Preschool to Prosperity: How Educational Systems Define Socioeconomic Status

By: Toa Ghatak

Education has only recently been recognized as a basic human right, despite its importance in a myriad of philosophies and cultures throughout history. Around 375BC, In Republic, Plato argues that the ideal leader (the ‘Guardian’) of a nation should be rigorously taught, as education is intrinsic to responsible leadership. The late 500s saw the Sui Dynasty of Imperial China introduce civil service examinations, creating a meritocracy that valued education to create bureaucrats. In the 18th century, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, a strong proponent of direct democracy, claimed that a strongly educated citizenry was essential to make informed decisions and trust citizenry. These traditions have helped establish a global view that equates excelling in education with success in life, with good students becoming conflated with paragons of social mobility. This “understanding” of education, while not entirely truthful, is rooted in reason: oftentimes, better academics has led to better opportunities.

Education inequality, especially in growing countries, becomes a root for future economic inequality: those with “better” education, which often come not only with education, but connections and reputation, go on to have higher salaries, which is directly correlated with one's happiness and wellbeing. The opportunities that quality education can provide often lead to direct upward mobility, smoothing socioeconomic inequalities and allowing students to break cycles. However, these cycles are only broken and the upward mobility is only available when said education is available to all and not cost inhibited: when education becomes a source of profit, its benefits perpetuate inequality rather than try to limit it.

Globally, a substantial share of students in basic education attend non-state (often tuition-based) schools, with around 20% in primary education and 30% in secondary education. In lower or middle-income countries, the percentage in private secondary school enrollment is consistently around 30%, whereas in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, whose member states are dominated by advanced economies, the percentage is around 15-20%, a considerable difference. However, even where tuition-free education exists across the globe, indirect costs (such as transportation, books, or uniforms) may still lock out poorer families- direct tuition-based schools are not the only cost inhibitors. Nations that are in the process of creating or changing their primary educational models or legislation are now faced with a choice: do we allow private tuition as a supplement to government-funded education, leave education to the private sector, or follow a model akin to Finland’s, which has outlawed for-profit education while simultaneously addressing indirect costs?

India and China, the two systems that serve the most children in their education system, both have some form of private education in their system. Looking at both of these examples, we can see how heavily reliant multiple countries are on private or fee-based schooling at the secondary or even primary level, despite both countries approaching cost-based education differently. In India, about 50% of all students were enrolled in private/non-government educational institutions, and that percentage climbs higher in urban areas. In China, families spend an average of 17.1% of their annual income on education, and lower-income families spend up to 55% of their income on education.

The growth of the private educational sector in India isn’t an accident, but results from decades of uneven public investment alongside fast urbanization. After independence in 1947, India’s budgetary priorities in education and bureaucratic incompetence left public schools severely under-supported, particularly in rural areas. By the 1980s and 1990s, as liberalization expanded the middle class, families were able to seek out English and “Western” standards that the state did not provide. Private schools were created and became natural pathways to university entry and to white-collar jobs, with the latter being a major aspiration of the newly formed “middle-class”, especially with their migration from rural areas to urban cities. Compounding this decline in confidence was a widespread problem of teacher absence from government schools and an outdated curriculum. Today, "low-fee private schools" private schools are rapidly expanding even in poorer districts, reflecting both aspiration and desperation as parents give up large portions of their income in order to see their children be afforded better opportunities. While originally these Indian private schools were supplementing society with what the Indian public school system didn’t provide, they’ve started to perpetuate an unequal education system by linking quality learning to financial access. Additionally, India’s growing middle class has come to use education as a status symbol. The direct cost of tuition, which grows accordingly with a school’s perceived quality, as well as the indirect costs of after-school tutoring, which many rural students don’t even have access to, furthers India’s notorious urban-rural class divide.

