Access Is Not Inclusion: What Happens After Marginalised Students Enter the Classroom?
A university can broaden access without necessarily changing the experience students encounter once they arrive.
That is the harder part of India’s education story. Over the past decade, the presence of historically disadvantaged communities in higher education has expanded considerably. Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes are no longer represented only at the margins of the higher-education system. Their enrolment has grown, and in several categories it now broadly reflects the reservation framework.
The scale of that expansion is visible in the latest All India Survey on Higher Education data. Between 2014-15 and 2023-24, enrolment of Scheduled Caste students increased by 51.4% to 69.72 lakh, Scheduled Tribe enrolment increased by 75.7% to 28.83 lakh, and Other Backward Classes enrolment increased by 60.2% to 1.80 crore. These numbers matter because they establish that the question of access is not merely theoretical: substantially more students from historically disadvantaged communities are now entering higher education.
Yet the institution itself can remain remarkably unchanged.
The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether a student from a historically excluded community can enter a university. It is what happens after admission: who teaches that student, how that student is perceived, whose experience feels normal inside the institution, and how easily discrimination can be recognised when it occurs.
This is the difference between formal access and substantive inclusion. And it explains why an education system can become more diverse without becoming equally inclusive.
The first clue lies in the numbers.
In Central universities, the representation of SC, ST and OBC students in admissions is much closer to their mandated shares than their representation among senior faculty. In 2023-24, SC students accounted for 13.6% of first-year undergraduate admissions, while ST and OBC students accounted for 5.6% and 25.6% respectively. At the PhD level, the corresponding figures were 11.4%, 20% and 25.9%.
The picture changes sharply when one looks at professors.
SC representation among professors was 8.8%, ST representation 2.2% and OBC representation 7.2%. Among associate professors, the figures were 9.2%, 2.9% and 9.1%. The gap is considerably narrower among assistant professors, where representation stood at 12.5%, 6.1% and 19.3%.
That difference matters because universities are not simply places where students receive instruction. They are institutions in which authority is distributed.
A student body can become socially diverse while the people who teach, evaluate, supervise and make institutional decisions remain much less diverse. The result is not necessarily deliberate exclusion by every individual teacher or administrator. It is something more structural: the institution may become diverse at the point of entry without becoming equally diverse in the positions that shape the educational experience.
This is why looking only at admissions can give a misleading impression of how far educational equality has travelled.
Consider what happens at the classroom level.
An IIM Bangalore study covering 105 government schools in Bihar compared students’ actual performance in standardised tests in mathematics, Hindi and English with teachers’ perceptions of those students’ academic standing. The study found that teachers, particularly those from forward-caste backgrounds, tended to underrate backward-caste students even when their objective performance was comparable.
The importance of this finding is not that every teacher is biased. It is that the process of evaluating students can itself be affected by social identity.
The student may have crossed the admission barrier. The examination paper may contain the same questions for everyone. The formal rules may be identical. Yet the human judgement applied around that student can still differ.
That is where the idea of merit becomes more complicated.
Merit is often treated as though it exists independently of the institution evaluating it. But educational systems do not merely measure ability; they also interpret it. A test score is one form of information. A teacher’s expectation, recommendation, assessment or judgement is another. Whenever the second begins to diverge systematically from the first, formal equality on paper does not guarantee equality in experience.
The same problem becomes more visible when we move from the classroom to the faculty room.
In 45 Central universities, Lok Sabha data showed thousands of reserved faculty positions remaining vacant: 2,389 for SC candidates, 1,199 for ST candidates and 4,251 for OBC candidates as of April 2021. The reasons for these vacancies are contested. Selection committees’ use of the “Candidate Not Found Suitable” criterion was identified as an important factor in a large share of reserved vacancies, while the earlier department-level roster system also limited the availability of reserved positions in smaller departments.
It would be too strong to conclude from this alone that every vacancy represents caste discrimination. Recruitment can fail for several reasons, including the availability of qualified candidates and institutional constraints. But the scale of the gap raises a more important question: what happens when an institution repeatedly fails to translate formal representation rules into representation among those who exercise academic authority?
India has already recognised this problem through legislation. The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, 2019 moved toward treating the institution as a single unit for reservation purposes through a 200-point roster and sought to address the “None Found Suitable” problem in recruitment.
The significance of such reforms goes beyond the number of appointments.
Representation changes the social environment in which education takes place. It can alter whom students see as an authority figure, whom they approach for support, and whether their own background feels like something that belongs inside the institution rather than something that must be left at its gate.
This becomes particularly important for students who are the first members of their families to enter elite educational institutions.
A Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force headed by Justice Ravindra Bhat examined student distress and identified “social mismatch” as one of the issues affecting students on campuses. It noted that more than 65% of faculty in IITs, NITs and private institutions came from communities outside the SC/ST/OBC groups. The finding does not establish that faculty composition directly causes student distress, but it points to an institutional environment in which the social distance between students and their teachers can be substantial.
This helps explain why representation is not merely a question of symbolic diversity.
