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The main goal of this paper is to analyse factors (accessibility, attendance rates 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 82 preschools and 492 households in six counties in three provinces of China, this paper documents the nature of early childhood education (ECE) services and the educational readiness of children aged four to five years in rural China. We present evidence that ECE services are seriously deficient. We show that China's rural children score much lower on standardised tests of educational readiness than their urban counterparts and that more than one half of the rural children in our sample are "not ready" to continue on to the next level of formal education, possibly owing to the poor quality of early childhood education and low participation rates in early childhood education. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

Although universities have expanded in size, it is unclear whether 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.

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 can 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 the authors 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. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the effect of high school scholarships tied to community service on the development of secondary school students in Northwest China. Using data from three rounds of surveys of thousands of students in 298 classes in 75 high schools in Shaanxi province, the paper documents the implementation of the Compassionate Heart Scholars Program and evaluates the effect of the programme on the educational performance, self-esteem, self-efficacy and social responsibility of the participants. We present evidence that part of the protocol of the programme (which includes the nomination and election of programme participants) improves the academic performance and self-esteem of those involved in the programme. The community service part of the programme is shown to raise the self-efficacy and the sense of social responsibility of the programme participants. One striking result is that the test scores of the community service participants do not appear to be adversely affected, even though they spend considerable time doing community service. The findings of this study, therefore, suggest that adding extra-curricular community service to school curricula may be a win-win-win strategy, for the students, for schools and for the local communities served. (Contains 1 figure, 4 tables and 8 notes.)

We examine the impact of primary school mergers on academic performance of students using a dataset that we collected using a survey designed specifically to examine changes in the academic performance of students before and after their schools were merged. We use difference-in-differences and propensity score matching approaches and demonstrate that overall the primary school merger has not harmed the academic performance of students, as some have claimed. We do find, however, that the timing of mergers matter; when students are older (e.g., the fourth grade) their grades rise after merging. The grades of younger students, however, fall. (Contains 9 tables and 4 figures.)

Despite the rise in grade retention in poor areas in rural China recently, little work has been done to understand the impact of grade retention on the educational performance of students in these areas in rural China. This paper seeks to redress this shortcoming and examines the effect of grade retention on educational performance on 1649 students in 36 elementary schools in Shaanxi province. With a dataset that was collected from a survey designed specifically to capture school performance of students before and after they were retained, we use differences-in-differences, propensity score matching and differences-in-differences matching approaches to analyze the effect of grade retention on school performance. Although the descriptive analysis shows that grade retention helps to improve the scores of the students that were retained, somewhat surprisingly, the results from the multivariate analysis consistently show that there is no significant positive effect of grade retention on school performance of the students. In fact, in some cases (e.g., for the students who repeat grade 2), grade retention is shown to hurt school performance. (Contains 13 tables.)

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyse the difference in nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets on 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 of poor quality, 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 exerts a positive influence on child nutritional status. Finally, our analysis implies that the effective way to decrease the inequality of health, malnutrition and human capital between urban and rural areas in the long run is to improve the facilities and services of boarding schools in rural China. (Contains 8 tables, 4 figures and 7 notes.)

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 enough in quasi-skilled and skilled sectors so that more technologically advanced industries and service sector firms eventually take the place of exiting low-wage factories. 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 1177 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 there is also 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. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures and 9 notes.)

