Literature Review
According to (2001), educational inequality is the result of interactions between family decisions (demand) and opportunities (supply). The supply is said to be a factor in which the national government can intervene. It can be stimulated by passing laws like compulsory-subsidized schooling or emphasizing specialization areas in which its pump-priming strategies will be applied ( 1992). With this, educational stratification can be obtained.
However, opportunities of higher education expansion are curtailed by limited resources and illegitimacy of the government. In the Philippines, although expansion ensued, social origins (say, farmland) and educational transition (say, away from agriculture to industry) remained stagnant (1987). Also, China’s educational recovery in the post-Mao era was halted when women started to draw back to rural areas due to inequality ( 1996). Lastly, South African whites applied racial discrimination to black counterparts to decrease the latter chance to access stratified higher education ( 1999; 1996).
Global factors such as Western thoughts and educational modernity adversely influence the stratification processes of developing countries (cited in 2001). Modernization theory ( 2006) suggests that developing countries require the aid of developed ones for internal growth. However, when discrimination reigns abound and developed economies wanted more, the opportunity of developing countries to exploit high-paying employment or infuse international knowledge to their own condition is undermined. In effect, this could be suspected about a procedural strategy from developed countries whereby dependency theory ( 2006) is the bottom-line theme wherein they continue to be capitalist and developing economies as natural resources and labor suppliers.
(1976) showed that school factors determine academic achievement than family factors (cited in 2001). This is supported by subsequent research conducted by (1983) that quoted “the poorer the country, the greater the impact of school and teacher quality on achievement.” In the contrary, there are important aspects of family background to educational outcomes in developing countries. Family status had found to affect student’s mathematics and language ability. In supporting study, (1999) found that the higher the “wealth gap” in a developing country, the difference in student achievement between rich and poor becomes eminent.
Liberal education is a holistic approach to learning that departs to conventional thinking that a person should learn in narrow perspective ( 2003). Its emphasis is on whole development and crucial to higher learning. Without it, vocational courses would replace bachelor’s degree or other graduate studies since liberal education provides the platform for a person to think critically, appreciate gaining of knowledge and understand cultures/ ethics including their problems. Developing countries had undermined liberal education due to too much focus on industrialization as evidenced by Soviet Union. This is aggravated by the fact that most persons in such countries who access liberal education are mostly elites — a very small fraction of the population.
Another hindrance to liberal education is the political ideologies of the holding governments ( 2003). As said, “People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge”. This dictum serves as one of the dictator’s rationale to invest heavily in vocational education. However, when thinking is limited to only know what to do, what to think and what to learn, people are transformed into robots with value judgments which even engineers would be slipped into since their industrial acts undermines environmental impacts due to too much technicality of their cognition. To acknowledge this, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee was formed and aimed to use liberal education to uplift the quality of graduates for the purpose of alleviating poverty in the country. This will lead for employers to see the graduates more attractive and fit-to-work.
In Alaska, youths who are on-the-verge of deciding whether to pursue higher studies or indulge to serious jobs for long-term goals are mostly bound to migrate (2004). This US-state faced continued slow growth during 1990s and shift from resource extraction to services and retail. The brain drain that it experiences would not support the transition due to lack of manpower not only in quantity but also quality. Its long-term development is also beleaguered due to the inability of its universities to lure student to study locally that would lead to permanent employment elsewhere.
Bibliography
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