Determinants of unit costs for financing students in Longido district and Arusha city public secondary schools, Arusha Tanzania

The main objective of this research was to find out the determinants of unit cost for financing students in public secondary schools in Tanzania at Longido district and Arusha city. The study had the following three specific objectives: to find out the extent to which geographical location of school has influence on student unit cost in rural and urban areas in 2010 to 2013. To find out the influence of annual student enrolment in the school in 2010 to 2013 years on student unit costs in both rural and urban areas and lastly to find out the influence of the distance from the school to district/city head quarter on student unit cost in rural and urban areas. The study used quantitative research approach which was accompanied by historical case study and comparative multiple case study designs. Population of the study consisted of twenty five school heads and two District Educational Officers. The simple random sampling technique was used to select 11 secondary schools and two Districts Educational Officers were purposively selected from the population. Data were collected by using questionnaire, interview and documentary review and analysed using SPSS and Microsoft excel 2007. The study found out that the geographical location is one of the determinants of student unit cost. Rural schools tend to have higher student unit cost compared to urban schools. Also annual enrolment was found to have high effect on student unit cost in both urban and rural schools. Enrolment below and above the optimum was found to increase the student unit cost. On the other hand, distance from the school to district council/city was found to be the determinant of student unit cost in rural areas only while in urban areas it is not. The study concluded that the student unit costs for financing students in public secondary schools in Tanzania are influenced by multiple factors. These factors include annual enrolment of the schools, geographical location of the schools and distance from schools to district council/city head quarters. The study recommends that the decision on how to fund government secondary schools must take into consideration multiple factors that in one way or another may affect the provision of education. Also the government should finance public schools according to their geographical locations, number of students in the school, the distance from the school to the municipal/ district council head offices, type of school that is day/boarding and other factors that may affect student unit cost in public secondary schools in Tanzania.