Accumulation of human capital is indispensable to spur economic growth. If students fail to acquire needed skills, not only will they have a hard time finding high-wage employment in the future but the development of the economies in which they work may also stagnate owing to a shortage of human capital. The overall goal of this study is to try to understand if China is ready in terms of the education of its labour force to progress from middle-income to high-income country status. To achieve this goal, we seek to understand the share of the labour force that has attained at least some upper secondary schooling (upper secondary attainment) and to benchmark these educational attainment rates against the rates of the labour forces in other countries (e.g. high-income/OECD countries; a subset of G20 middle-income/BRICS countries). Using the sixth population census data, we are able to show that China's human capital is shockingly poor. In 2010, only 24 per cent of China's entire labour force (individuals aged 25–64) had ever attended upper secondary school. This rate is less than one-third of the average upper secondary attainment rate in OECD countries. China's overall upper secondary attainment rate and the attainment rate of its youngest workers (aged 25–34) is also the lowest of all the BRICS countries (with the exception of India for which data were not available). Our analysis also demonstrates that the statistics on upper secondary education reported by the Ministry of Education (MoE) are overestimated. In the paper, we document when MoE and census-based statistics diverge, and raise three possible policy-based reasons why officials may have begun to have an incentive to misreport in the mid-2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The education of poor and disadvantaged populations has been a long-standing challenge for education systems in both developed and developing countries. Drawing on data from two randomised controlled trials involving two cohorts of grade 3 students in poor rural minority schools in China’s Qinghai province, this paper explores the effects of computer-assisted learning (CAL) on student academic and non-academic outcomes for underserved student populations, and how interactions between the CAL programme and existing classroom resources affect the programme effectiveness. Results show that CAL could have significant beneficial effects on both student academic and non-academic outcomes. However, when the scope of the programme expanded to include a second subject (in this case, math – which was added on top of the Mandarin subject matter that was the focus of the first phase of the programme), some schools had to use regular school hours for CAL sessions. As a result, the phase II programme did not generate any (statistically) significant improvement over the first phase. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study describes the current teacher training system in China, including the prevalence of teacher training, the types of training, training content and the ways that training is delivered. The paper presents subjective evaluations of training for principals and teachers using four diverse datasets. The results show that the National Teacher Training Project (NTTP) deviates from official policy objectives in several respects. The subjects of training programs and training content are not fully compliant with policy objectives. In addition, training opportunities are offered to a smaller proportion of rural teachers than urban teachers. It is found that the proportion of teachers and principals satisfied with the NTTP is lower than that for other types of training. Therefore, measures should be taken to increase training opportunities for rural teachers and to ensure the quality of training for all teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Many public health systems have struggled with the dual questions of: why the uptake rate of maternal health (MH) services is low among some subpopulations; and how to raise it. The purpose of this paper is to assess the uptake rate of a new set of MH services in poor rural areas of China. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on the survey responses of women’s representatives and village cadres from almost 1,000 villages in June 2012 as part of a wide-scale public health survey in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces in the western part of China. Findings – The authors find that the uptake rate of MH services (including in-hospital delivery, antenatal care visits and post-partum care visits) in poor rural areas of Western China are far below average in China, and that the rates vary across provinces and ethnic groups. The analyses demonstrate that distance, income, ethnicity and availability appear to be systematically correlated with low uptake rates of all MH services. Demand-side factors seem to be by far the most important sources of the differences between subpopulations. The authors also find that there is potential for creating a Conditional Cash Transfer program to improve the usage of MH services. Originality/value – The authors believe that the results will contribute positively to the exploration of answers to the dual questions that many public health systems have struggled with: why the uptake rate of MH services is low among some subpopulations; and how to raise it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We compare academic performance, Student background and school quality between Beijing migrant schools, rural public schools and urban public schools. [•] We employ multivariate regression to explore contributors to the achievement gap between students in migrant schools and those in rural schools. [•] Due to better backgrounds, migrant students outperform rural students academically. [•] Students in Beijing migrant schools gradually lose ground to rural students due to the poorer school resources and teacher quality. [•] Given access to better educational resources, migrant school students may be able to significantly improve their performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the assessment of China's rural labor markets. According to our data, the increase in off-farm employment that China experienced during the 1980s and 1990s continued during the 2000s. Our analysis shows that migration has become the most prevalent off-farm activity, although the destination of migrants is shifting from outside of one's province to destinations