Imagine entering a university whose language, social networks and academic culture were largely built without people like you in mind. Nothing in the admission letter tells you that you do not belong. Yet belonging can be communicated through hundreds of smaller signals: whose experiences are treated as ordinary, whose difficulties are understood immediately, whose accent is familiar, whose social background is recognised, and whose success is expected.
None of these signals needs to be an explicit act of discrimination to produce an unequal experience.
That is why formal complaint figures must also be interpreted carefully.
UGC data submitted to Parliament showed reported caste-discrimination complaints in higher educational institutions rising from 173 in 2019-20 to 378 in 2023-24 across 704 universities and 1,553 colleges.
The increase is significant, but even these numbers tell only part of the story. A formal complaint requires a student to recognise an experience as discrimination, decide that it is worth reporting, trust the institution’s grievance mechanism and accept the consequences of making the complaint. A low number of complaints, therefore, cannot automatically be interpreted as a low incidence of discrimination.
At the same time, the available administrative data should not simply be dismissed. UGC data indicate that the reported complaints handled through Equal Opportunity Cells and SC/ST Cells amounted to roughly 3.7 complaints per one lakh students, while the disposal rate for SC/ST-related complaints was reported at around 90%. These figures show both that formal grievance mechanisms are functioning in some measurable respects and that administrative complaint counts alone cannot capture the full range of everyday exclusion, hesitation to report or unrecorded experiences.
The ability of an institution to identify and respond to discrimination is therefore itself an important part of inclusion.
And this is where the debate over the UGC’s equity regulations becomes revealing.
The University Grants Commission’s 2026 regulations attempted to build a more elaborate institutional response to discrimination. They provided for Equal Opportunity Centres, Equity Committees, Equity Squads and Equity Ambassadors, along with institutional accountability for non-compliance. The regulations defined discrimination broadly as unfair, differential or biased treatment on specified grounds and separately defined caste-based discrimination in relation to SCs, STs and OBCs.
The regulations also required institutional structures for equity, representation within equity committees, monitoring and reporting mechanisms, and consequences for non-compliance. In that sense, they went beyond simply declaring that discrimination was prohibited: they attempted to create an institutional architecture through which complaints could be received, examined and monitored.
But the framework itself became legally contested.
The regulations were subsequently stayed by the Supreme Court on January 29, with the Court describing some provisions as vague and potentially capable of misuse. Critics had objected, among other things, to the specific definition of caste-based discrimination and the absence of a provision dealing with false complaints.
The dispute is important precisely because it shows how difficult substantive equality is to design.
A rule that simply says everyone must be treated equally can appear neutral while leaving existing inequalities untouched. But a rule designed specifically to address historically patterned discrimination can itself be criticised for being insufficiently neutral in its formulation.
Neither problem disappears by choosing one slogan over the other.
The harder task is to build institutions in which discrimination can be identified, complaints can be fairly assessed, marginalised students have meaningful protection, and safeguards against misuse exist without making the protection itself ineffective.
That is a much more demanding idea of equality than simply opening the door.
And the deeper problem begins there.
Once disadvantaged students enter an institution in greater numbers, the institution is forced to confront something that admissions statistics cannot reveal: its own internal structure.
A university may be formally open to everyone while its expectations, networks and informal hierarchies still reflect an older social order. If that happens, increasing access does not immediately produce equal participation. Instead, it creates a new institutional challenge—the need to change what happens inside.
That is why the next question is not how many students from marginalised communities have entered higher education.
It is whether the institution has changed enough for their presence to matter.
The distinction becomes clearer when we stop treating admission as the end of the equality question.
Entry answers one question: who is allowed to participate?
An institution has to answer many more.
Who gets encouraged? Who gets believed? Who gets evaluated generously or harshly? Who sees people like themselves in positions of authority? Who feels comfortable asking for help? Who can challenge a decision without fearing that the institution itself will turn against them?
The formal admission process answers only the first question.
The others determine what participation actually looks like.
This also explains why faculty representation deserves to be treated as more than an employment statistic.
If disadvantaged students are increasingly entering universities but senior academic positions remain disproportionately concentrated among other social groups, then the education system is producing a peculiar asymmetry. The beneficiaries of inclusion are changing faster than the institutions exercising authority over them.
The numbers make that asymmetry visible. In Central universities, SC, ST and OBC representation among students in several categories is much closer to their reservation shares than representation among professors. At the professor level, SC representation is 8.8% against a 15% reservation benchmark; ST representation is 2.2% against 7.5%; and OBC representation is 7.2% against 27%.
The point is not that reservation guarantees equal outcomes. It does not. Nor does the gap prove that every under-represented professor was excluded because of caste.
The point is narrower and more important: the educational institution is changing unevenly across its hierarchy.
Student representation can change substantially before the composition of academic authority changes at the same pace.
That matters because institutions reproduce themselves partly through people. Faculty members teach, evaluate, recommend, supervise research and shape departmental cultures. Senior academics also determine which questions are taken seriously and which forms of knowledge receive institutional legitimacy.
A socially diverse student population therefore creates pressure for a deeper transformation. If the people who exercise institutional authority remain drawn overwhelmingly from a narrower social pool, the university can become more diverse without becoming socially representative.
