Despite both requirements of and support for universal education up to grade 9, there are concerning reports that China is still suffering from high and maybe even rising dropout rates in some poor rural areas. Unfortunately, besides aggregated statistics from the Ministry of Education (which show almost universal compliance with the nine year compulsory education law), there is little independent, survey-based evidence on the nature of dropout in China. Between 2009 and 2010 we surveyed over 7,800 grade 7, 8, and 9 students from 46 randomly selected junior high schools in four counties in two provinces in North and Northwest China to measure the dropout rate. We also used the survey data to examine the factors that are correlated with dropping out, such as the opportunity cost of going to school, household poverty, and poor academic performance. According to the study’s findings, dropout rates between grade 7 and grade 8 reached 5.7 percent; dropout rates between grade 8 and grade 9 reached 9.0 percent. This means of the total number of students that matriculated into junior high school (those who were attending school during the first month of the first term of grade 7), 14.2 percent had left school by the first month of grade 9. Dropout rates were even higher for students that were older, from poorer families (and families in which the parents were not healthy), or were performing more poorly academically. We conclude that although the government’s policy of reducing tuition and fees for junior high students may be necessary, it is not sufficient to solve the dropout problem.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China’s Ministry of Education embarked on an ambitious program of elementary school mergers by shutting down small village schools and opening up larger centralized schools in towns and county seats. The goal of the program was to improve the teacher quality and building resources in an attempt to raise the human capital of students in poor rural areas, although it was recognized that students would lose the opportunity to learn in the setting of their own familiar villages. Because of the increased distances to the new centralized schools, the merger program also entailed building boarding facilities and encouraging or mandating that students live at school during the week away from their family. Given the magnitude of the program and the obvious mix of benefits and costs that such a program entails there has been surprisingly little effort to evaluate the impact of creating a new system that transfers students from school to school during their elementary school period of education and, in some cases, making students live in boarding facilities at school. In this paper, our overall goal is to examine the impact of the Rural Primary School Merger Program on the academic performance of students using a dataset from a survey that we designed to reflect transfer paths and boarding statuses of students. We use OLS and Propensity Score Matching approaches and demonstrate that there is a large “resource effect” (that is, an effect that appears to be associated with the better facilities and higher quality of teachers in town and county schools) that is associated with the transfer of students from less centralized schools (such as village schools) to more centralized schools. Boarding, however, is shown to have a negative impact on academic performance. However, students who transfer to county schools benefit from the transfer regardless of where they start and whether they board.

In this paper we present new evidence on the impact of health and nutrition information on anemia rates from three large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in rural China. Each RCT studies a different type of health education campaign designed in partnership with the Chinese government to reduce the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia among rural primary school students. These campaigns include single and multiple face-to-face education sessions for parents at their children’s schools as well as dissemination of written health education materials. Across all three studies, we find little evidence of changes in blood hemoglobin concentration or anemia status. In contrast, in our two studies that also examined a multivitamin supplementation intervention, we find meaningful reductions in anemia.

We estimate the effects of attending the first versus second-tier of higher education institutions on Chinese students’ at-college and expected post-college outcomes using various quasi-experimental methods such as regression discontinuity, genetic matching, and regression discontinuity controlling for covariates. Overall we find that just attending the first versus second-tier makes little difference in terms of students’ class ranking, net tuition, expected wages, or likelihood of applying for graduate school. The results do show, however, that just attending the first versus second tier makes it less likely that students will get their preferred major choice.

