Elsevier

World Development

Volume 64, December 2014, Pages 803-814
World Development

Parental Education as a Criterion for Affirmative Action in Higher Education

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.07.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Analyzes role of parental education on higher education participation in India.

  • If parental education can be an appropriate criterion for affirmative action.

  • Uses three rounds of National Sample Survey data collected during 1999–2010.

  • Compares predicted probability of parental education, socio-religious affiliation.

  • The former has larger, consistent impact on participation; and easy to implement.

Summary

Affirmative action, in the form of reservation policies, to address the issues of inclusion has been in place in India for a long time. While its scope has enlarged with inclusion of new social groups, the efficacy remains a matter of debate. This paper explores if parental education is an appropriate criterion for affirmative action. Empirical results using three rounds of the National Sample Survey data suggest that parental education as a determinant of participation in higher education not only transcends the impact of caste, religious, and economic status, it is also very attractive for the ease of implementation.

Introduction

Affirmative action, especially in the form of reservation policies, to address the issues of inclusion and equity has been in place in India for a long time. Through these policies higher participation of the marginalized groups is sought in the political, educational, and work-related domains. Over the years the scope and coverage of these reservation policies has been enlarged through the inclusion of new social groups and by incorporating new “spaces” hitherto not available to certain social groups. For example, while reservation in both educational and work-related domains was available for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) persons, the higher education space has been incorporated for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) only recently.1 Over the years, several castes and communities have been added to the reserved lists of each category at the central and state levels. The issue of reservation has become a tool of political mobilization and remains politically very alive even today.

It is important to analyze the role of affirmative action in different domains together so that the linkages across key domains of affirmative polices can be explored. As an underlying process, higher participation of specific segments of population in one domain (e.g., politics) may influence participation in other domains. However, capturing the dynamics of these linkages empirically is difficult as participation in different domains may interact in myriad ways over a period of time.

One can argue that reservation in the political domain is likely to be more effective as there is no formal pre-requisite or a threshold qualification to participate in the political processes. This is not the case for job reservation or reservation in higher education where eligibility criteria can be stringent which not many persons from the reserved category may be able to satisfy. To some extent, job reservation and quotas in higher education for the OBCs are a reflection of their increasing political participation and clout. Participation of marginalized social groups (especially SC, ST) in public employment is good only in select departments of civil services, while the overall participation leaves much to be desired (Sahoo, 2009). In the domain of education also, the participation of reserved groups is not very encouraging. However, in the political domain, participation of the reserved categories is much better; in a few cases the extent of participation of SCs and STs is more than their stipulated quota. Moreover, the rates of participation are significantly higher at lower levels of governance.

Sometimes, demands for preferential treatment can be a reflection of the “rise of newly educated and upwardly mobile” groups (Sowell, 2004, p. 19). Such a hypothesis seems consistent with the demand for preferential treatment by OBCs along with the fact that while quotas for state-sector jobs and admissions in higher education have often remained unfilled for SCs, this has rarely been the case for OBCs (Galanter, 1984, p. 62).2 Consequently, in one instance, lack of eligibility may reduce the efficacy of affirmative action, while in the other, the demand for higher preference may reflect the increasing trends in eligibility for the relevant population segment. Overall, the available evidence suggests that that the policies of reservation have not been an unqualified success. Besides, policies that were perceived as temporary have not only persisted but grown. Do we need to rethink the scope and nature of affirmative action policies?

Given this broad context, the paper explores if criteria other than caste can be used to form the basis for affirmative action. More specifically, we explore if parent’s education level is an appropriate criterion for this purpose. The paper is divided into six sections. Section 2 provides a brief discussion of the debates on the emerging role of the stratification of Indian society. Issues relating to the implementation of existing reservation policies in higher education are summarized in Section 3. Section 4 undertakes a brief review of the recent studies on the participation in higher education in India. Section 5 forms the core of the paper wherein the role of different factors in determining participation in higher education is analyzed. It discusses the analytical framework to explore the role of various factors, the data sets used, and the results of the econometric analysis. The main focus of this exercise is to ascertain empirically the impact of parental education on the participation in higher education. The final section discusses the policy implications of our findings.

Section snippets

Caste and social stratification

Desai and Dubey (2011) provide an insightful summary of the different narratives on the role of caste in the 21st century India. They suggest that while there remain differences across castes in a variety of “behavioral markers”, it is far from clear if this “differentiation translates into social hierarchies in modern India.” Besides, the salience of some of these behavioral markers is also on the decline (Desai & Dubey, 2011, p. 41). Moreover, the link between caste and occupation has

Issues in implementation of reservation policies

Sowell (2004) provides an excellent review of affirmative policies in different parts of the world. He identifies a variety of implementation issues that are common across nations. Building on his insights and of Galanter (1984), we list below a few salient ones which seem to be particularly relevant for India.

First, identification and the designation of preferred groups require very detailed knowledge of various population groups. In the case of India, one would require detailed information on

Participation of marginalized groups in higher education: insights from some recent empirical explorations

In a recent paper Basant and Sen (2010) argue that measures of participation in higher education need to be more nuanced than what have been used in recent years. The first distinction that needs to be made is between attainment and enrollment. While the former captures the segment that has completed graduate and higher level of education, the latter focuses on the segment that is currently studying for graduation or higher courses. In addition, while attainment is a stock measure and carries

Exploring the role of parental education on participation in higher education

Exploration of this kind requires an appropriate data set with information on parental and children’s education profiles along with data on other variables that can potentially affect participation in higher education. These variables can relate to the individual, household, and location characteristics.

Some concluding observations

This paper pooled together cross section data sets collected at three different points of time by the NSSO over a decade, to analyze the effect of socio-religious affiliation and parental education on participation in higher education after controlling for various other individual, household, and location factors. The empirical results show that the chances of participation in HE increases significantly with parental education levels and is the highest with parents having graduate education.

Acknowledgments

This is an extensively revised version of the paper presented at a conference on Higher Education at the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi during July 28–29, 2011. The paper is a result of the research undertaken as part of the long-term program on higher education at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. We would like to thank the anonymous referees of World Development for their insightful comments.

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