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.

KEYWORDS:

• Conditional cash transfer
• voucher
• rural education
• dropout
• high school
• randomised controlled trial
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial assistance of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 71110107028, 71333012 and 71033003), 111 Project (grant number B16031), and China Scholarship Council (grant number 201307650008). The authors also thank the comments from two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the aftermath of China’s 2005 School Merger Policy, smaller schools are likely to be merged with more centrally located schools, which would complicate our data collection.

2. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Peking University (PKU) are both located in Beijing and are two of the highest ranked universities in China with well-known roles as ‘think tanks’ for the government. The connection to these two prestigious institutions would lend the contract increased credibility.

3. We called in May because in most cases school summer holidays start at the end of June. During the summer holidays, some students migrate to urban areas to do short-term work which sometimes leads students to drop out of school afterwards. Therefore, May was a critical time to remind students of the outstanding CCT contract.

4. We chose math test scores because they are one of the most common outcome variables used to proxy educational performance in the literature (Glewwe and Kremer 2006; Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005; Schultz 2004).

5. There may be concern that students did not take the test seriously, due to a lack of strong incentives for effort. However, we believe that these test results are of the highest quality possible in a field setting. The test was administered with the full support of the school principal, and before each test the homeroom teacher (a very authoritative figure in Chinese schools) introduced the enumerators, explained the reason for our visit and the purpose of the exam and encouraged the students to take the exam seriously. In China’s test-based education system, promotion to every level of education is dependent on high-stakes standardised tests. Unlike in the United States, students are almost never administered low-stakes tests that have no bearing on their progress through school. As a result, students are trained to take standardised tests very seriously and we think it is highly unlikely that students did not try hard on this test.

6. One additional robustness check involves running the same analysis after matching students in the treatment group with most similar students in the pure control group. We find that the results of the matching analysis are consistent with the main results.

7. For the sake of brevity, we have not presented the heterogeneous analysis using the paired control group as the comparison group. The results are consistent and can be provided at request.

8. To provide a comprehensive summary of previous CCT studies, we searched the top 10 development-related journals (according to the Journal of Economic Literature database and SCImago Journal and Country Rank) for the keywords ‘conditional cash transfers’ (or ‘CCTs’) and ‘education’ (or schooling), as well as various databases (for example that of the World Bank; and 3ie (International Initiative of Impact Evaluation)). In total, we found 68 papers investigating the impact of CCTs on schooling outcomes. In the summary table (Table A4), we include results from all of the subsets of CCTs studies that used one of three outcome variables: school enrolment, school attendance, or school dropout (a total of 15 papers).

9. Admission to academic high school in China is almost entirely dependent on student scores on the high school entrance exam. While vocational high school admission is not dependent on test scores, academic high school is considered the most desirable path for students with the necessary academic credentials. Still, it should be noted that academic pressures cannot explain the lack of impact of CCT on matriculation to vocational high school.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71110107028; 71333012; 71033003], 111 project [grant number B16031] and China Scholarship Council [grant number 201307650008].

Notes on contributors

Fan Li

Fan Li is a PhD candidate at LICOS-Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven, Belgium. His research interests are mainly focusing on promoting the development of rural education in China. His is currently working on vocational education and training (VET) development in China.

Yingquan Song

Yingquan Song is Associate Professor at the China Institute for Educational Finance Research (CIEFR), Peking University. His research interests are inequality issues in health and education for the children from the disadvantaged families in rural China, including early childhood education and education for those impacted by parental migration.

Hongmei Yi

Hongmei Yi is Associate Professor at the China Centre for Agricultural Policy, School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences, Peking University. Her research agenda addresses questions on the building of human capital (education and health) in rural China through rigorous impact evaluation.

Jianguo Wei

Jianguo Wei is Associate Researcher at the China Institute for Educational Finance Research (CIEFR) at Peking University. His research mainly focuses on educational finance policy, including student financial aid, university budgeting and resource allocation.

Linxiu Zhang

Linxiu Zhang is Deputy Director of the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing. Her research concentrates on policy relevant studies related to agricultural and rural development in China, including poverty and inequality, gender and household nutrition, and public goods investments, rural basic education and the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS).

Yaojiang Shi

Yaojiang Shi is Professor of Economics at Shaanxi Normal University, China. He is the Director of the Centre for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE). His work is focused on China's education reforms and using empirical research to identify important leverage points for education policy that addressed the needs of the rural poor.

James Chu

James Chu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. His research is on inequality and stratification in educational systems, with a focus on in-school social processes that drive disparities in achievement and attainment. James managed randomised controlled trials prior to graduate school.

Natalie Johnson

Natalie Johnson is project manager at Rural Education Action Project (REAP) at Stanford University. She has extensive experience managing development projects in rural China and her research interests are mainly focusing on preventing dropout and improving education quality in rural China.

Prashant Loyalka

Prashant Loyalk is a faculty member of the Rural Education Action Program, a Centre Research Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Assistant Professor (Research) at the Graduate School of Education, Stanford University. His research focuses on examining and addressing inequalities in the education of youth and on understanding and improving the quality of education received by youth in a range of countries including China, Russia and India. Among his various projects, he is currently leading a large-scale international, comparative study to assess and improve student learning in higher education. He also frequently conducts large-scale evaluations of educational programmes and policies.

Scott Rozelle

Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). Currently his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education.