Inequalities in Agency and Empowerment in Moroccan Public Universities

Inequality in higher education in Morocco is a rising concern for policy circles as the distribution of opportunities and benefits is unequally distributed across lines of socio-economic stratification. This study explores the dynamics of access and participation in Moroccan higher education to scrutinize how the current configuration of the system generates unequal conditions. The study is particularly concerned with the exploration of how state-funded higher education in Morocco provides conditions for structural fairness and equality of opportunity; how the choices of higher education students in free-access and limited-access institutions integrate with their personal agency, aspirations and life plans, and finally the exploration of the reciprocal interrelationships between access and participation in higher education and capability deprivation. To achieve these objectives, a sample of (n= 262) higher education students from free-access (n=164) and regulated-access institutions (n=98) have been surveyed using a Relative Autonomy Index (RAI) questionnaire to measure their agency and empowerment levels in the enation of choices about higher education access and participation. The RAI developed by Deci and Ryan and refined in the context of human development and wellbeing by Alkire and Chirkov (2007) has been used to measure agency, autonomy and empowerment in higher education. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been used to analyze group differences to scrutinize inequalities in conditions and outcomes in Moroccan public higher education institutions. The results of this study indicate clearly that students in limited access institutions enjoyed significantly higher levels of freedom and opportunity to enact meaningful choices in their higher education pathways. In other words, they have higher levels of personal agency as a result of their expanded opportunity sets.