China's central government incrementally introduced various kinds of student financial aid since the late 1990s in response to public concerns about the rising burden of college prices. Despite the marked increase in financial assistance from governmental as well as non-governmental sources in recent years especially, little is known about how well aid is currently distributed across Chinese universities and whether it is successfully reaching needy students.

We use a unique randomly-sampled dataset of all local senior college students in one northwest province and a combination of non-parametric, semi-parametric and fixed effects methods to examine how various types of financial aid are currently distributed to students of different backgrounds across the university system. We also evaluate whether aid is reaching the main target population of low-income students. We primarily find that government-financed aid is allocated evenly across universities of varying selectivity and is reaching its target population of low-income students within universities. By contrast, university- and society-financed aid is not reaching low-income students. In addition, students in the most selective universities receive large implicit subsidies as they have high instructional costs, get more aid, and pay low tuition fees. Finally, a significant proportion of disadvantaged students do not seem to receive any type of aid.

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.

The education of disadvantaged populations has been a long-standing challenge to the education system in both developed and developing countries. Although computer-assisted learning (CAL) has been considered one alternative to improve learning outcomes in a cost-effective way, the empirical evidence of its impacts on improving learning outcomes is mixed. This paper uses a cluster randomized field experiment in 57 schools (26 schools were part of the CAL program; 31 control schools were not) to explore the effects of the CAL program on student academic and non-cognitive outcomes for students in public schools in minority rural areas in China. Our results show that a remedial, game-based CAL program that focused on teaching Chinese (held out of regular school hours) improved the standardized Chinese scores of the students in the treatment schools by 0.14-0.19 standard deviations more than those in the control schools. Moreover, CAL also had significant spillover effects on student standardized math test scores. Still further, our results also show insignificant positive effects of CAL intervention on student non-academic outcomes of interest in studying and metacognition, and significant positive effect on student self-efficacy of Chinese studying. In general, low-performing students benefited more from the program. The CAL intervention also had mixed effects on the non-academic outcomes of students from different ethnic minority groups. 

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.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an in-service life teacher training program can improve boarding students’ health, behavior, and academic performance.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial to measure the effect of life teacher training on student health, behavior, and academic performance among 839 boarding students in ten central primary boarding schools in Shaanxi. And the authors also tried to identify why or why not life teacher training works. Both descriptive and multivariate analysis are used in this paper.

Findings – The authors find significant improvements in health and behavior. Specifically, compared to boarding students in control schools, 15 percent fewer students in treatment schools reported feeling cold while sleeping at night. The results also showed that student tardiness and misbehaviors after class declined significantly by 18 and 78 percent, respectively. However, the in-service life teacher training program had no measurable impact on boarding students’ BMI-for-age Z-score, number of misbehaviors in class, and academic performance. The analysis suggests that improved communication between life teachers and students might be one mechanism behind these results.

Originality/value – This is the first empirical work which explored how to improve the welfare of boarding students via their life teachers. Because of the sudden increase in boarding students in rural China, it is almost certain that school personnel lack experience in managing boarding students. As such, one promising approach to improving student outcomes might be in-service training for life teachers.

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.

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.