Regression Analysis of Influencing Factors of Public Education in Hungary

The education system in Hungary has been greatly criticized in the last decades regarding the standards and quality of education and its ignorance towards labour market demands. The present study focuses on factors affecting the quality of education. The first part of the research analyses the relationship between public education and competitiveness in Hungary. In the second part of the research, with the help of the linear regression model and of other statistical and mathematical tools, we tried to identify those explanatory variables which influence and mostly determine the quality of public education.

The quality of education was chosen as the dependent variable of the model. Based on the data of competency measurements in Hungary, we were able to identify two explanatory variables that would also highly satisfy the goodness of fit of the linear regression model. The educational funding rates (GDP-proportionate educational spending rate) and the number of students learning English language turned out to be the two significant explanatory variables. Results show that increasing the GDP-proportionate educational spending rate with only one per cent increases the average value of competency measures with 10.9571 points without any other variable changes. Also increasing the number of English language learners with one person increases the average value with 0.000177253 points with other variables remaining the same.