Higher education, reservation and scheduled castes: exploring institutional habitus of professional engineering colleges in Kerala

This paper seeks to unravel the institutional context of the educational experience of scheduled caste engineering students in Kerala, a federal state in India. Though much has been debated about equity of access in the domain of reservation policies in higher education while studying the caste question and educational equity, process and outcome dimensions continue to be understudied. By presenting ethnographic accounts of the educational experience of fourteen scheduled caste engineering students, we explain how different institutional cultures result in different experiences for students of similar educational and familial backgrounds. Our analysis suggests that the notion of institutional habitus better captures the impact of institutions on marginalised students. The paper concludes with a call for further research to explore the institutional habitus of different higher education institutions. The authors hope that such research would help in formulation of new policies and practices to facilitate institutional transformation and contribute to improved quality and equity of higher education in India.