Inequalities in education

Websites are today the face of an organization in the virtual world, with a global reach. Universities are organizations in India offering higher education. They use their websites for digital equality in education. The Information and Technology (IT) Act 2000 of India, is silent on the subject of Digital inequality of its educable population. However, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) guidelines, which has been ratified by Govt. of India, in 2007 of which Article 9.2 (g) & (h) lays down that, states should facilitate digital equality for Persons with disabilities (PWDs) for education, for new information and communication technologies, especially the Internet. One of the aims of National Assessment and Accreditation Council’s (NAAC) is to assess and accredit institutions of higher education in the country and lay special emphasis on upholding the quality of higher education in India. The websites of 137 Central and State Universities with NAAC accreditation were used for the study. The study aimed at evaluating the websites in terms of digital inequality in education, digital equality, career opportunities and interactive features for student population with disabilities. The study showed significant differences of digital equality features in their websites.

This paper primarily examines the interrelationships connecting family background and students’ academic attainment. Based on the questionnaire survey conducted in 6 senior high schools in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, the sample consists of 2028 senior high school freshman.The findings suggest that the differentiation of social stratification between families in senior high school education is embodied in student’s academic attainment. The advantaged classes (such as the administrator group, the middle- manager group, and professionals and technicians group) contain significantly larger resources in economic capital, cultural capital, and parents’ emotional involvement in education than the disadvantaged (such as blue-collar worker group, skilled industrial worker group, and peddler group), which indirectly affects students’ performance in exams. A further analysis indicates the way how family structured variables, including family’s cultural capital, economic capital affect the academic achievement. Besides, this paper explores the extent to which family process variables, including parental educational expectation, family interaction, parents’ emotional engagement in education, and behavior supervision, have power to predict academic achievement between different classes.

Higher education in China has experienced an unprecedented expansion since 1998. Despite the heated public debate on equity in access to higher education, particularly related to the province-based quota system, only anecdotal evidence has been presented to show the decline of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in enrollment in several elite universities. The examination of the role of expansion and differentiation in higher education and its implications for stratification remain to be seen, mainly due to the unavailability of appropriate data. In 2009, we launched the first wave of the “Longitudinal Survey of College Students,” aiming to collect the panel data on 5000 students from 15 universities in Beijing, tracking their differential experience in career choices, adaptation strategies and subsequent labor market outcomes. This paper analyzes students’ retrospective information on high school experience and admission processes, analyzes show how family background, high school, and preferential policies have channeled students into different types of tertiary institutions. As found elsewhere, the transition from elite to mass high education has also been accompanied by differentiation between elite research universities and less selective colleges of second tiers, with latter increasingly occupied by children of working

This paper uses large repeated cross-section surveys to analyses the progress in school attendance and literacy rates in nineties for both boys and girls in India. The study explores the trends, initiatives and issues of enrollment and completion rates over the period 1951 to 2001. In this context, the study examines issues like access to school, school attendance and quality of school education in terms of learning achievements, teacher-student ratio etc.
The results reveal that universal primary school attendance has been almost achieved in urban areas. However, the dropout rate in rural areas is one in every five children between ages 6-11 years. Thus, primary school completion rate do not exhibit much progress over time and given the high dropout rate, achieving school completion rate is not expected in near future. Moreover, drop-out rate between primary and secondary school is high and also gender gap widens. There has been visible improvement in literacy rates over the 1990s, especially for women. The results suggest that universal school attendance can be achieved in India by strengthening the mass education programmes.