School Location and Private Cost of Secondary Education in Oyo and Osun States, Nigeria

Abstract

The study established the relationship between location of schools and private costs (cost of transportation, feeding, books and uniform) of secondary education in Oyo and Osun States, Nigeria. It also investigated the difference in the private cost of secondary education in urban and rural secondary schools and the parameters employed to site secondary schools in the two states under study. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The population of the study consisted of all the senior secondary school III (SSS3) students in all the 63 local government areas in both Oyo and Osun states (Oyo and Osun states are made up of 33 and 30 local government areas respectively). The sample of the study comprised 2,000 SSSIII students (1,040 from Oyo state and 960 from Osun state) from 100 secondary schools (52 from Oyo state and 48 from Osun state) in 32 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of the two states under study (17 LGAs from Oyo state and 15 LGAs from Osun state). The selection of the students, schools and local government areas was based on Probability Proportional to Size (PPS) sampling method. The instrument used for data collection is a questionnaire titled “Students’ Questionnaire on Secondary School Location and Private Cost” (SQSSLPC). Seven null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The results of the study showed that location of secondary schools and private cost of secondary education were not significantly related (χ2 =0.8896, table value = 3.84, df = 1, P > 0.05) and there was no significant difference in the private cost of secondary education between urban and rural secondary schools (t-cal, -1.23 < t-crit, 1.96, df = 1,992). The study concludes that educational planners have essential roles to play in the process of locating secondary schools in the states.