Socioeconomic determinants of academic achievement: The case of university students in Khulna City

This study aimed to identify the socioeconomic determinants of academic achievement of university students in Khulna City. For the study, responses were collected randomly from 600 university students by administering a semi-structured self-reported questionnaire (SRQ), and the data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25 in three mutually exclusive steps, i.e., descriptive statistics, stepwise multiple regression, and hierarchical regression. The findings reveal that personal attributes, i.e., age (p < 0.01), health problems (p < 0.05), and religion (p < 0.05), significantly determined the academic achievement of university students. Among the parental and household status, fathers’ occupation (p < 0.05), as well as family size (p < 0.001), number of household dependents (p < 0.001), income-based types of the family (p < 0.05), and parental reading habits (p < 0.01) substantially influenced the academic achievement. Moreover, academic pressure and mental stress (p < 0.01) and teachers’ academic support (p < 0.05) also affected university students’ academic achievement. It is recommended that the government take steps to minimize educational disparity among and between socioeconomic strata and initiate programs that would help students, especially marginalized students, secure scholarships and other facilities to enable them to continue pursuing higher education.