Study On School Fees And Education Attainment In Western Region Of Rural China

Education research in developing countries often investigates school and family socioeconomic influences on children's achievement and attainment. Less research has sought to identify the relation between educational fees and education achievement and attainment. This dissertation is to study education fees and education attainment and factors which affect them in western region of rural China.The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is introduction (problematic;research background;significance and objective of study;approach and methodology;frameworks;data.) . In the second part theories, methods and productions being applied into this study are reviewed and commented. Section 3 analyzes the change of school fees and determinants of school fees. Section 4 studies the level and composing of education expenditures and determinants. Section 5 describes the status of enrollment of children and what is the relationship between enrollment and education fees. At the same time, this paper presents other factors, such as wealth of household, land, education of parents, and school quality, that may bring positive or negative impact on access to school. Section 6 analyzes test scores of children. Section 7 concludes.The results are following: (1) Educational fees indeed affect education attainment. Education fees are not the main factor of children dropping out in rural China. Increasing educational fees are helpful to advancing test score of children. But children from poorer households have a disadvantage in school performance, and poverty still may be an important issue in education attainment because of its direct effects on education, so the government should improve farmers' status, increase their income, alleviate their educational burden and constitute more pro-poor policies. (2) The government should draw out different policies in different areas, in order to reduce region gap, and carry out education equity indeed. (3) School quality brings very big influence. Policy constitutor should attach importance to rural school quality, enhance teaching quality, improve material condition and build a good educational environment. (4) Education decision-making of family has obvious gender bias. Parents are all inclined to boys. Girls must have better scores if they want to go school. The government should adopt actively effective measures to promote girls school attainment. (5) Parents' education has positive effect on children' education. Mother's education has a much greater influence on children's enrollment and test scores than father's education, and that mother's education has a greater effect on girls' education. So the government should consider to advance educational level of father and mother. (6) The distance from home to school has negative effect on children' test scores, which shows that the policy of merging school is not right-on in rural, at least it affects children' learning. So the government should reconsider the policy on running a school by centralizing resource in rural. (7) Increase education loan.The detailed data make several innovations possible. First, unlike many studies that focus on single measures of attainment, especially enrollment, we examine multiple outcomes that reflect both enrollment and learning within school. Next, the data enable us to construct more direct measures of variables of interest than in previous studies. Using data on existing debt and the ability to borrow money from both formal and informal sources, we construct a measure of household credit limits, which allows us to test separately the effects of wealth and credit limits. A direct question on the role of mothers relative to fathers in the decision to enroll children in school serves as a measure of women's empowerment. Last, local school quality measures are available from surveys, so the effects of school quality can be estimated. These innovations provide general insights, but also enable us to go well beyond the scope of existing empirical studies of educational attainment in rural China, which have typically used large data sets with limited information.