Research on Education in Africa has not adequately reflected the effect of indigenous extended families on research outcomes. Hence, prevailing data lack evidence to show conclusively that family background is not as crucial to educational achievement and mobility in Africa as in Western countries.
Data collected from 533 first year students admitted directly from boarding schools into Ghana's three universities in 1982 were examined for the purposes of revealing: (i) the educational background and socioeconomic status of their families; (ii) whether the data from (i) above changed if family was defined differently, i.e., from nuclear to extended; (iii) whether the answers to (i) and (ii) above differ for males and females.
Evidence from this study supports the view that access to higher education in Ghana is unevenly distributed in relation to the larger population and still highly related to family status. Families of the population studied had literacy rates almost double that of adults in the larger Ghanaian population (82% to 46%). Only 15% of the parents were in Agriculture compared to 41% in the larger population. Urban residence was more than double the national average (70% to 33%).
The current data provided proof that dramatically different results occurred when definition of family was changed from the modern Western notation of nuclear family to the traditional notion of extended family. Male family education increased by 41% and female family education increased by 43%. The selectivity index for post-secondary education and above more than doubled (62 to 144) and the discrimination ration increased more than fifteen fold (95.38 to 1440).
Females were consistently shown to be from higher status families than males. This could be an indication that gender preference patterns still exist in lower status families in Ghana. The effect of changes in definition on family data persisted even when gender was differentiated.
Through the extended family privileges of the elite benefit a broader base of people, thus subsidizing national government inputs in non-Western countries than has hitherto been realized.
