Past studies find that disadvantaged students in the United States are often misinformed about college costs and financial aid opportunities and thus may make sub-optimal decisions regarding college. This information problem may be even more serious in developing countries. We therefore conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial to examine the effects of providing information on college costs and financial aid to high school students in poor regions of northwest China. We find that information increases the likelihood that students receive some types of financial aid. Information also positively affects the choice to attend college but does not seem to affect more specific college choices.

Despite increasing institutional and financial support, certain public health issues are still neglected by the Chinese Government. The present paper examines the soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infection and reinfection rates by conducting a survey on 1724 children in Guizhou Province, China. Our results indicate that 37.5 percent of children had been infected with one or more of the three types of tested STH. However, only 50.4 percent of children reported having taken deworming medicine during the 18-month period before the survey. Of those who reported being dewormed, 34.6 percent tested positive for STH infections. Poverty and number of siblings are significantly and positively correlated with infection and reinfection, and parental education is significantly and negatively correlated with infection and reinfection. Given the ineffectiveness of treatment in these areas to date, for anthelminthic campaigns to actually succeed, China must pay more attention to locallevel incentives to improve children’s health.

Across the globe, students living in disadvantaged areas (rural, impoverished, remote) and from disadvantaged backgrounds (low income) are less likely than their advantaged counterparts to go to higher levels of schooling. In general, disadvantaged students repeat grades more, drop out more, and on average perform less well academically. They thus face serious challenges in taking advantage of education, an important channel for social mobility, as a means to help them and their households improve their long-term economic well-being. Recognizing this, policy makers and researchers in developing countries have implemented a variety of interventions to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.

The goal of this article was to document and explain the gap in educational achievement between Han and minority students in primary schools in western China. In our survey of 300 schools in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces (involving nearly 21,000 fourth- and fifth-grade students), we find large differences in achievement on standardized exams between Han and minority students. On average, minority students perform 0.25 SD lower in math and 0.22 SD lower in Chinese. Most strikingly, minority students who do not generally speak Mandarin as their primary language score 0.62 SD lower than Han in math and 0.65 SD lower than Han in Chinese.

Using decomposition methods pioneered by Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973), we find that most of the achievement gap between Han and minority students with no alternative ethnic language can be explained by differences in endowments of student, family, and school characteristics. Of these, differences in students and family characteristics appear to contribute the most to differences in achievement. Little of the gap between Han students and non-Mandarin minority students (Salar and Tibetan in our sample), however, can be explained by endowment differences. Comparing these students only to Han students in the same schools significantly reduces the size of the achievement gap, yet a difference of more than 0.2 SD persists. None of this remaining gap is explained by differences in endowments. Although several explanations are possible, we believe that a likely explanation is that the ability of students to learn may be hindered by difficulty comprehending instruction in Mandarin (given that no schools in our sample provided instruction or texts in minority languages). While we cannot say with certainty why these students may benefit less from a given amount of schooling inputs, our analysis suggests that teachers play a significant role.

A significant gap remains between rural and urban students in the rate of admission to senior high school. One reason for this gap may be the high levels of tuition and fees for senior high school. By reducing student expectations of attending high school, high tuition and fees can reduce student academic performance in junior high school. In this paper we evaluate the impact of a senior high tuition relief program on the test scores of poor, rural seventh grade students in China. We surveyed three counties in Shaanxi Province and exploit the fact that, while the counties are adjacent to one another and share similar characteristics, only one of the three implemented a tuition relief program. Using several alternative estimation strategies, including Difference-in-Differences (DD), Difference-in-Difference-in- Differences (DDD), Propensity Score Matching (Matching) and Difference-in-Differences Matching (DD Matching), we find that the tuition program has a statistically significant and positive impact on the math scores of seventh grade students. More importantly, this program is shown to have a statistically significant and positive effect on the poorest students in the treatment group compared to their wealthier peers.

This paper examines the academic performance of migrant students in migrant schools in China and explores determinants of their performance. The paper compares academic performance, student backgrounds and measures of school quality between Beijing migrant schools and rural public schools in Shaanxi province. Furthermore, we employ multivariate regression to examine how individual characteristics and school quality affect migrant student performance and the achievement gap between students in migrant schools and those in rural public schools. We find that although students in Beijing migrant schools outperform students in Shaanxi’s rural public schools when they initially arrive in Beijing, they gradually lose ground to rural students due to the poorer school resources teachers in migrant schools. Additional analysis comparing migrant students in migrant schools to migrant students in Beijing public schools demonstrates that given access to better educational resources, migrant school students may be able to significantly improve their performance.

Although universities have expanded in size, it is unclear if the poor have benefited. If there are high returns to college education, then increasing access of the poor to college has important welfare implications. The objective of this paper is to document the rates of enrollment into college of the poor and to identify the hurdles to doing so. Relying on several sets of data, including a survey of college students from universities in three poor provinces in China, we have found that the college matriculation rate of the poor is substantially lower than students from non-poor families; the same is true for rural women and minorities. Clearly, there are barriers that are keeping the rural poor out. The paper also demonstrates that the real hurdles are not during the years of secondary schooling or at the time of admissions to college. The real impediments keeping the rural poor from pursuing a college education arise long before high school—as early as preschool and elementary school years—and are present throughout the entire schooling system.