Can Nighttime Satellite Imagery Inform Our Understanding of Education Inequality?

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 13; no. 5; p. 843
• Main Authors: Qi, Bingxin, Wang, Xuantong, Sutton, Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2021
• Subjects: Access to education; Decision making; Education; education inequality; GDP; Gross Domestic Product; Growth models; Growth rate; human development; Human settlements; Inequality; Land settlement; Land use; Light; Night; Nighttime; nighttime light; Population; Population distribution; Poverty; Remote sensing; Satellite imagery; Spatial data; Sustainable development; Urban populations; Urbanization
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs13050843

Education is a human right, and equal access to education is important for achieving sustainable development. Measuring socioeconomic development, especially the changes to education inequality, can help educators, practitioners, and policymakers with decision- and policy-making. This article presents an approach that combines population distribution, human settlements, and nighttime light (NTL) data to assess and explore development and education inequality trajectories at national levels across multiple time periods using latent growth models (LGMs). Results show that countries and regions with initially low human development levels tend to have higher levels of associated education inequality and uneven distribution of urban population. Additionally, the initial status of human development can be used to explain the linear growth rate of education inequality, but the association between trajectories becomes less significant as time increases.