title: Bridging Economic Inequality in India through Higher Education: A Study on Rural, First Generation Learners
Creators: name: Vijayakumar, Kala
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2020

description: One of the biggest challenges that India is facing is growing economic inequality. This inequality greatly impacts the social welfare of the nation. There is a pressing need for India to address this issue. Widening participation in higher education has the potential to open up new opportunities, reduce income inequality and promote economic growth and social welfare. Widening participation has resulted in many first generation learners entering the higher education institutions. Gainful employment for these first generation learners is one potential way for bridging economic inequality. Many researchers have opined that supplementary measures need to be taken to help the first generation learners to compete with their peers and get gainfully employed. A private, self-financed, philanthropic engineering school in Chennai, a city in India, had designed a special supplementary curriculum to help first generation learners, from rural villages belonging to the economically lower strata, to overcome the cultural and social barriers and get gainfully employed. The purpose of this research was to understand the lived experiences of a cohort of rural, first generation learners, who had undergone this curriculum and to comprehend their perception of the effectiveness of this specially designed supplementary curriculum in enhancing their employability skills and economic status and also the impact it had on their family’s economic status. The research was conducted on a cohort of 13 rural, first generation learners, who had completed their undergraduate engineering program at this institution in 2012. Seven of the participants were male and six were female. All of them had undergone the special supplementary curriculum designed by this institution, which included an orientation course, mentorship, additional coaching classes for academics, English communications skills training, participation in extra-curricular and co-curricular activities and job-oriented placement training. Semi-structured interviews were held to collect data. A qualitative phenomenological approach was taken for this study, since the requirement was to understand in-depth the challenges faced by the rural, first generation learners from their perspective and get a deep insight into how they overcame them. The themes were extracted from the participants’ interviews and were analyzed. The participants of this study perceived that higher education alone may not have been sufficient for them to overcome the challenges in getting meaningful employment. Their lived experiences suggest that the specially designed curriculum was necessary to help them to overcome the cultural and social barriers and to equip them with the necessary employability skills to enter the workforce. Their economic status improved considerably. It was interesting to note that all of them had contributed towards uplifting the economic status of their family as well. Their lived experiences indicated that targeted initiatives in higher education institutions that assisted in equipping rural first generation learners from underprivileged backgrounds with the necessary skills and traits needed for employment could be considered as an effective tool to fight economic inequality. The study concludes with recommendations to the education policy makers and higher education institutions. More research into the scalability of the proposed supplementary curriculum to a larger mass of diverse first generation learners is recommended.