On Education, Once again.

I read this interesting interview with Oxford Academic, Craig Jeffery here: He makes an interesting observation that education alone is not a passport to social mobility. And class still mattters. While one would think that equal education is one of the surest steps towards social mobility, to erase historical biases etched into the bloodstream of generations, it turns out that not only in India, but across US and UK as well, that a good education is a necessary but insufficient basis for mobility.

I earned a post graduate degree in Patent Law recently. The course equipped me with all the knowledge on the subject but gave me very little to understand what I can do with it. Apart from the adage of Knowledge-For-Knowledge's sake - which I really like, it has given me little else. Jeffery puts this across neatly in another context as "....Education provides a sense of entitlement but not always the problem-solving skills that allow young people to start businesses".

On another note, the newspapers headlines of today indicates that a daughter of a stone quarry worker in Bangalore is headed to the prestigious National Law school to pursue her undergraduate degree. Given her intelligence as well as a capacity for hard work, I am sure she would top the graduating class five years on. But at campus interviews, wouldn't corporate India favour someone else in this field.....someone who perhaps has a lineage of lawyers, an unmatched network of pedigreed contacts etc? If it does not, then I can surely say education is a passport to social mobility. If not then the prestigious education would have taught her to "lower her ambitions. To quote a rather pessimistic note from the interview "....Class is crucial. If you are from the right class, there is always a good “fallback job” available when you leave education. If you are from a poorer background, you are much less likely to be able to turn your university degree into a good job."