A Disaggregated Analysis of Wealth Status and Educational Attainment in Nigeria Using the Multinomial Logit Approach

For most studies that have been carried out, a country’s level of income and aggregate wealth go a long way in shaping the overall welfare of citizens therein. This study seeks to investigate the relationship between wealth status and educational attainment, as a manifestation of income inequality, especially when the wealth status is disaggregated. With data obtained from the National Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2013 and the adoption of the multinomial logit model, this study captured exogenous variables such as wealth index, the core variable; household sex preference, a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if a household prefers a male child and 0 otherwise; and place, another control variable. This study finds that there is a very significant relationship between wealth status and educational attainment, especially for the individual categories of wealth index, hence, educational inequality hinders the quest to achieve higher educational levels for individuals from low wealth families. This study therefore recommends that the government should engender state-based subsidized education cost programs that will be targeted at poor households, as well as intensify efforts in solidifying the overall educational framework in the country, especially in the rural areas bereft of facilities.