY
• All students who wish to participate in Advanced Placement courses are allowed to do so despite previous performance if they attend an in-person meeting articulating the demands of the course. EQUITY
• Only students who have a 3.2 grade point average and have had less than five missing assignments per year on average are allowed to participate in Advanced Placement courses without any exceptions. EQUALITY
• Some staff members have advanced degrees in reading so their professional development requirements around the new reading curriculum are altered to acknowledge their expertise. EQUITY
• All staff members are required to attend the same professional development regardless of prior knowledge or expertise. EQUALITY

My point in sharing these very realistic examples of equity versus equality is twofold. I have come to the realization that we “DO” equity far more than some people would elect to realize. Second, even those who are reluctant to embrace the fact that schools should have an equity focus typically want schools to make equitable decisions when it comes to them or their children. From that statement, feel free to extrapolate what you will.

I will leave with one last thought on the topic. Equity is not a goal. Equity is not an initiative. Equity is a mindset and a lens through which we make innumerable decisions every single day. Whenever we consider how we can best serve an individual student or lead an individual staff member by meeting them where they are at and helping them to get where they need to be, we are operating with an equity mindset.

‘Equity Empowers’

A retired teacher and speaker, Denise Fawcett Facey now writes on education issues. Among her books, Can I Be in Your Class focuses on ways to enliven classroom learning:

The words “That’s not fair” have become a virtual children’s anthem. Heard from homes to playgrounds to classrooms, those three words—spoken almost in the cadence of a song—are the outcry of kids everywhere, conveying their frustration over what they perceive as unequal treatment when things don’t go as they expected. Although we tend to ignore that all-too-common outburst, the early sense of justice that underlies it just as often informs adult concepts of equality as well, fostering an expectation that everyone will be treated the same. However, there is a striking difference between appearing to treat everyone equally and ensuring that everyone has the equity offered by an equal opportunity.

In an educational setting, affording everyone an equal chance at success means equity supersedes equality. From differentiation in teaching methods to the hiring of teachers, among other factors, here are four differences between equality and equity:

• Differentiation. Just as we don’t expect all students to wear eyeglasses in the name of equality, we shouldn’t expect all students to learn in the same way, either. Differentiation settles that. Providing what each student needs for optimal learning, it might be as simple as eyeglasses, preferential seating, or extended time for assignments. However, the chance to present mastery in multiple ways or to use books and other resources that are culturally relevant are also means of differentiation. Although the content area is the same for all students, as are the myriad tools available (there’s your equality), each uses the tool that enables that student to achieve success. That’s not only differentiation. It’s equity.
• Admission to gifted classes. While white, able-bodied students of a certain intellectual ability and socioeconomic level generally have an equal opportunity to be admitted to classes for gifted students, admission tends to exclude students of color as well as students with physical disabilities and those of lower socioeconomic levels, all of whom have eligible students among them. Equality makes certain that all schools have classes for gifted students. Equity goes beyond that, seeking to identify gifted students among those underrepresented groups within each school and assuring that they also gain admittance to gifted classes once identified.
• Hiring diverse teachers. It’s easy to point with pride to teachers of color in a district or to teachers who use wheelchairs, believing them to be reflections of equality and diversity. However, how many are there? And where are these teachers placed? Equality merely says there are some of each. Equity provides an equal opportunity for ALL teachers to teach at any school, not simply affording them an interview at the “better” schools with no hope of being hired nor relegating these teachers to schools designated “inner city” or “low achieving.” Equity also ensures that the number of teachers outside the dominant group is at least representative of their numbers in that community.
• A seat at the table. Much like hiring practices, opening a committee or group to people not normally invited is ostensibly equality. After all, this type of equality frequently involves having “one of each kind,” so to speak, with representation from various racial and ethnic groups and possibly from different ability groups as well. However, it’s certainly not equity as the newly invited are expected to be grateful for the invitation, not to be bold enough to participate as equals. Without affording these participants a genuine voice, it’s educational tokenism that solely allows one to be present. Equity, on the other hand, balances power, legitimizing each person’s voice.

Returning to that childhood question of fairness, equity is the true answer for both students and educators. Offering an equal playing field for success, equity empowers, placing everyone on equal footing.

Thanks to Karen, PJ, and Denise for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

It’s not unusual for districts, schools, and educators to confuse “equality” with “equity.” What are examples, and ways, you would help them understand the difference?

Part One in this series featured responses from Jehan Hakim, Mary Rice-Boothe, Jennifer Cárdenas, and Shaun Nelms.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email . And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 12 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Sign Up for The Savvy Principal

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

Publications — Over 100 years of publishing excellence

• Book Author Resources
• Submit a Book Proposal
• AMS Rights, Licensing, and Permissions
• Open Math Notes
• Frequently asked questions
• Member Journals
• Research Journals
• Translation Journals
• Distributed Journals
• Open Access Journals
• Guidelines and Policies
• Journal Author Resources

Librarian Resources

• eBook Collections
• COUNTER Usage Statistics
• My Subscriptions
• Subscription Information
• Licensing Information

Mathematical Reviews/MathSciNet®

• MathSciNet ®
• Reviewer Home
• MathSciNet ® Subscriptions

Membership — Welcome to your membership center

Join the ams, renew your membership, give a membership, individual membership.

