For many years, evaluation in higher education equity has been dominated by a familiar set of questions: Who gets in? Who stays? Who completes? These questions matter. But they are also deeply limited.
They privilege institutional accountability over student experience, numerical indicators over lived realities, and compliance over justice. They rarely ask harder questions about power: Who decides what counts as success? Whose knowledge shapes evaluation frameworks? And who benefits from the data that are collected in the name of “equity”?
In my recent article, Critical evaluation through the lens of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, published in Access: Critical Explorations of Equity in Higher Education, I challenge the assumption that evaluation is a neutral or technical exercise. Evaluation is always political, ethical, and relational—and treating it otherwise allows inequity to persist under the guise of evidence.
The problem with “good intentions”
Across Australia, substantial public investment has been made in student equity initiatives—through HEPPP and related programs—aimed at widening participation for under-represented groups. Yet despite decades of policy effort, inequities in retention, progression, and graduate outcomes persist.
One reason is that many equity programs are poorly evaluated—or not evaluated at all. Where evaluation does occur, it often relies on blunt indicators, deficit framings, and administrative data systems that were never designed to capture complexity, belonging, agency, or harm. Students are labelled as “at risk”, “low SES”, “First Nations”, “regional, rural and remote”, or “disability”, yet these categories are frequently applied without understanding the distinct structural barriers and enablers they reflect—and without inviting students to define success on their own terms.
In practice, evaluation frequently serves institutional risk management rather than student justice. Findings are sometimes withheld due to sector competition. Programs are adjusted to meet reporting requirements rather than student needs. And students themselves remain largely absent from decisions about how their data are collected, interpreted, or used.
This is not simply a technical problem. It is a problem of power.
Why Indigenous Data Sovereignty?
Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) emerges from the long struggle of Indigenous peoples to reclaim authority over data about their lives, lands, and communities. It challenges extractive research traditions that treat people as data sources rather than rights-holders, knowledge-holders, and decision-makers.
At the heart of IDS are the CARE Principles—Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics. Together, these principles insist that data practices must be grounded in self-determination, relational accountability, and justice—not just efficiency or compliance.
The paper situates Indigenous Data Sovereignty within a broader tradition of critical and transformative evaluation that treats evaluation as a moral and political act, rather than a neutral technical exercise. From this perspective, how we evaluate is inseparable from questions of power, justice, and accountability. At the same time, while Indigenous Data Sovereignty offers valuable guidance, it is grounded in the specific rights, histories, and self-determination of Indigenous peoples, and these principles must not be appropriated or used to replace Indigenous-led evaluation by non-Indigenous actors.
Moving beyond access: a justice-oriented lens
From this perspective, student equity cannot be reduced to enrolment targets or participation counts. Justice requires attention to agency, voice, dignity, and belonging. It requires evaluators to interrogate deficit framings and to recognise universities as moral and political institutions, not neutral service providers.
Crucially, it also requires evaluation to be accountable first to the communities it affects, not only to institutions or funders.
An illustrative case: refugee-background students
To ground these arguments, the article explores how IDS principles could inform the evaluation of university initiatives supporting students from refugee backgrounds. These students often sit at the intersection of multiple exclusions—visa precarity, financial barriers, racialisation, and misalignment between migration and higher education policy.
While some universities offer fee-waiver scholarships and access initiatives, evaluation tends to stop at entry points. Persistence, wellbeing, and success are rarely examined in ways that centre student voice. Where explanations for limited outcomes are offered, they often individualise trauma or “lack of preparedness”, deflecting attention from structural barriers.
Applying the CARE Principles reframes evaluation in powerful ways. It asks whether evaluation produces collective benefit for student communities, whether students have authority over how data about them are used, whether evaluators act with reflexivity and accountability, and whether evaluation practices actively prevent harm. In this framing, evaluation becomes a shared governance practice rather than an extractive exercise.
An invitation
This paper is an invitation to pause and to be honest about what evaluation currently does in the name of equity. Too often, it counts participation without asking who sets the terms, measures outcomes without interrogating power, and reports “success” while inequities remain structurally intact. The question is not whether we collect enough data—but whether our data practices serve justice or merely institutional comfort. If evaluation is going to matter, it must do more than document disadvantage. It must redistribute authority, centre lived experience, and refuse extractive uses of data. Indigenous Data Sovereignty does not offer a technical solution; it issues an ethical challenge. It asks evaluators, institutions, and policymakers to rethink who evaluation is for, who controls it, and who benefits. That shift—from measuring access to practising justice—is the work now required of equity evaluation.
Lien Pham 