Empirical Analysis of the Continuity of Sequential Demands for Education in a Rural Philippines: Gender and Parent–Child Relations

Abstract

This study investigates factors associated with the continuity of educational demands by employing an agricultural and socioeconomic survey in Bukidnon, rural Mindanao. Educational demand is more continuous when individuals pursue higher levels of education, while it is less continuous when they stop schooling at lower levels of education. We present this behavior as a decision tree with five choices for schooling: elementary entry, elementary graduation, secondary entry, secondary graduation, and tertiary entry. Bukidnon is an area with low schooling achievement and seriously challenged educational attainment in the Philippines. Using information on contemporary and retrospective schooling attainment and the socioeconomic characteristics of children and adults, this study employs a sequential logit regression analysis to understand the continuous move from lower to higher levels of education in terms of individual, household, and region-specific characteristics. The gender dimension, a characteristic of Philippines’ education, is particularly interesting. In addition, regarding gender relations, we study the association between the parents’ and childrens’ levels of education.

We find that boys’ education is more favorably associated with their fathers’ level of education at the elementary school level. However, the association between the levels of mothers’ and children’s education is more robust than that between fathers and children, regardless of the children’s gender. At the secondary and tertiary levels, the association between the levels of education of mothers and daughters is stronger than that between mothers and sons. This implies that the more educated the mothers are, the higher is the level of education attained by the daughters; this association tends to be stronger at higher levels of education. As a possible background to this finding, this study contemplates roles of nonagricultural sources of rural livelihood and bilateral descent prevailing in the Philippines.

We also find that the continuity of educational demands may be interrupted at the entry to each subsequent level of education rather than only at the graduation level. However, income could be influencing entry to a higher level of education. This is consistent with the existing literature that emphasizes the importance of alleviating credit and asset constraints among rural households. Although endogeneity bias arising from omitted variables may pose a challenge to future studies in analyzing the income effect, this study proposes that the heterogeneity of income-related obstacles to educational demands exists across educational stages.

The structure of this article is as follows: Section I reviews the literature. Section II provides general and basic information about education in Bukidnon, Philippines and an explanation for its selection. Sections III explains the survey data and econometric models and Section IV enumerates the variables used in them. Section V exhibits the results and Section VI provides a conclusion and discusses future possibilities.