Philosophical Foundations
This 1948 landmark document established that higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit and individual capability.
Human Rights Mandate
This univariate equity concept insists that a binary educational criterion (like primary school completion or basic literacy) must be fulfilled for 100% of the population.
Minimum Standards
In the simple education production model, public expenditure, household spending, and parental human capital represent this initial stage.
Inputs
This visual tool plots the cumulative percentage of a population against their cumulative share of an educational good, forming the graphic foundation for the Gini coefficient.
Lorenz Curve
This universal property requires that replicating a population without altering the shape of its educational distribution leaves the inequality measure unchanged.
Population Independence
Amartya Sen’s framework criticizes "commodity fetishism" (focusing solely on goods or money), arguing instead that equity evaluation must focus on the freedoms and options open to individuals.
Capabilities Approach
This concept defines equity as a state where educational outcomes are distributed equally and do not depend on pre-determined background circumstances like gender, wealth, or location.
Impartiality
Standardized assessment test scores and formal educational qualifications belong to this stage in the education production cycle.
Outcomes
This common impartiality metric calculates the ratio of female values to male values for a given education indicator.
Gender Parity Index (GPI)
This fundamental principle dictates that transferring a year of education from a student near the top of the distribution to one near the bottom must reduce overall inequality.
Principle of Transfer (Pigou-Dalton Principle)
John Rawls proposed this famous thought experiment, where principles of justice are chosen without knowing one's future social class, intelligence, or gender.
Veil of Ignorance
This univariate concept examines the spread or dispersion of an educational variable across all individuals in a population, regardless of their background circumstances.
Equality of Condition
Higher adult wages, improved health outcomes, and civic participation represent this final stage of the education production framework.
Ultimate Outcomes
This analytical technique combines household survey enrolment data with government spending data to evaluate which wealth groups benefit most from public education expenditure.
Benefit Incidence Analysis
An inequality measure possesses this property if multiplying all individuals' educational values by a constant scale factor leaves the calculated index unchanged.
Scale Invariance (Relative Inequality)
In Spheres of Justice, this philosopher argued that basic education serves a universal citizenship purpose, whereas specialized higher education acts like "holding office" where meritocratic selection applies.
Michael Walzer
This univariate concept examines the spread or dispersion of an educational variable across all individuals in a population, regardless of their background circumstances.
Redistribution (or Vertical Equity)
This level of measurement applies to unordered categories where individuals can be classified but not ranked, such as sorting students into academic vs. vocational streams.
Nominal level of measurement
This equality of condition metric calculates the ratio between the share of education held by the top 10% and the bottom 40% of the population.
Palma Ratio
An inequality measure possesses this property if adding a constant amount of education to every individual in the population leaves the calculated index unchanged.
Translation Invariance (Absolute Inequality)
John Roemer’s formulation for measuring equal opportunity uses this metric to evaluate an individual's morally relevant effort relative to others of the same background "type".
Effort Quantiles
This bivariate/multivariate concept allocates educational opportunities based on intelligence, effort, or accomplishment while remaining independent of non-relevant background traits.
Meritocracy
This continuous level of measurement features a true zero point, making ratios between individual values mathematically meaningful (e.g., years of schooling or public expenditure per student).
Ratio level of measurement
In regression-based impartiality analysis, this absolute metric measures the OLS slope coefficient of an educational outcome against a circumstance variable like wealth.
Slope Index of Inequality (SII)
This property of multivariate equity measures allows overall inequality of opportunity to be mathematically broken down into the specific percentage contributions of individual circumstances (e.g., gender vs. wealth vs. location).
Decomposability