Engineering Aspirations and Lives of Youth

Abstract

Abstract The concluding chapter revisits some of the key understandings arrived through the ethnographic research and shows the realities of higher education in contemporary India. Despite the manifold increase in the number of institutions and the subsequent entry of a large number of first-generation learners, hierarchies and inequalities are largely reproduced. Women are able to enter education only under conditions that enhance their families’ respectability. Groups that do not have explicit markers of cultural and social capital struggle to find employment. Neither upward mobility nor personal success nor transformations sought through entry into engineering colleges are easily achieved. The case studies help to make clear some of the seeming paradoxes such as why despite a drastic increase in women’s access to higher education, their enrolment in the workforce is at an all-time low; why young men and women struggle to find jobs despite having a professional education degree, and why even marriage choices are often made along the grain of caste.