Educational Inequality and Opportunity: The Effects of Secondary Education Expansion on Educational Attainment in the Philippines

Abstract

This thesis builds on previous literature on educational expansion policies, which increase the years of compulsory education, by examining the legislatively mandated expansion of the Philippine secondary school system in 2016. Analyzing data from the 2013 and 2017 Philippine Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), I assess the effects of this policy change on completing secondary school and focus on its potentially heterogeneous effects by family wealth. I find that while educational attainment increased across all wealth groups and regions following the policy’s implementation, there is substantial variation in impacts by family wealth and region. Students from lower wealth backgrounds benefitted less from the policy change than students from higher wealth backgrounds. However, I find important interactions with regional characteristics. In regions with a larger percentage of students from higher wealth backgrounds, gains in educational attainment are lower for both low wealth and high wealth students, suggesting a crowd-out effect. I then turn to qualitative data collected in the Philippines to contextualize these results. Based on analysis of education data before and after the transition, I identify many aspects of the policy change that placed lower wealth students at a disadvantage relative to their peers, including educational cost, school choice, and curriculum choice. From my research, I argue that while the expansion of the education system has increased the completed years of attainment for children, the wealth gap in education still persists and the expansion has positively affected the attainment of students in the middle and higher wealth backgrounds more than those from lower wealth backgrounds. As the Philippines pursues inclusive growth to improve the livelihoods of Filipinos, the effects on the expansion of education is important to analyze. This thesis provides insight on how this expansion has affected student attainment and how its effects vary by family wealth and background. Further, this thesis can identify how the country can improve its efforts in meeting the state goals of the K-12 plan.