Education In Kerala Case Study

Whether the expansion of education in Kerala has helped to reduce social inequalities in educational attainment and contributed to greater social development? What kind of relationship can exist between the entitlement to education and the resulting intergenerational mobility among the socio-economic groups in Kerala? The study proposes to address the above issues by adopting a comparative study of the socio-economic groups (religious community) in the state of Kerala. Such a method becomes necessary as the castes or the religious communities are diverse in terms social development and economic status of people. The paper is divided into three sections. Section I discusses empirical issues in education and social mobility.
Work looking at participation in higher education, or more specifically university attendance, has shown that people from lower income backgrounds have significantly lower participation rates (two recent example are Blanden and Gregg, 2004, for the United Kingdom, and Black and Sufi, 2002, for the United States). The other feature of higher education and its connection to social disadvantage is that people from poorer backgrounds who do participate tend to enroll on courses, or in institutions, that yield lower economic and social benefits. This includes a lower likelihood of studying at “elite” universities (Chevalier and Conlon, 2003) and also a higher probability of studying for a vocational qualification rather than an academic qualification (Conlon,
There are international differences in the extent of intergenerational mobility of economic and social outcomes (Dearden et al, 1997, Lillard et al, 1994, Hertz, 2005,). Countries with higher levels of social mobility also have education systems that seem to do better at ensuring educational equalities. Social mobility is higher in the Scandinavian countries, at intermediate levels in Germany, and at its lowest in the United Kingdom and the United States (Solon, 1999, 2002). Kumar et al (2002), explore the Indian experience of social mobility using data of National Election Study of 1996. The study came to the conclusion that the class inequalities cannot be explained by the current operation of caste in Indian society. To be sure, the historical legacy of caste should not ignored, but they suspect that similar class inequalities could probably be found in other countries that lack the caste system but at similar stages of economic development. Their contention is that the class inequalities described are to be explained primarily by the resources – financial, educational, and social – that the members of different classes posses and should not be ascribed to caste. They pay particular attention to those who start or end up near the top or bottom of the distribution and find that members at these extreme ends of the distribution are particularly