Abating a Simple Fact: Recent Attempts to Reduce the Positional Aspect of Higher Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: The Interplay of Equality and Human Difference

Abstract

The simple fact that more higher education improves a person’s economic and social possibilities is complicated when higher education is acknowledged to be a positional good. As a positional good, one person’s advantage becomes another person’s disadvantage. Consequently, the worth of pursuing more higher education begs normative interrogation. If this pursuit puts others at a disadvantage, should we continue seeking more degrees or competing for high status institutions? Granting that higher education has positional and non-positional aspects, the purpose of this paper is to apply recent philosophical treatments of positional goods to higher education. I argue that the best of these treatments succeeds insofar as it reduces the positional aspect of higher education without reducing its non-positional goods.

Author

• John Peter Fantuzzo, Teachers College, Columbia University