Abstract
Little is known about the long-term impact of postdisaster government support on students’ educational outcomes in selective high schools. Using the instrumental variable approach and administrative education data on an earthquake-affected county, we found that entering a selective high school in a postdisaster government-supported county reduces the college entrance examination scores of students and, thus, their success in attending college. Suggestive evidence showed that the redistribution of educational resources across schools could be a reason for this negative impact of selective schools. We conclude that raising awareness of this educational misallocation problem can be of great importance in improving the average level of human capital in rural areas.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Chiu Yu Ko, Xiaoyu Xia, Jian Zou, Yongzhi Sun, Ruichao Si, Yankun Kang for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank seminar participants at the 12th International Symposium on Human Capital and Labor Markets, the 16th China Labor Economics Forum, the 4th China Labor Economics Frontier Forum.
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Author contribution: All errors are our own. All authors are equally contributed in this paper.
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Conflict of interest: All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Ethical approval: This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.
Matched | Unmatched middle | Unmatched high | |
---|---|---|---|
sample | school sample | school sample | |
(1) | (2) | (3) | |
2015–2018 Matching | 4350 | 1261 | 4977 |
2016–2019 Matching | 4531 | 1012 | 4624 |
2017–2020 Matching | 3855 | 1536 | 4235 |
Total observation | 12736 | 3798 | 13836 |
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In Panel A, 2015–2018 Matching refers to matchings between 2015 middle school graduates and 2018 high school graduates. 2016–2019 Matching refers to matchings between 2016 middle school graduates and 2019 high school graduates. 2017–2020 Matching refers to matchings between 2017 middle school graduates and 2020 high school graduates. Notice that in the baseline regression where CEE score served as the outcome variable, we have 12,108 observations because we dropped the sample with missing CEE score and samples in vocational school.
Attrition or not | ||
---|---|---|
(1) | (2) | |
Gender | 0.001 | |
[0.001] | ||
Age | 0.000 | |
[0.001] | ||
Year fixed effect | Yes | Yes |
Middle school score | Yes | Yes |
Middle school score(class-level) | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 12,108 | 12,108 |
R-squared | 0.004 | 0.004 |
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Each column represents a separate regression in which the dependent variable is a dummy variable indicating a missing value for the respective survey item, and the independent variable is student’ gender dummy and student age. Robust standard error is presented in the bracket.
(1) | (2) | (3) | |
---|---|---|---|
Dependent variable | Middle school score | Gender | Age |
Instrument | −7.68*** | 0.004 | 0.042*** |
[0.066] | [0.003] | [0.005] | |
Middle school score | No | Yes | Yes |
Middle school score(class-level) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Year fixed effect | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 12,108 | 12,108 | 12,108 |
R-squared | 0.035 | 0.001 | 0.027 |
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This table presents the validity of distance instrument where middle school score. Column (1) shows that middle school score is imbalance, and Columns(2)–(3) presents the results by controlling for middle school score. Robust standard error is presented in the bracket.
Dependent variable | Drop out probability | ||
---|---|---|---|
Reduce form | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
[0.002] | [0.002] | [0.002] | |
First stage | −0.071*** | −0.071*** | −0.070*** |
[0.002] | [ 0.002] | [0.002] | |
Second stage | −0.007 | −0.007 | −0.007 |
[0.005] | [0.004] | [0.005] | |
Year fixed effect | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Gender | No | Yes | Yes |
Age | No | No | Yes |
F-statistics | 808.532 | 809.974 | 790.851 |
Middle school score | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Middle school score(class-level) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Observations | 12,108 | 12,108 | 12,108 |
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Robust standard error is presented in the bracket. The dependent variable is drop out probability, which is measured by whether the student has CEE score or not. Students whose CEE score is missing or 0 are defined as drop-out student, and vice versa. The accurate coefficients of reduce-form is 0.0004747 for Column (1), 0.0004697 for Column (2) and 0.0004646 for Column (3). ***indicates significance at 1%, **at 5% and *at 10%.
Author | Data | Methodology | Result |
---|---|---|---|
Park et al. (2015) | Student from rural counties in Gansu province from 1997 to 2001 | RDD | Attending a magnet high school increases CEE scores by 0.387 standard deviations |
Wang and Sun (2015) | Student from rural county in eastern China in 2009 and 2010 | Fuzzy RDD | Attending a magnet high school increases CEE scores by 0.139–0.187 standard deviations |
Fabregas (2017) | Individual data in Mexico city from 2011 and 2012 | RDD | Students who barely scored above admission cut-off are 0.2 standard deviations likely to be worse off |
Anderson et al. (2016) | Middle school students in Beijing in 2005 | RDD | Elite exam high schools decrease students’ test score by 0.326 standard deviation |
Dee and Lan (2015) | Chinese urban students from 2006 to 2008 | RDD | Entering elite school reduces students’ college entrance examination score by 0.104 standard deviation |
Denning et al. (2021) | Students information from 1995–2008 in Texas | OLS | Improving students’ rank reduces the probability for retention by roughly 4 percentage points |
Yu (2020) | 2013 and 2014 waves of the China education Panel survey | OLS | One standard deviation increase in a student’s ordinal rank leads to 0.14 increase in math |
Murphy and Weinhardt (2020) | Students in England 2003/2004 to 2007/8 | OLS | One standard deviation increase in rank is associated with increases in later test scores by 0.085 standard deviations |
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This presents an overview of the effect of selective high school on students’ academic performance. First four paper employs RDD strategy that are closely related to the present paper, and the latter three paper focus on using OLS estimation.
Appendix B: Aggregate effect of educational misallocation
A back-of-envelope calculation of the aggregate effect of rural human capital can be listed in three steps as listed below. All data are obtained from the Poverty Monitoring Report of Rural China in 2017.
Step 1: The number of middle and high school students in our studied county in 2017 was 33,393.
Step 2: In 2017, the total number of middle and high school students from poverty-stricken counties in China was 11, 630, 000.
Step 3: According to our estimation in Table 2, choosing the appropriate high school can increase the probability of attending colleges by 6.8%. That is, for 33,393 students in 2017, approximately 2,270 students may attend colleges if they choose the appropriate schools.
Step 4: In this way, we can say that approximately 790,588 students in the poor national counties are able to reach the college admission line if they choose high schools in a sensible way.[14]
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