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.

Despite rapid growth in China, it is unclear whether the poor have benefited in terms of nutrition. This paper’s goal is to understand the prevalence of anemia among school children in western China.We report on results from seven cross-sectional surveys involving 12,768 age 8-12 students. Sample students were selected randomly from 283 primary schools in 41 poor counties of Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces. Data were collected through questionnaires and hemoglobin tests. The dataset represents 7 million age 8-12 children in poor western counties. The anemia prevalence was 34% using the WHO’s hemoglobin cutoff of < 120g/L. Students who boarded at school and girls were more likely to be anemic. Assuming the sample population is representative of poorregions in western China, nearly2.5 million 8-12 year old school children in the region may be anemic and many more iron deficient. Given China’s growth, such high prevalence of anemia is surprising and illustrative of the large health disparities in the country. Iron deficiency remains a significant nutrition issue, though there appears to be no effort to address this issue.

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.

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.

Although the past few decades have seen incomes rise and increased government commitment to helping the poor, there is concern that a large fraction of children in rural China still lack regular access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Insufficient diets and poor knowledge of nutrition among low income populations can result in nutritional problems, including iron deficiency anemia, which adversely affect attention and learning in school. Surprisingly, there has been little research in China trying to document the prevalence of nutritional problems among certain vulnerable populations, such as school-aged children in rural areas. The absence of programs to combat iron deficiency anemia among students might be interpreted as a sign that the government does not recognize the severity of this problem. The goal of this paper is to increase our understanding of the extent of anemia among school-aged children in poor regions of Qinghai and Ningxia, and to identify structural correlates of anemia in this region. We report on the results of a cross-sectional survey involving over 4000 fourth grade students, from 76 randomly selected elementary schools in 10 poor counties in Qinghai Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, in China’s poor northwest region. Data were collected through structured questionnaires and standardized tests. Trained professional nurses administered hemoglobin (Hb) tests (using Hemocue finger prick kits) and anthropomorphic measurements using high quality equipment. Our baseline data shows that the overall anemia rate is 34.5% (23.0%) using the World Health Organization’s blood Hb cutoff of 120g/L (115g/L). We find that students who live and eat at school have higher rates of anemia. Children with less-educated parents are more likely to be anemic. Higher anemia rates are associated with students with parents working on farms and away from home. Anemia rates are correlated with adverse physical (lower body mass index (BMI) z-scores and higher incidences of stunting), cognitive and psychological impacts among students. Such findings are consistent with recent findings of other studies in other poor areas in China’s Northwest.

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.