A Population Divided

For years, American scholars have boasted the steadily rising number of young adults attending college. In 1973, according to the Pew Research Center, only 24 percent of American citizens were enrolled in college, while 15.7 percent of the population had dropped out of high school; by 2008, the number of college students had risen to 40 percent, while the percentage of high school dropouts had fallen to less than 10 percent. Professors, parents, and politicians nationwide spoke of the increasing level of intelligence and productivity such statistics implied, and their sense of pride and optimism was not unwarranted. However, this growth came at the cost of equal access: while the total percentage of those aged 18-24 enrolled in colleges or universities had reached 43.4 percent, the percentage of enrolled urban young adults was 48 percent while the percentage of rural students was only 30 percent.
This sort of demographic education disparity is not unique: across the globe, governments are struggling to raise the quality of learning offered by rural schools up to the standard set by urban ones. In Shanghai, authorities raised concerns that the rural population was ill equipped to deal with the demands of the workplace environment after the discovery in 2004 that per-student expenditure in rural areas was only 50-60 percent of that in the city. More recently, in Bangladesh, following the results of the 2014 Secondary School Certificate Examination, education authorities have begun to voice their fears that the easily traceable education disparity between city-dwellers and the rural population has only increased over the past few years, ever-widening the socioeconomic and cultural gap between the demographic groups.
Understanding the Cause
Shanghai has pointed to administrative failures among rural schools as the primary culprit of their education disparity, leading the Shanghai Rural Compulsory Education Management Program to look for ways to “improve the content, development, and educational quality” among rural schools. Authorities in Bangladesh, by contrast, point to the nature of homes in different geographic regions, in addition to the physical characteristics of the schools themselves. Education campaigners have argued that urban students enjoy “coaching, private tuition, and better guidance” from their guardians in a way rural students do not, and that urban parents invest more of their time and attention in the upbringing of their children. Former University Grants Commission chairman Nazrul Islam also pointed specifically to the lack of infrastructure and trained teachers in rural schools.
Children raised in cities have much greater exposure to schools of higher learning because colleges tend to settle in more densely populated areas. The September 2013 Forbes list of the World’s 25 Best Universities consisted of 24 schools categorized as either urban or suburban. Additionally, the 10 most populated American cities boast more than 450 colleges and universities between them, demonstrating the tendency of these urban areas to cultivate the education-oriented spirit that contributes to higher interest in, and better quality of, schools starting at the kindergarten level.
Addressing the Problem
In 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which, among plenty of other things, sought to address the education disparity. The State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, created as part of the act, devoted $7 billion specifically to improving the state of education in rural areas. Additionally, the Council of Economic Advisors estimated that the Department of Labor is “spending an additional $650 million in rural areas on Workforce Investment Act programs, which provide job training and related services.” Meanwhile, the Shanghai Rural Compulsory Education Management Program established a system in which “high-quality urban schools” were assigned a less successful rural partner to advise and reform, hoping to address management problems by “formulating the rural school’s education strategy, designing new school management systems, organizing and executing administrative duties in the area of education and teaching, and introducing high-quality educational resources to improve the quality of rural school administrations.”
Shanghai education authorities called in third party agencies to evaluate the success of the program. They uniformly determined that the rural schools had successfully undergone “great changes” and that particular improvement was detected in school management, lecturing, and student performance, among others.
And in Malaysia, the call for change in Malaysia is coming from an organization called Teach for Malaysia, which seeks to provide support and learning to those children who are “deprived of access to educational opportunities because of where they are born.”
Across the globe, officials are realizing that a population divided along explicitly ideological as well as geographic lines inevitably results in a splintered nation with little hope of forward movement, destined either to abuse the less-educated sector or create an environment unsuitable for development.  While cities may inevitably remain at the center of research and learning, rural populations must be provided with opportunities to reach the same levels of educational success as their urban fellows.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Darrenxys