Educational inequality has been recognized by the UN as a crucial problem that has negative effects on students’ learning outcomes and future life. While educational equality refers to distributing the same academic resources to everyone, educational inequality means providing students with unfair treatments or resources.
Academic resources include teachers, books, technologies and other materials used for learning. Having appropriate academic resources and good learning environments would help students acquire essential skills to increase their employability.
The World Economic Forum says the core future skills are: problem solving, working with people, self-management, and technology use and development.
To remain competitive in a changing world, governments should facilitate the development of such skills among their citizens. As the new trend pays attention to recruiting candidates based on skills and abilities rather than academic qualifications, governments need to provide their citizens with flexibility in academic qualifications to meet the requirements of future jobs. This means necessary academic resources should be available to serve the study programs.
People who experience educational equality are more likely to have good connections with others. So, they have more career opportunities, as well as choices for life. However, a challenge of offering equal education to citizens in many countries is about the capability to provide equal academic resources such as budget, technology and human resources (for example, competent academic staff).
Compared with developed countries in Asia (for example, Singapore and Taiwan), developing countries are probably unable to deal with disruption (such as digital disruption) because they have insufficient academic resources.
To achieve educational equality, national policies on education should emphasize the accessibility of quality education to everyone. Besides that, cooperation between Asian countries can reduce educational inequality.
Instead of focusing on short-term and unsystematic cooperation between countries, they should systematically exchange academic resources, such as technologies and academic staff, to avoid a shortage of skilled workers in Asia in the near future. This could lead to sustainable development of the region.
Phathara-on Wesarat and Anlaya Smuseneto are associate professors at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand.
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