Estimating the Effects of Educational System Consolidation: The Case of China’s Rural School Closure Initiative

Abstract

Global trends of fertility decline, population aging, and rural outmigration are creating pressures to consolidate school systems, with the rationale that economies of scale will enable higher quality education to be delivered in an efficient manner, despite longer travel distances for students. Yet, few studies have considered the implications of system consolidation for educational access and inequality, outside of the context of developed countries. We estimate the impact of educational infrastructure consolidation on educational attainment using the case of China's rural primary school closure policies in the early 2000s. We use data from a large household survey covering 728 villages in 7 provinces, and exploit variation in villages' year of school closure and children's ages at closure to identify the causal impact of school closure. For girls exposed to closure during their primary school ages, we find an average decrease of 0.60 years of schooling by 2011, when children's mean age was 17 years old. Negative effects strengthen with time since closure. For boys, there is no corresponding significant effect. Different effects by gender may be related to greater sensitivity of girls' enrollment to distance and greater responsiveness of boys' enrollment to quality.

Large Socio-Economic, Geographic, and Demographic Disparities Exist in Exposure to School Closures and Distance Learning

“…Given evidence that school closures are detrimental to educational performance, particularly for students of disadvantaged backgrounds 2,7,[15][16][17][18][19][20] , the large socio-economic, geographic, and demographic disparities in exposure to distance learning suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate inequalities in learning outcomes across the U.S.…”

Fewer, better pathways for all? Intersectional impacts of rural school consolidation in China’s minority regions

“…29 Controlling for provincial fixed effects, Hannum, Liu, and Wang (2021) find no statistically significant differences between closure and non-closure villages in terms of village per-capita income, local wage, fraction of workers in the labor force, the fraction of migrant workers, village per-capita spending overall and on education, and the implementation rate of health and insurance policies between closure and non-closure villages. The key statistically significant difference is that closure villages have on average 11 percent less households than non-closure villages.…”

“…Other studies suggest that some poor rural families might be more likely to shoulder costs for boys than girls: research in China suggests that girls' educational attainment has been more susceptible than boys' to poverty (Cherng and Hannum 2013;Liu and Hannum 2017). Earlier research has also shown that rural girls are particularly affected by school consolidation, possibly because enrollment decisions for boys are more sensitive to quality, while those for girls are more sensitive to distance (Hannum, Liu, and Wang 2021).…”

“…Long, Li, and Liu (2014) provides detailed source data in Chinese. Howell (2017) and Hannum, Liu, and Wang (2021) provide detailed discussions on survey design and the distribution of survey villages across provinces. 20 We do not consider individuals below 10 years of age in 2011 who have just started their educational trajectories.…”

“…Studies published on the phenomenon as recently as 2014 and 2015 commented on the surprisingly paucity of empirical research on the consequences of this important policy (Chen et al 2014;Mei et al 2015). While a handful of empirical studies in English have begun to address implications of system consolidation for access, cost, and performance (for example, see Cai, Chen, and Zhu (2017), Chan and Harrell (2009), Chen et al (2014), Dong, Chang, and Bai (2013), Hannum, Liu, and Wang (2021), Hou, Wu, and Song (2020), Liu et al (2010), and Liu (2014)), the implications of system consolidation for patterns of stratification have not been fully explored.…”