Although rural schools in China are still lagging behind urban schools in the quality of education provided, the government has made considerable efforts in improving rural education. In March of 2006, the central government announced that over the next five years it would provide the funding needed to finally implement the Compulsory Education Law of 1986, which mandated free and compulsory nine-year education (Xinhua, 2006). In the past few years, officials have also taken measures to bolster investment in teacher salaries), buildings and facilities and curriculum reform (Hannum et al., 2008). While there is still much effort needed to continue to improve rural schools, considerable progress has been made in the quality of teachers, facilities and curriculum and making education free in rural as well as urban schools.

However, there is a growing segment of the population that does not fit neatly into the rural-urban dichotomy traditionally characterizing the economy and the school system. The children of the rural-to-urban migrants that are flooding China’s cities have fallen into a conspicuous gap in the provision of public education.

Why are migrant children not covered by the formal education system? The source of the problem most likely is that migration itself has not always been fully sanctioned by the government. In recent years, however, the government has gradually begun to pass laws and design policies to protect the rights of migrants (Nielson et al, 2006). Migrant children are now allegedly entitled to attend urban schools in their local school districts. Schooling in urban areas is supposed to be free. There are indications that municipal governments are begging to address the migrant schooling issue.

Despite the change in the official line, access to schooling is still not routine; there are considerable barriers remaining (citation). Difficulties for migrant children to enroll in urban public schools have led to the emergence of privately-run migrant schools, which struggle to fill the educational gap. However, the quality of the school has been observed to be low by many scholars. Unfortunately, most of the studies have been based on small sample sizes and interviews and not on rigorous survey-based research.

China has made remarkable progress along the path of economic transformation over the past three decades. To continue its rapid growth in an economy with increasingly higher wages, China’s key challenge is whether it can become competitive in quasi-skilled and skilled industrial sectors so that upscale factories can be induced to establish themselves in China? This study seeks to increase our understanding of high school education in China at a time when the nation is facing challenges in its development path. Using secondary statistics, we have found that educational access at the high school level is quite low—especially in poorer areas of rural China. We argue that the low level of access to high school education in China may be a problem resulting from high tuition and fees. We include empirical evidence about the tuition barrier argument by using a survey of 41 developing and developed countries and a representative survey of 1,177 students from one of China’s poorest provinces. We demonstrate that not only is financing high school a burden for the families of poor students, but also there is little financial aid available. The quality of education of students from poor rural areas prior to entering high school is also a problem. We conclude with a recommendation that in poor rural areas of China high school should be made free, as it is in most of the rest of the world—and efforts should be made to improve rural education in general.

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in Shaanxi Province, a representative province in western rural China, this paper finds that dormitory and student canteen facilities in boarding schools are under-equipped and services are poor quality and far below that needed for student development. Poor services in boarding schools and inadequate nutrition intake may be an important cause of low student height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ), as students eating at school have a much lower HAZ on average than that of non-boarding students. Furthermore, girls and students with more siblings have relatively lower HAZ, while the higher the number of parents a student has and the more educated they are exert a positive influence on child nutritional status in terms of HAZ. Finally, our analysis implies that the effective way to decrease the inequality of health, malnutrition and human capital between urban and rural in the long run is to improve the facilities and services of boarding schools in rural China.

The overall goal of the paper is to understand the progress of the design and implementation of China’s New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) program between 2004 (the second year of the program) and 2007. In the paper we seek to assess some of the strengths and weaknesses of the program using a panel of national- representative, household survey data that were collected in 2005 and early 2008. According to our data, we confirm the recent reports by the Ministry of Health that there have been substantial improvements to the NCMS program in terms of coverage and participation. We also show that rural individuals also perceive an improvement in service by 2007. While the progress of the NCMS program is clear, there are still weaknesses. Most importantly, the program clearly does not meet one of its key goals of providing insurance against catastrophic illnesses. On average, individuals that required inpatient treatment in 2007 were reimbursed for 15% of their expenditures. Although this is higher than in 2004, on average, as the severity of the illness (in terms of expenditures on health care) rose, the real reimbursement rate (reimbursement amount/total expenditure on medical care) fell. The real reimbursement rate for illnesses that required expenditures between 4000 and 10000 yuan (over 10000 yuan) was only 11% (8%). Our analysis shows that one of the limiting factors is constrained funding.