In China, the commitment to household spending on education combines long-standing cultural traditions along with current-day pressure. Historically, the Confucian civil service examination system tied educational success to social mobility, and was one of the first examples of education-facilitated upward mobility. Historically, one of the world's earliest and largest scale meritocracies was rooted in China’s Confucian civil service examination system, which lasted from the 600s til 1905. This system linked education achievement (via examination results) directly towards social mobility, as better results yielded better careers, specifically ones in the bureaucracy of Imperial China. The exams were technically open to any man from any background, allowing for upward mobility if one could master Confucian classics. This resulted in the cultural belief of education as an investment- focus on the education and exam could result in better pay and a better life in the future. After the 1978 Economic Reforms,  education once again became a central means towards economic security and social capital, with a changing job market that would be characterized as "competitive" unlike the past iron rice bowl, a system of state benefits including guaranteed employment with stable wages, which limited the influence of education on economic outcomes for workers. However, China’s restructuring to a market economy resulted in the dismantling of state-owned enterprises, in turn dismantling the iron rice bowl. This turned China’s labor market into competition, with higher-educated white-collar workers seeing the most growth in opportunities and finances. 1977 also saw the reintroduction of the gaokao, China’s infamous college entrance exam. With mobility being limited to jobs that required higher education, the systems that determined your higher education started to determine your prospects. Academic performance, elite schools, and gaokao scores were what admitted students into prestigious universities, helping explain why education spending increased so dramatically, and bringing back the historical belief that investment in education was a strategic investment in a student's future. Similarly to India, parents began leveraging their savings and credit into street vendors, tutoring, cram schools, and extracurricular training classes that became a multi-billion-dollar "shadow education" industry to supplement the lack of support from government education. While the government wasn’t supportive of the shadow industry, households remained devoted to education as a means of securing survival in a competitive labor market. For low-income families, this reliance on education as the only, reliable paradigm to escape poverty would often threaten financial security, reflecting the desperate belief in education.

This idolization of private education isn’t limited to Asia: in North America, it’s rather well-founded. In the United States, local property taxes and levies dictate school funding, resulting in intense inequality dependent on varying monetary resources. This has led to vastly different education outcomes in wealthier and poorer neighborhoods, with students in high-poverty districts receiving 14% less resources than students in low-poverty districts. Districts with the ability to spend more will use it on better coursework, technology, extracurricular activities, and educators, perpetuating a cycle where students from lower-income families have fewer opportunities for higher-paying jobs due to fewer opportunities for higher education. Households with the ability to afford private schooling may do so to avoid relying on the instability of local funding, in turn taking the funding they would otherwise provide to public institutions away. The system in the United States often leads parents to two choices: spend money on housing and move to a higher-income area for a better education, or attempt to pay tuition for private schools while disregarding the neighborhood in which they live. However, those who have the ability to pay tuition in the first place will always be able to afford neighborhoods where state and public schools are inherently more supportive, leading to incredibly limited opportunities for those of lower socioeconomic status to access quality education. The U.S. is also not exempt from a reliance on tutoring and indirect costs, and the private tutoring market is expected to be valued at $8.08 billion by 2030. 

The global trend that can be inferred from these statistics is the reliance on paid educational services, due to a belief that public schooling is not ‘quality’, nor can it secure upward mobility or economic stability. Even parents who send their children to public or state schools still pay for educational benefits through private or after-school tutoring, another indirect cost associated with no-tuition schooling. The perceived need for “better” education, which correlates directly with paid opportunities, also minimizes the trust in government education. For a government to be able to highly regulate education to support social mobility, citizens must also believe that their policies can increase overall educational equality. A lack of trust in government education inhibits states from using their systems to promote socioeconomic development and equality, as when families see government schools negatively, they’ll withdraw from them. Households that are able to afford private education, whether through schools or tutoring, leave families that have no other options in the dust and widening the socioeconomic gap that education is intended to close. A lack of trust also erodes public support for a state's initiatives to fund or reform schools, or implement education policy.

Finland offers a new way of looking at equality in education by bringing the issue to the forefront. In Finland, private schools do exist, but they cannot be for-profit, and must still follow a national core curriculum. The Basic Education Act of 1998 and Section 16 of the Finnish Constitution assert that education is a social service for the public. Legislatively, profit-seeking behavior is prohibited from any public or private educational institution, while also ensuring that all schools are required to adhere to the National Core Curriculum created by the Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI). Other sections also outline the free nutritional lunches (and snacks for before/after school programs) in Finnish schools, and there are also options for students to receive subsidies for their transport to school, especially if they live further away. Finland's Student Welfare Act from 2013 (enacted in 2014) also requires schools to offer a myriad of student support, mainly student welfare services. Through such measures, Finland not only removes the direct cost of education via tuition, but also addresses the indirect costs that many students in other countries face, such as transportation, availability, and nutrition, and allows for student growth through provided psychologists and other welfare services.

It is said that this centralized system is responsible for Finland's consistently high levels of performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the primary measurement for the success of international educational systems where Finnish students tended to yield higher results compared to OECD country average. Supporters argue that Finland removes tuition and indirect costs (including meals, transportation subsidies, and student support programs) to ensure that all children, regardless of wealth, have an equal opportunity for success. On the contrary, critics claim that this extensive level of support minimizes educational freedom. Private institutions in Finland, such as Montessori and Waldorf schools, are required to implement the same essential curriculum, leaving little opportunity to develop alternate pedagogical practices. Some educators point out that limiting educational freedom inhibits experimentation and school choice for parents seeking alternative approaches to learning or extended academic programming. Others question whether a completely non-competitive and non-marketable system can adapt quickly to societal and technological change, and international education reformers worry that a lack of for-profit and independent opportunities reduces the innovation that competition creates. 

