DETERMINANTS OF ENROLLMENT IN PRIMARY EDUCATION A Case Study of District Lahore

This study is an attempt to analyze the primary school enrollmentstatus in the city of Lahore; and provide estimates regarding the impact ofhousehold’s quantitative characteristics on enrollment decision. Primary data iscollected from 3320 households where 2520 households belonged to the urbanareas and 800 households belonged to the rural areas. Computations are carriedout using both OLS and Logit models. The factors contributing positively andsignificantly to net enrollment of children at primary school level are found to befamily size, dwelling ownership, expenses on education, literacy ratio anddependency ratio. It is also established that access to school is not a verysignificant factor towards inhibiting school attendance. Some of the results, withrespect to the contribution of family size and dependency ratio to enrollment, arecontradictory to the prior determined thoughts. Briefly, it can be concluded thatdespite the positive effect of some of the characteristics of individuals andhouseholds on gross as well as net enrollment, there are various more strongqualitative factors across the socio-economic spectrum that have differentialimpacts on school enrollment. Consequently, legislative measures need to beimplemented to make primary education compulsory, in order to motivate all thechildren of respective age to complete primary school education