Yingquan Song

Can Information and Counseling Help Students from Poor Rural Areas Go to High School? Evidence from China

Recent studies have shown that only about two-thirds of the students from poor, rural areas in China finish junior high school and enter high school. One factor that may be behind the low rates of high school attendance is that students may be misinformed about the returns to schooling or lack career planning skills. We therefore conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) using a sample of 131 junior high schools and more than 12,000 students to test the effects of providing information on returns or career planning skills on student dropout, academic achievement and plans to go to high school. Contrary to previous studies, we find that information does not have significant effects on student outcomes. Unlike information, counseling does have an effect. However, the effect is somewhat surprising. Our findings suggest that counseling increases dropouts and seems to lower academic achievement. In our analysis of the causal chain, we conclude that financial constraints and the poor quality of education in junior high schools in poor, rural areas (the venue of the study) may be contributing to the absence of positive impacts on student outcomes from information and counseling. The negative effects of counseling on dropout may also be due to the high and growing wages for unskilled labor (high opportunity costs) in China’s transitioning economy. It is possible that when our counseling curriculum informed the students about the reality of how difficult were the requirements for entering academic high school, it may have induced them to revise their benefit-cost calculations and come to the realization that they are better off dropping out and/or working less hard in school.

The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on the Matriculation of Junior High School Students into Rural China's High Schools

ABSTRACT The goal of this study is to examine whether promising a conditional cash transfer (conditional on matriculation) at the start of junior high school increases the rate at which disadvantaged students matriculate into high school. Based on a randomised controlled trial (RCT) involving 1418 disadvantaged (economically poor) students in rural China, we find that a CCT voucher has no effect on increasing high school matriculation for the average disadvantaged student. The CCT voucher also has no differential impact on students at any point in the distribution of baseline academic achievement. This result suggests that CCTs, while shown to be effective in many contexts, do not always work.

The Impacts of Building Elite High Schools for Students from Disadvantaged Areas

Although thousands of studies in developing countries have evaluated whether specific interventions improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students, few have focused on comprehensive reforms. The goal of this study is to examine how a comprehensive package of demand- and supply-side educational interventions—namely, the building of free, elite high schools targeted toward students from poor areas—affects the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students. Specifically, we use a unique administrative data set that includes information on all students in one northwestern province in China over 10 years, in combination with short interrupted time series with comparison group designs, to estimate the causal effects of this intervention on the college admission outcomes of students from poor areas. Our results show that the intervention improves the likelihood that a “typical” (or average) student from a poor area can gain admission to nonelite colleges but not to elite colleges. Furthermore, by discussing the mechanisms through which the intervention can improve the (nonelite) college admission outcomes of the typical student, we argue that expanding the capacity of existing high schools may be a more cost-effective option than building new elite high schools.

The Impact of Vocational Teachers on Student Learning in Developing Countries: Does Enterprise Experience Matter?.

Although a large number of students around the world attend vocational schools, there is little evidence about what factors matter for learning in these schools. Using data on approximately 1,400 vocational students in one eastern province in China, we employ a student fixed-effects model to identify whether teacher enterprise experience, direct occupational experience, and not just program training increases students’ technical skills. We find this to be the case, especially for students who began the program as high performers. In contrast, “professional certification” that is given to teachers who participate in short-term training programs has no positive impact.