An Empirical Analysis of Secondary School Enrollment Across the Indian States

India records enrollment rates of 95% in primary schools but only 62.5% enrollment in secondary schools (PRS Legislative Research, 2019). The existing literature mainly focuses on differences in public/private schools and urban/rural areas, however, there are few studies exploring the differences across the states (ASER, 2015). To study the factors affecting secondary school enrollment in India and their differences across the state, two tests were conducted. The first test, a multi-variate regression study in all the states, found that attendance seems to have a strong relationship with secondary school enrollment. The second test, which analyzed the differences in the means, found that both attendance and proportion of qualified teachers seemed to have the largest effect on enrollment. The paper concludes with calling for prioritization of policies on improving attendance and proportion of qualified teachers in schools.

Keywords:
Secondary schools, Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER), Net Attendance Ratio (NAR), Quantitative analysis, Teacher qualifications, National Education Policy