Determinants of Schooling Attainment and Enrollment Rates in the Philippines

The Note addresses issues of modeling schooling choice, and of estimating the determinants of schooling attainment and enrollment rates in a low-income rural economy, like the Philippines. It is concerned with schooling differences within and between families, and with inequality between males and females. The authors present a statistical model that treats schooling attainment explicitly as a discrete, rather than a continuous, variable, and that fully accounts for observations of completed schooling levels, as well as for observations of currently enrolled students. The model is applied to family survey data collected in the Philippines in 1978. The sample consists of 1,492 families with 7,464 children of school age or older. In general, the education of both parents, land wealth, availability of and distance to school, birth order, and rurality are found to be important determinants of the family's decision to send children to school.