Finland’s current education system that is highly focused on equity was intentionally created in response to the widespread region-based inequality of the 1960s and 70s. 1972 brought about Peruskoulu, the first centralized basic education system, which resulted in the government-run 9-year basic education system, which turned into compulsory education for children aged 7 til 17. However, Finland’s societal context (a fairly small population, a strong welfare state, utilitarian cultural values and an ethnically and linguistically cohesive citizenry) is what allowed for this model's implementation, as is the government's ability to subsidize the many costs involved with education. 

Recognizing the diversity within private and public schools, however, is also important: neither construct is a monolith, nor are they diametrically opposed. In fact, if we believe that private schools are the only options for better pedagogical innovation, quality, and safety, we should incorporate the facets that allow excellence into public education. Policymakers must be able to allocate all the necessary ‘choices’ that private schools are able to bring into the sphere of public education. Conversely, if we are to believe that public schools are the only option for equity and accessibility, governments must ensure that these options are supported  through policy and supportive of their communities. Neither structure should be practiced in isolation- taking strengths from both systems would allow us to look at educational improvement holistically. 

To limit inequalities that begin with schooling, we must also make sure that the quality of public education is not affected by geography or student demographics. The educational tie to local property taxes that we see in North America does not let us have equal education quality across geographic and socioeconomic differences. However, there is a precedent for reforming this specific issue: we can use  consistent national-level redistribution and requirements, as exemplified by Finland's core curriculum. If we look to balance education nationally, all our children will have a similar start- in theory.

The other hiccup in the idealism of fully equal schools is social demographics, schools are not only for education. For example, private schools in the United States serve not only as a different curriculum, but also as a way to network with the rest of the rich and powerful. These connections lead to future job opportunities and simultaneously keep these opportunities within an “inner circle”, one that’s hard to break into due to the circle being created and closed during an executive’s childhood.

If we believe the purpose of education is not just for students to learn, but also to provide opportunities for all children in the future, not only through academics but through social connection, solutions are idyllic but not quite attainable. An ideal system would involve the across-the-board curriculum and equalized facilities of Finland while removing the social connections formed in schools from only being the connections of a student's neighbors. Schools that only take students from the neighboring areas fall into a trap of an unchanging economic geography. There will always be “wealthier areas”, but dispersing families across schools instead of focusing on geographical convenience confirms that the area in which one lives will not determine the social networks a student creates. With places like Finland already subsidizing transportation, we can imagine a vision of students being able to interact with a further diverse group of peers, rather than a group based on neighborhood incomes.

This ideal is wholly impossible to truly implement. Mandatory reassignment in schools and education, especially with the distance involved, would spur resistance, and intrinsic residential inequality of many areas makes it difficult to change. Nonetheless, the ideal of equality in all aspects of education: within your peers, your curriculum, and your ability to participate, is something that we should always strive for. Educational equality is a direct precursor of future socioeconomic equality, from the opportunities presented to the amount of education able to be pursued. Now we must ask- what is needed to set up one of these systems in a country that doesn’t want to force a future of inequality, and what led to systems with educational inequality?

If education is to be the great equalizer, it shouldn’t inherently divide. Education systems reflect the societies that generate them. In India, the reliance upon private schooling demonstrates how unequal support and a lack of public trust forces families to pay their way into opportunity. In China, the cultural expectation of educational superiority causes families to sacrifice extraordinary shares of their income in pursuit of a mobility that the state system cannot guarantee. Meanwhile, in Finland, where education is publicly funded, tuition-free, and heavily regulated, educational equity is meant to reflect that no person’s future is dictated by their wealth or geography. 

Governments looking to improve or centralize their education systems should not attempt to either replace or simply try to copy the Finnish model. Instead, the creators of education systems should look at what Finland’s system represents: a lack of cost barriers and consistent quality education across the nation, being instrumental to educational equity. Public trust in an educational system must be earned, as trust inherently ends the alternative education market before it can even start. A world where the next generation of a country already starts with an equitable life that they want to sustain, rather than leaving the following generations with problems to fix, will help the longevity and sustainability of a nation and can be directly impacted by the results of educational equality. 

Photo by Olympus Imaging Corp

Toa Ghatak is a freshman at New York University from Seattle WA, double-majoring in Business & Political Economy and Journalism. Her interests include urban and educational policy and sociology, and outside of class, she enjoys exploring museums, writing more than just non-fiction, visual art, and trivia.