Muslim OBCs have lowest college access, lower than even SCs, STs

Disparities across Socio-Religious Groups (SRG) in India showed that along with Muslims (OBCs and others), STs and SCs were far behind when compared to the Hindu other/upper castes.

Hyderabad: If you are a Muslim from an Other Backward Class (OBC) background in India, your odds of reaching a college classroom are worse than almost anyone else’s, worse even than those of Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), groups that have historically borne the brunt of educational exclusion in the country.

That is the central finding of a working paper published in February 2024 by the Research Cell for Studies in Education Policy, Planning and Governance (RSEPPG) at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad. 

Titled “Participation Disparities in Post-Secondary Education” and authored by Venkatanarayana Motkuri and E Revathi, the paper draws on the third round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS-3), a nationally representative household survey carried out in 2019-20.

The researchers relied chiefly on what is called the Net Attendance Rate for Post-Secondary Education, or NAR-PS – the share of the college-going age group 18 to 23 that is actually enrolled in higher education at a given time. A related measure, the Gross Attendance Rate for Post-Secondary Education (GAR-PS), casts a wider net, counting everyone pursuing higher education regardless of whether they fall within that age bracket.

By the NAR-PS measure, Muslim OBCs recorded the lowest attendance rate of any socio-religious group in the country in 2019-20 – just 17.2 per cent. Hindu upper castes, classified as “other castes” in the survey, stood highest at 41.8 per cent, a gap of 24.6 percentage points separating the two. 

STs were not far ahead of Muslim OBCs, at 19.4 per cent. Muslims outside the OBC category fared only slightly better, at 20.3 per cent, while SCs came in at 22.7 per cent. Across nearly every measure the paper examined, Hindu OBCs attended post-secondary education at twice the rate, or more, of Muslim OBCs, STs and SCs.

Lagging behind even SCs and STs

What stands out in the paper is not just the size of the gap but who sits at the bottom of it. “An observation from the present analysis is that Muslim OBCs are lagging behind even compared to SCs and STs in respect of non-modified measures like NAR-PS and GAR-PS of post-secondary participation/attendance rates,” the authors write.

For SC and ST students, the paper points to a body of earlier research showing that unequal access, entry barriers and discriminatory practices within higher education institutions take a toll on academic performance and eventually push students out of the system. Some of these institutional practices, the paper notes, either keep such students from enrolling in the first place or force them to drop out once they are in.

A rural-urban chasm

The disparities do not run along caste and religious lines alone. Gaps by rural-urban location, gender, socio-religious group and economic and occupational category all show up more sharply on the GAR-PS measure than on NAR-PS. Rural India’s Gross Attendance Rate for Post-Secondary Education stood at 29.5 per cent in 2019-20, against 47.2 per cent in urban India, a difference of 17.7 percentage points.

The population groups furthest from India’s higher education goals are largely the same ones across every measure: the lowest two quintile classes, Muslims (both OBC and other), STs and SCs. All remain well short of the target set by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 – a Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of 50 per cent by 2035.

Decades of expansion, still a long way to go

GER measures total enrolment in higher education institutions, counted regardless of a student’s actual age, as a share of the population in the corresponding age group. At independence, it stood at under 1 per cent. By the turn of the century, it had crept up to just 8 per cent. The following two decades saw remarkable expansion, with GER roughly tripling to reach 25.6 per cent by 2019-20, according to the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE).

Closing in on the NEP’s 50 per cent target, the paper argues, will depend on narrowing the gaps between groups rather than simply pushing up the national average. “Unless the group-disparities are reduced while improving GER of population groups with low participation rates, the national average of GER at 50 per cent would be difficult to achieve,” the authors write, noting that because these lagging groups make up a large share of India’s population, their low participation rates will otherwise keep dragging the country’s average down.

The scale involved is considerable. India’s total population in 2019-20 was estimated at around 134.65 crore. Of this, roughly 15.27 crore – 11.3 per cent of the total – fell in the college-going age bracket of 18 to 23. Close to 4.45 crore of them had completed higher secondary schooling and were enrolled in post-secondary courses that year. A further 0.9 crore students outside this age bracket, either younger than 18 or between 24 and 29, were also pursuing post-secondary education. 

Put together, roughly 5.4 crore Indians under the age of 30 were enrolled in some form of higher education in 2019-20.

Kerala, Delhi lead the way

Not every part of the country tells the same story. Kerala recorded the highest Net Attendance Rate for Post-Secondary Education among 18-23-year-olds in 2019-20, at 45.1 per cent, followed by Telangana (41.6 per cent), Maharashtra (40.9 per cent), Tamil Nadu (40.7 per cent) and Goa (39.5 per cent).

On the broader GAR-PS measure, Kerala again topped the list at 53 per cent, followed by Delhi (51.1 per cent), Tamil Nadu (50.3 per cent), Telangana (50 per cent) and Maharashtra (47.5 per cent).

No state had crossed the 50 per cent mark on NAR-PS that year. But two, Kerala and Delhi, had already crossed that threshold on GAR-PS, and two more, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, sat right on the line. These, the paper suggests, are the states closest to the “universal trajectory” of higher education transformation that the NEP 2020 envisions for the country as a whole by 2035.

(This article draws on a February 2024 working paper by the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad, published to mark World Population Day, observed annually on July 11 to underline the importance of census data, surveys and demographic research)