Equity In Education

What steps can be take to address inequity by race, class, and gender in higher education, that would be better than stripping the college curriculum of general education requirements to make college degrees possible to earn in less time at a lower cost (thereby advancing equity, which the person to whom I was responding to was primarily considering in light of its impact on black college students)?

This isn't by any means a complete list, but here are a few thoughts on the subject.

1. College affordability which needs to change if we are to have anything approaching a meritocracy - providing grant based financial aid to the full extent of financial need to every academically qualified college student is the easiest and least expensive single step one could take to improve socioeconomic equity in the U.S. 

College attendance and completion is far more closely related to family income, even after controlling for academic performance, than it should be in the U.S.

2. Law school and med school ought to be an undergraduate programs as it is almost everywhere else in the world, turning a 7 year law school program and 8 year med school program into a 4 year law school and 5 year med school program. 

This is both an issue for affordability, and an issue of making it easier for women who are on a "biological clock" if they want to have children at a reasonable age, to pursue these professions.

3. While there are countries that have three year bachelor's degrees (and both my daughter and I graduated from college in three years in the U.S.), but that is made possible by essentially fitting the first year of the U.S. college curriculum into H.S. 

From a racial equity perspective in the U.S., I think a system that required that kind of H.S. program to go to college would exclude more black Americans from higher education than the status quo because the H.S. quality divide in the U.S. is greater than the higher education divide, so that would be a net minus and an extra year to figure out what you want to be when you grow up is also worthwhile. 

More plainly, lots of black Americans are stuck in shitty high schools - general education in college remedies a lot of the shitty H.S. education those students got, without penalizing kids (black and not black) who got good H.S. educations. 

Higher ed is easier to fix than K-12 for reasons that are hard to change in the short to medium run. K-12 education funding, curriculums and operations are controlled by state and local elected officials in a very direct, hands on way, and while school choice options exist, in lots of places there aren't any choices or aren't any good choices. The wide choices available in higher education, and the limited amount of political interference in how higher education operates, helps address institutions that are seriously deficient at that level better than the political tools at the K-12 level do.

The U.S. has among the best higher educational institutions in the world, and best typical higher educational experiences in the world, in terms of teaching quality, and its K-12 educational standards are not nearly so impressive.

4. Degree inflation and requiring degrees for positions that don't actually need them is a serious problem. Lots of jobs that only need four years of education require a graduate degree, lots of jobs that a two year degree is sufficient for require a bachelor's degree, lots of jobs that high school is sufficient for expect some college. But, the next point gets at an important source of this problem.

5. Four year college programs, that general education requirements contribute to, are appropriate because a lot of what one gets out of college (even more so for black students, on  average, than for middle class white students) is assimilation into an emerging multi-ethnic national social class of college educated people. Lots of inflated degree requirements are imposed because that is what employers are really looking for, and two years isn't enough to do that well.