Drawing on a survey of 106 secondary vocational schools and 7309 students in two provinces of China, this descriptive paper assesses whether vocational schooling is measuring up to government benchmarks for quality and whether poor students are able to access quality schools. We find that secondary vocational schools have met government benchmarks for teacher qualification and training, student opportunities for practical training and adequate facilities. Furthermore, poor students access schools of similar quality to non-poor students, even though 34 percent of poor students do not receive financial aid. We conclude that recent policies are successfully ensuring secondary vocational school quality and equity of access to school quality between poor and non-poor students. However, financial aid policies should be re-examined, such that poor students receive sufficient coverage. Moreover, given that input-based measures only proxy school quality, the government should consider holding schools accountable for outcomes such as student learning.

This paper reports on a survey conducted among more than 800 engineering students at elite universities in China and the United States. Results from the survey reveal that US and Chinese students are roughly equivalent in their desire to form or join startup ventures. Far more US students, however, plan on actually doing so. In contrast, Chinese students are more likely to join the state/government sector. Our results also reveal a wide gap in perceptions on the availability of financing, mentorship and other innovation resources. The findings suggest that the innovation ecosystem in China remains underdeveloped in certain important respects.

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.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is one of the high profile initiatives to try to narrow the inequality of access to ICT (digital divide). However, despite the fact that OLPC currently has distributed more than two million laptops in more than 40 countries, there is little empirical evidence that is available to help us understand the impacts of the program. The goal of our study is to assess the effectiveness of OLPC in narrowing the digital divide between poor and rich children in China and in increasing the human capital of disadvantaged children. In order to do so, we conducted a randomized experiment involving 300 third-grade students in 13 migrant schools in Beijing. Our results show that, the OLPC program improved student computer skill scales by 0.33 standard deviations and standardized math scores by 0.17 standard deviations after 6 months of intervention. Less-skilled students improved more in computer skills after the program. Moreover, the OLPC program also significantly increased student learning activity using computer software and decreased the time students spent watching TV. Students’ self-esteem also improved with the program.

This paper explores China’s digital divide, with a focus on differences in access to computers, learning software, and the Internet at school and at home among different groups of elementary school children in China. The digital divide is examined in four different dimensions: (i) between students in urban public schools and students in rural public schools; (ii) between students in rural public schools and students in private migrant schools; (iii) between migrant students in urban public schools and migrant students in private migrant schools; and (iv) between students in Han-dominated rural areas and students in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities. Using data from a set of large-scale surveys in schools in different parts of the country, we find a wide gap between computer and Internet access of students in rural areas and those in urban public schools. The gap widens further when comparing urban students to students from minority areas. The divide is also large between urban and rural schools when examining the quality of computer instruction and access to learning software. Migration does not appear to eliminate the digital divide, unless migrant families are able to enroll their children in urban public schools. The digital divide in elementary schools may have implications for future employment, education and income inequality in China.

One’s opportunity to attend college and earn a degree has increased dramatically in China. However, that does not mean that everyone has an equal opportunity. Historically, there has been well-documented systematic discrimination against minorities, women, and the rural poor. The main question of this paper is whether or not this discrimination has persisted since the recent expansion of China’s tertiary education system. Using a census of incoming freshmen from four tier-one universities, this paper assesses if certain types of students are overrepresented while other types of students are underrepresented. Comparing the shares of students from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds from our primary survey data with government generated census statistics, we conclude that poor, minority, and rural female students are systematically underrepresented. In contrast, rich, Han, urban males are dominant in college.

Despite growing wealth and a strengthening commitment from the government to provide quality education, a significant share of students across rural China still have inadequate access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Such poor diets can lead to nutritional problems, such as iron-deficiency anemia, that can adversely affect health, attention and cognitive ability. The overall goal of this paper is to assess the impact of multiple micronutrient supplementation on anemia and anxiety among students in poor areas of rural China. We report on the results of a randomized control trial (RCT) involving over 2700 fourth grade students, mostly aged 9 to 12, from 54 randomly-chosen elementary schools in 8 of the poorest counties in Shaanxi Province in China’s poor northwest region. The design called for random assignment of schools to one of two groups. One group received a daily multivitamin with mineral supplements, including 5 milligrams of iron, for 5 months while the other group was a non-intervention, control group. Anemia was defined as < 120 g/L. We found that 42.4 percent of students were anemic at baseline In the schools that received the multivitamins with mineral supplements, Hb levels rose by more than 1.7 g/L over the control schools. The test for anxiety showed that students that received the multivitamin with mineral supplements also improved significantly. Overall, these results should encourage further research on the interaction between nutrition and mental health in a development context.

Recent attention has been placed on whether computer assisted learning (CAL) can effectively improve learning outcomes. However, the empirical evidence of its impact is mixed. Previous studies suggest that the lack of an impact in developed countries may be attributable to substitution of effort/time away from productive, in-school activities. However, there is little empirical evidence on how effective an in-school programme may be in developing countries. To explore the impact of an in-school CAL programme, we conducted a clustered randomised experiment involving over 4000 third and fifth grade students in 72 rural schools in China. Our results indicate that the in-school CAL programme has significantly improved the overall math scores by 0.16 standard deviations. Both the third graders and the fifth graders benefited from the programme.

Keywords: computer assisted learning; out-of-school programme; in-school programme; substitution effect; test scores