The ethical costs of using higher education for economic mobility

Abstract

A great deal of recent scholarship on economically disadvantaged students and higher education works under the foundational assumption that going to college can and/or should serve the goal of economic mobility. This article considers a cost of using higher education for this purpose – specifically, the impact on the decision-making of poor students. I argue that the narrative of higher education for economic mobility places poor students in a problematically restrictive normative framework as compared with their wealthier peers in which decisions involving the pursuit of future economic goods change from matters of preference into ethical dilemmas. In turn, poor students are forced into a narrow cost–benefit, consequentialist mode of decision-making. This is especially problematic because higher education for many students is a transformative experience – a type of experience which is particularly unsuited to consequentialist reasoning. The solution involves reframing the way in which we think about decision-making in higher education, which is at least partially contingent on increasing social supports to shift the burdens of poverty off individual students.