Equity and Access in Higher Education

The conversation of equity in higher education has been gaining popularity for years. Questions like “Is affirmative action fair?” or “Should legacy admissions be allowed” have been dominating public discourse and we won’t pretend that we haven’t noticed. 

Scholar Launch is tasked with doing all we can to help students get into the colleges and universities of their dreams. To do that, however, we must make sure we provide the professors, faculty advisors and teachers’ assistants who make this possible with the resources they need to make the biggest impact. 

Does Scholar Launch care about equity? The short answer is yes, of course! The long answer is yes, we care very much, but dismantling centuries-old systems of inequity in any industry is a long game that requires cooperation and dedication across the board. 

But we are working to do our part.

What is equity?

Equity and equality are commonly confused terms. Equality means providing everyone the same type and amount of resources, regardless of students’ backgrounds, abilities, or needs. Equity in higher education, on the other hand, acknowledges and addresses the disadvantages some students face. It attempts to close the gaps caused by privilege and ensure each student can pursue and acquire a great education on a level playing field. 

To simplify, equality means giving a healthy person and a starving person each one apple, while equity means giving the healthy person one apple and the starving person three.

To dig a little deeper, there are two types of equity. 

Horizontal equity is essentially deliberate inclusivity. It’s a concept that’s focused on ensuring all students, regardless of background, have access to the same opportunities to pursue higher education. Horizontal equity calls for more accessible and inclusive admissions criteria, college costs, financial aid and other support services. Vertical equity focuses on helping students move up the ladder of success by ensuring fairness of outcomes across socioeconomic and demographic groups. This concept “focuses on making sure that all students have a fair chance of achieving their educational goals—not just pursuing them in general.”

As Scholar Launch is concerned, horizontal equity is our goal that we’re working tirelessly to achieve.

How does Scholar Launch pursue horizontal equity? 

Preparing young people for the world of higher education is our specialty, which means we’re directly responsible for inclusivity and accessibility at a pre-admissions level. 

We’re achieving that by leveraging the power of remote learning, so students across the globe can benefit from our expert faculty and professional support system. We work with students’ schedules, especially in our one-on-one cohorts, to make sure we’re prioritizing their needs over our own. Also, in addition to our multilingual consultation service (we offer consultations in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese and German), we frequently reward applicants with scholarships to ensure they have equitable access to world-class education. 

Our efforts go beyond these actions, though. Equity is about more than internet access and admissions costs. We must also address the intellectual, cultural and social gaps that can occur for any number of reasons. 

For example, a first-generation college student attending a research conference could easily be at a communicative disadvantage when surrounded by peers who’ve received guidance on higher education since birth. Our curated, personalized guidance with each of our scholars helps close those gaps and gives our students the confidence to stand in rooms they’ve never been in before.

We also acknowledge that many students have incomparable intellectual abilities, but may have trouble integrating those smarts into hands-on projects, social situations, or their post-collegiate careers. We’re working to address that intellectual intersection too.

How does Scholar Launch prepare its students for life after high school?

As we march further and further into the 21st century, with its new technologies that are evolving faster than we can keep up, we become increasingly inundated with mountains of knowledge from countless sources. While this can be a good thing, most of us weren’t taught how to process, let alone integrate, all that information on a daily basis.

This deluge of information has, so far, outpaced students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Young people today quite literally have the world at their fingertips, but have not yet honed the transdisciplinary, critical competencies needed to manage that access. And institutions of higher learning, and employers alike, are challenged with finding stellar young minds who can adapt their academic smarts to complex, real-world scenarios. In fact, colleges and universities are now looking beyond test scores to judge whether students can apply all they’ve learned in actionable ways. It’s no longer enough to be smart. Students must also demonstrate creativity, leadership and initiative.

Scholar Launch’s core mission is to equip our students with the emotional intelligence, communication skills and intellectual agility needed to integrate academic and interpersonal excellence. In short, we work closely with our scholars to bridge the gap between having good grades and being a well-rounded person. Our scholars come from diverse backgrounds from all over the world, and our efforts to ingratiate them all with the social skills and academic rigor to succeed in Top 30, or even Ivy League, schools go a long way.

Despite all of these efforts, we still work daily to pursue equity in all that we do. As our company grows and we’re able to do more for our students, we’ll continue to prioritize inclusivity and accessibility. At the end of the day, their success is our main concern.