closer to home. The present paper finds that large shares of male and female individuals, especially those under 40 years, are working off the farm. These findings represent an important contribution to the labor economics field. First, the results of the present paper reveal that the labor transition from the agricultural sector to the non-agricultural sector for key segments of China's rural labor force is nearly complete. Second, although a large share of China's rural labor force work in agriculture, most of these workers are older men and women (and likely would not be willing to take low-wage, labor-intensive jobs). Third, the rising unskilled wage rate in China is partially a result of the tightening of the labor force in the young age cohorts. Finally, due to factors associated with the one child policy and other demographic transition forces, successive age cohorts will continue to fall in absolute number in the coming decade. Assuming China's growth continues, we expect to see further wage increases since it will take higher wages to coax more workers to work off the farm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – With the rise in the opportunity to go to college, the purpose of this paper is to identify if China's rural poor are being excluded from the university system, and if so, why. Design/methodology/approach – Two sets of the authors' own primary survey data were used: a group of randomly selected high school students in Shaanxi Province and a census of all freshmen entering into four universities in Sichuan, Anhui and Shaanxi. The intention was to show if the rate of the rural poor attending universities is lower than that of urban students and that of rural non-poor; also to identify the barriers to education (if they exist) that are keeping enrollment rates low for the rural poor. The authors used ordinary least squares method to make the estimations. Findings – Matriculation rate of the poor into college was found to be substantially lower than the students from non-poor families. Clearly, barriers exist that are excluding the rural poor; however, the authors demonstrate that the real barriers are not at the point of college admissions, but before students have even matriculated into high school. Originality/value – This is the first empirical work which studies the barriers that keep the poor out of university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The paper aims to discuss whether the younger generation of China's rural labor force is prepared, in terms of education level or labor quality, for the future labor markets under China's industrial upgrading. Design/methodology/approach – Using nationally representative survey data, the paper gives detailed discussions on the young rural laborers' education attainments, and their off-farm employment status including job patterns, working hours, and hourly wage rates. The relationship between education and employment status is analyzed and tested. Through these discussions, an employment challenge is revealed, and some policy implications are made. Findings – This paper finds that China's young rural laborers are generally poorly educated and mainly unskilled. They work long hours and are low paid. While they lack the labor quality that will be required to meet the industrial upgrading, an employment challenge may face them in the near future. This paper also finds a strong link between education levels and employment status for the young labor force, which implies the possible effect of policies such as improving rural education. Originality/value – Based on a solid foundation of a national rural household survey, this paper updates the understanding of the education and employment situations of the young rural labor force in contemporary China. The concern about the employment challenges raised in the paper is related to the future of China's rural labor transition and the whole economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence from developed countries supports the idea that parent-teacher interaction is high and improves student outcomes. The evidence from developing countries is, however, decidedly mixed. Using longitudinal data from nearly 6000 students and their 600 teachers in rural China, we show the prevalence of parent-teacher interaction is generally much lower than that of developed countries. We also show parent-teacher interaction, when it exists, can have positive effects on raising academic achievement and reducing learning anxiety. We demonstrate that the prevalence and effectiveness of parent-teacher interaction in a developing country context varies considerably due to both demand-side and supply-side factors. • The prevalence of parent-teacher interaction is low in rural China, especially among disadvantaged students. • Parent-teacher interaction has positive effects on raising academic achievement and reducing learning anxiety. • The prevalence and effectiveness of parent-teacher interaction varies by both demand-side and supply-side factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the impact of having more female classmates on students' physical health outcomes. To do so, we draw on panel data from the first two waves of the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) and take advantage of exogenous variation in classroom gender composition brought by the random assignment of students to classes when they entered junior high school. Results from the value-added model show that having more female classmates helps to improve the physical health outcomes of junior high school students in China. Specifically, a one-percentage-point (pp) increase in the proportion of female classmates in Grade 7 explains a 0.003-0.004 pp increase in one's probability of staying normal BmiAZ or going from abnormal to normal BmiAZ, a 0.029-0.031 increase in the BmiAZ score of those with low starting BmiAZ, a 0.003 increase in one's HAZ score, and a 0.157-0.165% or 0.166-0.177% decrease in the diopter of one's left or right lens of glasses from Grade 7 to Grade 8, respectively. One possible mechanism underlying these relationships is that more female classmates bring healthier behaviors. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the beneficial effects of having more female classmates on health outcomes are more prominent among boys, students with less-educated parents, and those attending rural schools or schools with bigger class sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]