Monitoring Inequality in Education

Investments in education and skills are of crucial importance in today's rapidly changing global economy. While some people in some parts of the world are keeping up with such investments, other people in other parts of the world are not. This creates inequality in education which gives rises to big gaps in income and wealth as well as social exclusion. To allow for better monitoring of these inequalities both across and within countries, dr. Mariko Klasing and dr. Petros Milionis want to construct a global database on education inequality. Financial support, however, is necessary to make this happen.

Every year about 5% of the world’s GDP is invested by governments in education and training. The benefits from these investments are not shared uniformly, though. Women and minorities tend to receive less education, which limits their ability to compete for good jobs in the labor market. Highly skilled workers also tend to concentrate in economically more advanced areas, leaving smaller cities and rural areas with a less educated workforce. Tracking these gaps in educational investments across population groups and regions is very important in order to promote successful development strategies. While international organizations provide some data on these gaps, the data are mostly at the country level. As a consequence of that, it is currently not easy to compare education inequalities that are present within countries and across population groups.

Petros: “Once the project is completed we will be making the database publically available via the website of the University of Groningen to anybody who would like to use the data for policy purposes or to conduct further research on the topic.”

With your help, Mariko and Petros can complete this project, raise aware on the importance of educational inequalities and provide insights about how to promote equal access to education. Please help them achieve their goal and donate! Any amount is welcome.

Mariko: “In order to understand how educational inequality arises and how it can be combated, we first need to know the facts. This requires data that are not available at the moment.”

The goal of the project is to put together an extensive database on educational statistics for different population groups covering as many regions and countries of the world as possible. The database should also go back several decades in order to track the changes that have occurred over time. To assemble this database, Mariko and Petros will need help from research assistants who will collect education data from censuses conducted in different countries and organize them so that they are comparable across countries and easy to use. This is expected to cost €40.000.