Educational Stratification in Thailand: Gender and Residency Effects

Abstract Although Thailand's education through secondary school is compulsory, nonetheless, educational inequality persists. Due to the inequality of the education system, people with less education have less chances of finding good careers and limited upward social mobility. Research on the educational inequality in Thailand will allow us to understand the causes of the inequality of the education system in Thailand. In this study, I am using both qualitative and quantitative data to analyze educational inequality. For the qualitative analysis, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews of Thai people of various backgrounds in both Thailand and in the United States. For the quantitative analysis, I used three waves of statistical data from the Child and Youth Survey. This includes data from 1992, 1997, and 2002: my research focuses on the subsample of people age 12 to 24. My analyses show that regional and gender inequality in educational access persists.