In India, university students from scheduled castes (SCs) face a number of challenges that not only prevent them from graduating but also prevent them from being strong performers in universities and upon graduation. Utilizing the framework of social capital, this article draws upon life histories, secondary interviews, and document analysis to understand the lived realities of four male Indian adolescents from different SCs who are in their third year of university studies. Although the findings support the notion that overt acts of discrimination based on a student’s caste are negligible, lower caste students have limited access to the networks that create social capital. Moreover, institutional efforts to develop or enhance student social capital are minimal. For these reasons, the article concludes that systemic reform is necessary to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds overcome less obvious forms of discrimination, so that they might succeed during college and after graduation.
This paper seeks to unravel the institutional context of the educational experience of scheduled caste engineering students in Kerala, a federal state in India. Though much has been debated about equity of access in the domain of reservation policies in higher education while studying the caste question and educational equity, process and outcome dimensions continue to be understudied. By presenting ethnographic accounts of the educational experience of fourteen scheduled caste engineering students, we explain how different institutional cultures result in different experiences for students of similar educational and familial backgrounds. Our analysis suggests that the notion of institutional habitus better captures the impact of institutions on marginalised students. The paper concludes with a call for further research to explore the institutional habitus of different higher education institutions. The authors hope that such research would help in formulation of new policies and practices to facilitate institutional transformation and contribute to improved quality and equity of higher education in India.
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