Differences in the Graduate Educational Attainment of Social Groups in India: Preferences for Education Versus Education-Friendly Endowments

Abstract

The focus of this article is on the ‘educational attainment’ of social groups in India, defined as the proportion of 21–29-year-olds in the different social groups that are graduates. Within this context, the article makes three contributions. The first is in terms of decomposition methodology: It shows how decomposition analysis can be used to breakdown graduate educational attainment (GEA) by population subgroups and region to offer insight into the policy levers available for improving the GEA of certain groups. The second is to a methodology for computing probabilities (termed ‘recycled predictions’) for isolating the group-specific probabilities of GEA which can be totally attributed to group identity. The third is to use these probabilities to break down the differences in proportions between social classes into a ‘social group effect’ and an ‘endowments effect’. The data for this article is from India’s Periodic Labour Force Survey for the period 2017–2018.