Educational Inequality In The Middle Class

“Although the educational system helps certain poor children to move into middle class professional positions, it denies most disadvantaged children the same educational opportunities afforded to children of the affluent. In this way, schools tend to preserve social class inequalities in each new generation” (p. 240). In this quote, the author of our course textbook, Richard T. Schaefer throws light upon the conflict perspective of education and how the educational system is designed to bestow status differentially. In simpler words, the educational system does not improve life chances for the poor noticeably, since they start from a very low position on the ladder of social status. Educational system serves as a very strong bureaucratic system which caters the needs of the upper class and the upper middle class who can afford to pay for quality higher education. On the other hand, children from poor families, despite having
potential are not able to acquire degrees that can help them climb the ladder of their social status.
According to conflict theorists, the educational system preserves inequality because of the increasing tuition and degree requirements for professional positions that are ranked higher in terms of income and prestige. Students from disadvantaged families must depend on grants and huge loans if they intend to go for a professional degree that will bring a change in their social status and help them move from the working class to lower class, or to the middle class. Professions like doctors and surgeons are for students who come from affluent families who have huge savings to fund such expensive degrees, and even after making such huge investments, students are drowned in student loans for years and years. In today’s world, being intelligent, having a high IQ level and creativity are not enough to secure a high social status through education. One must come from a social status that is already high to maintain that status
through acquisition of education otherwise one may experience downward vertical mobility of their social status. Schaefer very rightly calls the higher education system “a sieve” for filtering students that can afford to pay for education and acquire degree after degree to survive and flourish in today’s competitive era.
I grew up in Pakistan which is a third world country. The economic disparity in my native country is very visible. The rich are extremely rich and the poor are extremely poor and the educational system preserves these huge differences of socio-economic classes to a great extent. Students with the potential and intelligence to achieve are held back from entering professions due to lack of financial resources, since there are no such things as grants, scholarships and loans available to students in Pakistan. One good example of this is the story of my cousin Uzair. He was always a bright kid throughout school, scoring always the highest grades in class. His family belonged to the lower middle class and it had always been difficult for my uncle and aunt to pay the monthly tuitions for their three children. They were aware that Uzair was gifted and had big dreams. He expressed clearly from a very young age that he wanted to step into the field of medicine and aimed at completing his MBBS degree (Bachelor of Medicine) from the most renowned medical school of Pakistan named Agha Khan University. However, as a young child he was not aware that his family lacked the financial resources to fund his education because the university he aimed to enroll in charged very high tuition. When Uzair completed high school, his parents tried to convince him to apply in other medical schools with affordable and considerably lower tuition as compared to the one he wanted to go to. Uzair still went ahead and took the entry exam for his dream medical school. As expected he passed the entry exam and was accepted. When the time to pay the first year’s tuition came, Uzair and his parents could not put together the huge amount of money to pay for his tuition. Thus, his dream was broken. Instead of applying in other more affordable medical colleges, Uzair completely gave up his dream and ended up enrolling for Bachelor’s in Science degree at a local university. Today Uzair is a professor of marine biology in the same university he completed his Bachelors and Masters from, but deep down he knows that he could have been a doctor or a surgeon, if only he came from a family with a high social status and financial resources to support his education. There are millions of students out there like Uzair who dream big, but the educational system denies them the opportunities to realize their dreams as argued by the conflict theorists in the quote stated above.