• Member Benefits
• Member Directory
• Reciprocating Societies
• Members in Developing Countries

Institutional Membership

• Domestic Institutions
• International Institutions
• Two-Year Institutions
• Graduate Student Chapter Program

Other Member Types

• Corporate Memberships
• Associate Memberships

Meetings & Conferences — Engage with colleagues and the latest research

National meetings.

• Joint Mathematics Meetings
• Upcoming JMMs
• Previous JMMs
• Special Lectures
• Professional Enhancement Programs (PEPs)

Sectional Meetings

• Upcoming Sectionals
• Previous Sectionals
• Presenting Papers
• Hosting Sectionals

Other Meetings, Conferences & Workshops

• Mathematics Research Communities
• Education Mini-conference
• International Meetings
• Mathematics Calendar
• Short Courses
• Workshop for Department Chairs and Leaders

Meetings Resources

• Suggest a Speaker
• AMS Meetings Grants
• Submitting Abstracts
• Welcoming Environment Policy
• MathSafe – supporting safe meetings

News & Outreach — Explore news, images, posters, and mathematical essays

News from the ams.

• AMS News Releases
• Feature Stories
• Information for Journalists
• In Memory Of

Math Voices

• Feature Column
• Math in the Media
• Column on Teaching and Learning

Explorations

• Recognizing Diverse Mathematicians
• AMS Posters
• Mathematics & Music
• Mathematical Imagery
• Mathematical Moments

Professional Programs — Resources and opportunities to further your mathematical pursuits

Professional development.

• Employment Services
• Mathjobs.org
• BEGIN Career Initiative
• Mathprograms.org
• Mathematical Opportunities Database
• Research Seminars

Institutional Information and Data

• Annual Survey of the Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
• CBMS Survey
• Other Sources of Data
• Directory of Institutions in the Mathematical Sciences
• Professional Directory

Grants & Support

• AMS-Simons Grants for PUI Faculty
• Travel Grants
• Fellowships & Scholarships
• Epsilon Fund
• Child Care Grants

Awards & Recognition

• AMS Prizes & Awards
• Fellows of the AMS

Education — Resources to support advanced mathematics teaching and learning

For students.

• Information for Undergraduate and High School Students
• Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs)
• Considering Grad School
• Find Grad Programs
• Applying to Grad School
• What do Mathematicians Do?

For Teachers

• Teaching Online
• Teaching Resources
• Inclusive Classrooms
• Assessing Student Learning
• Education Webinars

For Department Leaders & Mentors

• Information for Department Leaders
• paraDIGMS (Diversity in Graduate Mathematical Sciences)

Government Relations — Advocating for the mathematical sciences

Elevating mathematics in congress.

• Our Mission
• Letters, Statements, & Legislation
• Congressional Briefings

Legislative Priorities

• Federal Issues of Concern
• Federal Budget Process

Get Involved

• Advocacy Resources
• Take Action

DC-Based Fellowships

• Congressional Fellowship
• Mass Media Fellowship
• Catalyzing Advocacy in Science & Engineering (CASE) Fellowship

Giving to the AMS — Your gifts make great things happen for mathematics   Make a Gift

What you can support.

• The 2020 Fund
• Next Generation Fund
• Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars
• JMM Child Care Grants
• MathSciNet for Developing Countries

Create a Legacy

• Make a Tribute Gift
• Create a Permanent Fund
• Establish a Prize, Award or Fellowship
• Bequests and Charitable Estate Planning

Honoring Your Gift

• Donor Stories
• Donor Wall of Honor
• Thomas S. Fiske Society
• AMS Contributors Society
• AMS Gardens

Giving Resources

• AMS Development Committee
• AMS Gift Acceptance Policy

About the AMS — Advancing research. Connecting the mathematics community.

Our organization.

• Executive Staff
• Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion
• Jobs at AMS
• Customer Service

Our Governance

• Board of Trustees
• Executive Committee

Governance Operations

• Calendar of Meetings
• Policy Statements & Guidelines

Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society

Published by the American Mathematical Society since 1950, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society is devoted to shorter research articles in all areas of pure and applied mathematics.

ISSN 1088-6826 (online) ISSN 0002-9939 (print)

The 2020 MCQ for Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society is 0.85 . What is MCQ? The Mathematical Citation Quotient (MCQ) measures journal impact by looking at citations over a five-year period. Subscribers to MathSciNet may click through for more detailed information.

• Articles in press
• Recently published
• All issues : 1950 – Present

Contents of Volume 152, Number 7 HTML articles powered by AMS MathViewer View front and back matter from the print issue