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Unit 20: Secondary Education: Concept and Need

The earning differentials between workers with high levels of education and those with Notes
less have widened, despite the expansion of the education system and an increase in the
supply of educated workers at all levels. Since the early 1980s, the relative wages and
relative supply of workers with secondary education have risen steadily in comparison
with those of workers with only primary education. In recent years, the rise in demand
for workers with senior secondary and tertiary education has been large enough to
outweigh any downward pressure on wages resulting from the increased supply of such
workers. This growth in demand for skilled workers is expected to continue, making the
expansion of secondary education and improvement of quality a matter of some urgency.
India’s trend of increasing returns to higher levels of education is consistent with worldwide
trends in East Asia (including China), Latin America and Africa. These trends are likely to
be associated with market liberalization and free trade (Lam and Leibbrandt, 2003; Schultz,
2003; Behrman, Birdsall and Szekely, 2003; Lloyd, 2005).
(ii) Social Benefits of Secondary Education: In addition to the private benefits of secondary
education which accrue to households (which link to overall 13 This selectivity will likely
evaporate as the secondary enrollment rate of girls increases, reducing returns. productivity
and contribute to growth), the social benefits of secondary education must be considered.
Social benefits go beyond the wages of workers and consider other factors important to
society. It is worth pointing out that the positive externalities of secondary education on
health, gender equality, and poverty reduction are even stronger than those of primary
education (World Bank, 2005a), although these are difficult to quantify in economic terms.
Through its impact on young people’s age at marriage, and its propensity to reduce fertility
and improve birth practices and childrearing, expanded secondary education of girls leads
to significantly lower maternal and child mortality, slower population growth and
improved education of children, all of which are important Government of India.
Below shows recently released data from the Third National Family Health Survey (2007),
and compares the education level of females with a range of reproductive health indicators.
The positive effects of upper primary and secondary education, as opposed to primary
education or less, are strikingly clear.
(iii) Social Equality: Social inequality has resulted in differential access to quality education
by young people from different household consumption quintiles, affecting their skills
and earnings later in life. This, plus the fact that social networking affects access to good
jobs, has resulted in inequality in earnings, even among workers with the same level of
education. Workers from the poorest quintile have tended to earn less per hour than
workers in the top quintile, even though they have the same level of education, if not the
same quality (Figure 1.3). This has also been seen in Latin America where socioeconomic
segmentation results in the poor attending schools of lower quality compared to their
wealthier peers, which translates into lower future earnings. This situation has begun to
change, however, as hourly wages have increased faster for those workers in the poorest
quintile who have senior secondary and tertiary education. This shows that education is a
promising avenue for upward mobility for the poor, particularly in a rapidly growing
economy. Government has an important role to play in encouraging this process.
After India passed a Constitutional Amendment in 1976 which made education a joint
responsibility of the central and state governments, there was much national debate
regarding how to achieve education for all, and many state-level experiments with
community-based primary education.14 These contributed to the launching of the landmark
National Policy on Education (NPE) in 1986, operationalized by the Plan of Action of 1992.
The NPE laid the groundwork for a series of centrally sponsored schemes to support the
universalization of primary education and gender and social equity.15 In the 1990s, multi-
state interventions, supported through the District Primary Education Program (DPEP) in
half of the districts with low female literacy, built the foundation for the government’s
flagship National Program for Universal Elementary Education, Sarva Shiksha Ahbiyan
(SSA). Huge progress has been made in addressing inequality at the elementary level

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