This is one reason the “representation paradox” is so important. The success of affirmative access can itself expose the limitations of affirmative access.
The more students from historically excluded communities enter higher education, the more visible the remaining institutional imbalance becomes.
That imbalance can also affect how students interpret their own difficulties.
Suppose a student struggles in an unfamiliar academic environment. In a socially homogeneous institution, that struggle can easily be understood as an individual problem: perhaps the student is not prepared enough, confident enough or capable enough. But when a large number of students with similar backgrounds encounter similar forms of isolation or misunderstanding, a different possibility emerges. Some of the difficulty may lie not only in the individual but in the environment.
The Bihar teacher-evaluation study offers a small but powerful illustration of this principle. The students’ academic performance could be measured independently, yet teachers’ perceptions still differed by caste.
That does not mean objective assessment is useless. It means that education contains layers of judgement that objective tests cannot capture.
And those layers become especially consequential because educational institutions are not passive spaces. They distribute opportunities.
A teacher’s expectation can affect how much attention a student receives. A recommendation can influence an academic pathway. A faculty selection committee determines who becomes an authority figure in the next generation. A grievance committee determines whether a student’s experience is recognised as a legitimate institutional problem or dismissed as an individual dispute.
Inclusion therefore depends not merely on who is present, but on whether the institution’s decisions give those students a genuinely equal chance to participate and progress.
This is also why the history of grievance mechanisms matters.
The earlier UGC framework on equity, introduced in 2012, was reportedly poorly implemented across higher educational institutions. The newer framework attempted to create dedicated institutional structures, including Equal Opportunity Centres, equity committees and mechanisms for time-bound complaint resolution.
The very need for these mechanisms reveals something important. If admission alone were sufficient to produce inclusion, institutions would not need elaborate systems for dealing with discrimination after admission.
The existence of such mechanisms does not prove that discrimination is widespread everywhere. It does, however, acknowledge that the educational relationship continues after the admission decision.
That distinction is easy to miss because education policy often measures what is easiest to count.
Enrolment is countable. Seats are countable. Scholarships are countable. Faculty posts are countable. Complaints are countable.
The experience of being accepted, heard and treated fairly is much harder to capture in a single number.
So is the effect of being routinely underestimated by a teacher. So is the psychological distance created when almost nobody in authority shares a student’s social background. So is the hesitation before filing a complaint against the institution on which one’s academic future depends.
Yet these are precisely the conditions through which formal access can fail to become substantive equality.
This is why the rise in reported caste-discrimination complaints—from 173 in 2019-20 to 378 in 2023-24—should be read with some care. It may reflect greater discrimination, greater willingness to report it, better institutional reporting, or some combination of these factors. The number alone cannot tell us which.
But it does indicate that formal grievance systems continue to encounter cases requiring an institutional response.
The UGC regulations are part of that response. Their controversy is not an accidental side issue. It exposes the central difficulty of designing equality in a society where disadvantage is historically structured but institutions must still provide fair procedures to everyone.
A genuinely effective system therefore needs two things at once.
It must recognise that formally identical treatment can operate differently in an unequal social environment.
And it must ensure that attempts to correct that inequality are themselves transparent, fair and accountable.
That is harder than simply writing an equality rule.
It requires institutions to examine their own behaviour.
The same principle applies to faculty recruitment. A reserved position that remains vacant is not simply an empty chair. It can represent a missing opportunity to diversify academic authority. But the explanation for the vacancy matters. If qualified candidates are unavailable, the problem is one of the pipeline. If selection procedures systematically reject suitable candidates, the problem lies elsewhere. If the roster itself prevents a position from arising in a department, the institutional design becomes part of the problem.
The evidence on reserved faculty vacancies points to all these possibilities, which is precisely why simplistic explanations are inadequate.
The policy lesson is therefore not merely “increase representation.”
It is to examine where in the institutional process representation is being lost.
That shift—from measuring entry alone to examining what happens throughout the institution—is the more useful way to think about educational equity.
The same logic applies inside the classroom.
If students enter with similar measurable achievement but are perceived differently, the problem is not access. It lies in evaluation.
If students are admitted but encounter an institution in which people from their backgrounds are almost absent from positions of authority, the problem is not access. It lies in representation.
If complaints exist but students do not trust the mechanism enough to report them, the problem is not access. It lies in institutional confidence.
And if a university has equality rules on paper but those rules are not implemented, the problem is not the absence of a right. It is the distance between a right and the institution capable of delivering it.
This is the deeper transformation taking place in the meaning of educational equity.
For decades, the most visible question was distribution: Who gets a seat?
That question remains essential. Without access, there can be no inclusion.
But once access expands, a different question becomes unavoidable: What does the institution do with the people who have finally entered?
The answer cannot be found in admission statistics alone.
It lies in the classroom, the faculty room, the recruitment committee and the grievance office. It lies in who is trusted, who is heard, who is represented and whose experience the institution is capable of recognising.
Educational equality is therefore not complete when admission becomes possible.
It becomes meaningful when students who were historically excluded can participate, be evaluated, challenge decisions and exercise institutional opportunities without their social background continuing to shape those experiences.