Can Private School Subsidies Increase Enrollment for the Poor? The Quetta Urban Fellowship Program

Abstract

Private schooling-often postulated to improve school quality-may also prove to be a means to leverage public funds in order to provide access to schooling at rates faster than possible with public funds alone. This study measures the success of such an effort to stimulate girls' schooling through the creation of private girls' schools in poor urban neighborhoods of Quetta, Pakistan. The impact evaluation, which employs on an experimental design, indicates that the program increased girls' enrollments by an average of 33 percentage points. At the same time, boys' enrollments rose an average of 27.5 percentage points, partly because boys were also allowed to attend the new schools, and partly because parents would not send their girls to school and not also educate their boys. While the success of the program varied from one neighborhood to another, success was not clearly related to the relative wealth of a neighborhood or to parents' education levels. Thus, the program offers tremendous promise for increasing enrollment rates in other poor urban areas.

Financial Constraints and Girls' Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in The Gambia

“…21 Compared to private school students, students in public schools earn higher scores, particularly in English (0.16 standard deviations for girls 20 Other programs that targeted girls for reduced schooling costs have also shown increases in male enrollment (Kim et al, 1999a;Begum et al, 2012), which the authors explain as a spillover to male siblings. Our data do not allow us to distinguish siblings among test takers or enrolled in other grades, however.…”

“…We also contribute to the broader literature on efforts to close the gender gap in access and learning. Several other studies have evaluated similar programs targeting girls (Kim et al 1999a, Kim et al 1999b Of these, however, only Baird et al (2011) examines learning outcomes among secondary school students as we do, using a program that is more local in scope than our setting.…”

Improving Education Outcomes in South Asia: Findings from a Decade of Impact Evaluations

“…Boys' enrollment rose as well. This was partly because boys were also allowed to attend the new schools and partly because many parents would not send their daughters to school without also educating their sons (Kim, Alderman and Orazem, 1999). Likewise, in the province of Punjab, the establishment of publicly funded low-cost private schools had large positive impacts on the number of students, teachers, classrooms, and blackboards (Barrera-Osorio and Raju, 2011).…”

Evaluating Public Per-Student Subsidies to Low-Cost Private Schools: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from Pakistan

“…The study by Kim et al (1999) is particularly pertinent as they evaluate a public subsidy program in Pakistan which shares some of the design elements of the FAS program. They study the impact of a program that offered a low temporary per-girl student subsidy conditional on free girls' schooling to establish and operate private primary schools in a randomly-selected subset of poor urban neighborhoods lacking public girls' primary schools in the province of Balochistan.…”