Trần Phương Mai – 1617710099
Writing 2 – Assignment 4
Lecturer: Lê Thị Bích Thủy, M.A
What factors affect the schooling attainment in developing countries? The answer is in the studies of
Egypt’s schooling attainment.
Education is an important component of economic development in any country. Education endows
individuals with knowledge, skills to adopt as well as invent new technology that enhances economy’s
ability and contributes to social development. However, many children, especially those in developing
countries like Egypt have not chance to go to school. To explain this issue, there is an opinion that the
schooling attainment of children in developing countries is affected by four main factors and they are:
1. The number of siblings in family
2. The gender composition of the siblings
3. The child’s gender
4. Birth order
Although I agree with this statement, the factors have to be extended with parental education, household
characteristics and the influence of rural-urban residence. And in this paper, I examine the factors that
affect schooling attainment in Egypt.
About number of siblings in family
In “Sibship Composition, and Education in Egypt”, Rania Tfaily points out the impact of number of
siblings on schooling attainment in Egypt. To illustrate, she uses statistics of attending first grade which
decreased by 31% for every additional sibling for girls and by 23% for each additional sibling for boys
(1983-1999). Then, she uses statistics of attending grade seven which decreased by 27% for girls and by
19% for boys for every additional sibling. It means the more the number of siblings a family has, the less
the chance attending school children get, especially for girls. Moreover, getting upper classes is not
possible for children in multi-child families. She also analyzes the interaction between the number of
siblings between birth year to specifically test whether the effect of the number of siblings on education
Commented [TM1]: Hook
Commented [TM2]: Thesis Statement
changed over time. As a result, the negative impact of number of siblings did not decrease, it is even
larger and more negative that makes the costs of education increase and the quality of education declined.
More and more children in multi-child families are not allowed to attend school because parents believe
that attending schooling is money-consuming and time-consuming as well. Instead of that, helping
parents with housework, farming or working at some factories would be better whether children want or
not.
About gender composition of the siblings
In “Gender Differences in Schooling Attainment: The Role of Sibling Characteristics and Birth Order
Effects”, Dancer and Rammohan assert that Sibling gender composition also has impact on schooling
attainment. First, they give findings of Garg and Morduch (1998) which show that relative to male
children, female children are more adversely affected by the presence of pre-school age siblings. Then,
they point out that an increase in the number of pre-school age siblings increases the probability of female
children having grade distortion by around 84%. Finally, they conclude that the schooling of females is
valued less relative to the schooling of males, and also that relative to males, female children are more
likely to be combining work and schooling.
Commented [TM3]: Summarizing Tfaily’s point of view
on the effect of siblings’ number