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the factors (access, attendance and quality of preschools) that may be affecting the educational readiness of China’s rural children before they enter the formal school system. Using data from a survey of 80 preschools and 500 households in 6 counties in 3 provinces of China, this paper documents the nature of early childhood education (ECE) services and the educational readiness of children aged 4-5 in rural China. We present evidence that ECE services are seriously deficient. Households in many areas of rural China do not have convenient access to preschool facilities. Preschools have poor facilities, inadequate health services, and little concern for the nutrition of their students. Most teachers have little formal training. In part due (perhaps) to the poor quality and low participation in preschool, in this paper we will show that China's rural children score much lower on standardized educational readiness tests. In fact, according to our findings, more than one half of the rural children in our sample are “not ready” for continuing into the next level of formal education. Our analysis implies that it is necessary to improve the facilities and quality of teachers and to increase the probability that children will be sent to ECE institution.

Opportunities to go to college and earn a degree have risen dramatically in China. Government investment into the college systems has skyrocketed and the size of universities has increased by more than five times over the past decade. With the rise in the opportunity to go to college, several questions naturally arise: Are the rural poor—perhaps those that would most benefit individually as well as provide spillovers to their home communities—being systematically excluded? If they are, what are the barriers that are keeping them from having access to higher education?

The overall goal of this paper is to answer these questions. To do so, we combine two sets of our own primary survey data. One survey covers a group of randomly selected high school students from the poor parts of Shaanxi province, one of China’s poorest provinces. The other survey is a census of all freshman entering into four universities in three poor provinces. With these data we seek to identify if China’s rural poor are being systematically excluded from the university system, and if so, why.

In the first part of the results section of the paper, we show that the participation rate of the poor accessing to college education is substantially lower than the students from nonpoor families. Clearly, there are barriers that are keeping the rural poor out. In the rest of the paper, we examine two general categories of barriers. First, according to our data from Shaanxi province, it does not appear that any real barriers appear at the period of time between the final year of high school and the first year of college. We find no empirical evidence that the College Entrance Exam (CEE) is biased against the poor; the exam scores of poor students are virtually the same as the exam scores of nonpoor students, holding all other factors constant. There is some evidence that the nature of the CEE process—particularly that the timing of when students find out about financial aid—distorts the decisions of poorer students regarding what college to attend and what major to pursue. At the same time, however, we observe that the admission rates between poor and nonpoor are statistically the same when poor students are admitted to university. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, we find that virtually every student who passes the entrance exam (poor and nonpoor alike) is able to find a way to pay the fees and tuition charges that are demanded upon matriculation and is able to enter college, despite the high costs.

Therefore, the paper concludes that if the real barriers are not at the time of admissions to college, there must be a second, remaining set of systematic barriers that prevent poor children from ever making it to the point where they take the CEE. In fact, a close reading of the literature and some of our own data demonstrate that the rural education system—in general—is putting rural children at a severe disadvantage at almost every point of the educational process (low rates of enrollment into early childhood education; low quality elementary schools; poor nutrition and low quality boarding facilities; high levels of high school tuition; a migrant schooling system that is outside of the public education system).

The paper concludes that the real barriers keeping the rural poor from pursuing a college education are being erected early in their educational experience—as early as preschool and elementary school—and are present throughout the entire schooling system.

Many educational systems have struggled with the question about how best to give out financial aid. In particular, if students do not know the amount of financial aid that they are receive before they make a decision about where to go to college and what major to study, it may distort their decision. This study utilizes an experiment (implemented by ourselves as a Randomized Control Trial) to analyze whether or not an alternative way of providing financial aid--by providing an early commitment on financial aid during the student's senior year of high school instead of after entering college--affects the college decision making of poor students in rural China. We find that if early commitments are made early enough; and they are large enough, students will make less distorting college decisions.

Impact evaluation has become an increasingly integral part of development project design and execution in recent years. Many questions remain, however, about what methods yield the most compelling evaluations, and how best to implement them. The Rural Education Action Project (REAP) is among the most successful impact evaluation groups currently operating in China. The goal of this paper is to share five practical strategies that REAP has employed to maximize the effectiveness of our impact evaluations. These strategies include the use of randomization and other experimental and quasi experimental research designs; pursuit of local and international collaboration; strict attention to policy relevance; a modular, incremental research approach; and robust outreach.