Household wealth and opportunities to continuing on secondary education of students in Nangrong district, Burirum province

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of household wealth on opportunities to continue secondary education of students. Household wealth was measured by the change of household wealth and the price elasticity of household wealth. Opportunities to continue education were measured by the number of completed education years in 1994, divided to 3 categories: Elementary, secondary education and higher education. The hypothesis of this study was that household wealth has a positive association with the opportunity to continue secondary education. Ordered logistic regression and longitudinal data of Nangrong from 1984 and 1994 were employed for the analysis. The unit of analysis was children who were 5-12 years old in 1984. There were 6,881 cases in this study. The opportunity to continue education was the dependent variable, while independent variable was household wealth. There were 10 control variables in 3 domains: 1) Child characteristics (gender and age) 2) Family contexts (occupation of father, type of household, member of household and education of parent) and 3) Community factors (distance from village to secondary school, frequencies of buses to secondary school, education proportion and availability of a secondary school) The results revealed that in rural areas of the northeast, household wealth had an influent on opportunities to continue secondary education. The change of household wealth could better explain in opportunities to continue secondary education than the price elasticity of household wealth, which better explained on higher education progress. The student who was wealthy had more opportunities for education than a student who was poor. Regarding the control variables, boys and younger children had more opportunity than girls and older children. In addition, children who resided in nuclear family with a low number of members in the household, had parents who had completed grade 4 or higher, and whose families were not employed in agricultural field had more opportunity ;