Understanding Marginalized Youth's Secondary Education Experiences (UMYSEE)

Relevant secondary education is expected to play a key role in moving youth out of poverty, advancing economic development, and stabilizing societies. Powerful stakeholders are defining and prescribing notions of relevance (e.g., UNGA, 2015; World Bank, 2016) that will shape the national policies and secondary education opportunities of 1.5 billion youth living in low- and middle-income countries and fragile states (Goldin, 2015). Global models of secondary education relevance that are uninformed by marginalized youth will be at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive to improving youth wellbeing, especially for the most vulnerable.

To fill the gap in the understanding of the experiences of marginalized groups, our comparative study examined marginalized youth’s secondary school contexts, experiences, and outcomes in urban and rural public secondary schools in Colombia, India, and Malawi between 2019 and 2023.

Using a mixed methods approach that centers youth’s schooling experiences, we aim to inform and direct global and national secondary education policy and practice toward a more youth-centered and youth-responsive model of relevance.

The project team acknowledges the funding support provided by the Spencer Foundation through the Lyle-Spencer Grant. The participation of all the participants across the three countries and the support provided through the three partner universities is acknowledged.