This ethnographic study analyzes the barriers women encounter in achieving their goals at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Employing a discursive approach, the study seeks to identify symbols promulgated by various policy actions that legitimize or delegitimize specific gender relations. It draws…

This study provides an insider's perspective on why engineering undergraduates at elite Indian universities lack academic motivation. Using interpretive qualitative research (actors approach), we uncover students' perceptions of academic (de)motivation and group them into three broad categories: faculty-related, course-related and…

In the conventional system of education, a student can regularly interact with teachers and peers and effectively and smoothly carry on with the learning process. However, in the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system, students have to learn by themselves with the self-instructional materials and with the minimum guidance received from…

Using detailed data on the 2008 graduating class from an elite engineering institution in India, we evaluate the impact of affirmative action policies in higher education focusing on three issues: targeting, catch up, and mismatch. We find that admission preferences effectively target minority students who are poorer than average displaced…