The Right to Higher Education and the Problem of Unequal Benefits

Abstract

This chapter turns to the question of who should pay for an education system founded on the right to higher education. First, it explains how moral intuitions about fair funding can challenge the claim that higher education should be allocated as an entitlement or primary good. Second, its show how these intuitions are conventionally justified in terms of a distribution’s effects on socioeconomic equality. Third, it argues that there are also liberty-based reasons for the public to fund higher education. Finally, it shows why these liberty-based reasons take on a special significance in the context of the right to higher education, warranting full public funding so long as two other distributive conditions (non-exclusivity and support for diverse conceptions of the good) are satisfied.