Education Opportunities for Rural Areas: Evidence from China's Higher Education Expansion

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Shen, Ande, Zhou, Jiwei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Shen, Ande
Zhou, Jiwei
author_facet Shen, Ande
Zhou, Jiwei
contents This paper explores the causal impact of education opportunities on rural areas by exploiting the higher education expansion (HEE) in China in 1999. By utilizing the detailed census data, the cohort-based difference-in-differences design indicates that the HEE increased college attendance and encouraged more people to attend senior high schools and that the effect is more significant in rural areas. Then we apply a similar approach to a novel panel data set of rural villages and households to examine the effect of education opportunities on rural areas. We find contrasting impacts on income and life quality between villages and households. Villages in provinces with higher HEE magnitudes underwent a drop in the average income and worse living facilities. On the contrary, households sending out migrants after the HEE experienced an increase in their per capita income. The phenomenon where villages experienced a ``brain drain'' and households with migrants gained after the HEE is explained by the fact that education could serve as a way to overcome the barrier of rural-urban migration. Our findings highlight the opposed impacts of education opportunities on rural development and household welfare in rural areas.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_12915
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Education Opportunities for Rural Areas: Evidence from China's Higher Education Expansion
Shen, Ande
Zhou, Jiwei
General Economics
Economics
This paper explores the causal impact of education opportunities on rural areas by exploiting the higher education expansion (HEE) in China in 1999. By utilizing the detailed census data, the cohort-based difference-in-differences design indicates that the HEE increased college attendance and encouraged more people to attend senior high schools and that the effect is more significant in rural areas. Then we apply a similar approach to a novel panel data set of rural villages and households to examine the effect of education opportunities on rural areas. We find contrasting impacts on income and life quality between villages and households. Villages in provinces with higher HEE magnitudes underwent a drop in the average income and worse living facilities. On the contrary, households sending out migrants after the HEE experienced an increase in their per capita income. The phenomenon where villages experienced a ``brain drain'' and households with migrants gained after the HEE is explained by the fact that education could serve as a way to overcome the barrier of rural-urban migration. Our findings highlight the opposed impacts of education opportunities on rural development and household welfare in rural areas.
title Education Opportunities for Rural Areas: Evidence from China's Higher Education Expansion
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12915