ABSTRACT
The second serious problem we face as a society when we ponder the future of higher education is: How can we generate a new understanding of the social good compatible with the political rationales of the current period? The idea of social good is a public construct, a commonly understood set of goals that guide public action. John Rawls (1971, 2001) argued there was a social contract that guided public choices about investment in education. More recent social theorists have concluded that there is no longer a social contract (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2009). Recent analyses of dialogues about the social good among educational leaders in the early 2000s consistently demonstrate a valuing of economic rationales for investment in education over social uplift and issues of equity, although there are occasional voices of reformers advocating social justice for minorities and women in science and engineering (Pasque, 2010). In the present context, there is also increasing recognition of underrepresentation of males in higher education as a whole, especially minority males (Harper, Williams, Pérez, & Morgan, 2012). Inequalities in educational opportunity undermine the economic growth of the nation, especially given the inequalities in wealth distribution (Rampell, 2011), which should be a compelling argument for reconsidering the value of the current stance on taxation. Interjecting understanding of the role of policy and practice into the policy discourses on higher education represents a major challenge.
