Rationing Education

I examine the school-going behaviors of children from families in a rural subdistrict of southern India that contain one or more school-aged girl children who do not attend school. I describe and explore the constraints that hinder the ability of these largely impoverished families to educate their children, with a particular focus on girl children. I examine whether family composition factors, such as the rank of the girl within the birth order, predict which girl within a family will go to school, or return to school once dropping out. The setting is an area where girls are valued to work in wage labor on agricultural enterprises, and thus the opportunity cost for girls to attend school is high. I find that girls who have been, or are currently, in school tend to have more educated fathers, and come from smaller families who own less land and livestock than girls who were never enrolled in school. I also find that the fitted odds for a girl one increment higher in the relative birth order (closer to being last born) to be currently in school are 3.3 times higher than for the next lower sibling (closer to being first born) in the birth order. The relative birth rank is not a statistically significant predictor that an out-of-school girl will return to school (via a transitional school called a residential bridge camp ). The decision-making process of families regarding schooling investments is thus consistent with an economic model of comparative advantage, i.e., older girls seem to have an advantage over younger sisters and all brothers in engaging in non-school activities such as sibling rearing, housework, and wage labor. These findings can only be generalized to the population of families who currently have out-of-school girls and/or recently have had out-of-school girls.

The implications of this study may be instructive to other child labor endemic areas in rural India that share similar conditions, namely high illiteracy, poverty, high migration, and a lack of irrigated land.