Becoming the Mainstream: Merit, Changing Demographics, and Higher Education in California

Abstract

In this essay, we discuss the nature of what one commentator has termed "savage inequalities" in educational opportunity that separate minority students from the rest of the population in the United States. Notwithstanding the political importance of widespread liberal education to the integrity of the democratic process,2 there are pressing practical reasons to be increasingly concerned about persistent educational inequity. Rapidly changing demographics will soon redefine "majority" and "minority" populations in states across the country and produce unprecedented shifts in the composition of the American workforce. Yet, the combined effects of race-based disparities in educational opportunity and rapidly changing demographics are on a collision course with an increasingly advanced technological economy that will require greater numbers of better trained, more highly educated, and more intellectually skilled workers, managers, and policymakers. The dimensions of the coming educational crisis and its corresponding economic consequences are quite clear. Indeed, at perhaps no other time in history have the methods and data of social science allowed us to map the trends and trajectories created by this inequality so precisely. Thus, we argue that, absent significant changes in educational policy and concerted efforts to achieve more equitable distribution of educational opportunity, a new world order is in the making that will be beset by increasingly insurmountable employment barriers that growing numbers of minority workers will be unable to transcend. Indeed, if the powerful, opposing forces created by shifting demographics and shrinking opportunity proceed