Household Capitals And Preschool Attendance

In recent years,the development of preschool education in China has made remarkable achievements in terms of resource allocation,popularization level and management system.However,preschool education development still faces many challenges,the problem of unbalanced and inadequate preschool education resources is still prominent,among which "difficulty in attendance" and "high price in admission fee"are the embodiment of the contradiction between supply and demand of preschool education.This paper focuses on the opportunity for school-age children to enter the kindergarten.Due to the absence of preschool education in compulsory education at present,the fact that families bear the corresponding education costs has become an influential factor hindering school-age children in disadvantaged groups from getting equal opportunities to enter the kindergarten.On the one hand,from the perspective of family economic capital,cultural capital,social capital and political capital to discuss the access to preschool education,we strive to protect the school-age children's preschool opportunities;On the other hand,in the context that some family resources,such as household political capital and household economic capital,cannot be significantly expanded in a short time,it is necessary to explore how to effectively use other household resources and community resources to improve preschool attendance.The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows:firstly,the relationship between household capitals and preschool admission is analyzed and discussed with a more diversified econometric model;Secondly,this paper uses a more representative tracking database to give a more comprehensive overview of this issue.The research questions of this paper include:first,will the family capitals affect the preschool attendance for school-age children?Second,is there heterogeneity in the effect of different types of family capitals on the preschool opportunities?Third,is there heterogeneity of preschool education opportunities in urban and rural areas and gender?This paper uses the micro data of China Family Panel Studies to analyze the issues concerned above.The main findings are as follows:First,the household economic capital is not the key factor in deciding whether the children enter the kindergarten or not.Using per capita household income and per capita household assets as proxy indicators of household economic capital,this paper illustrates that per capita household assets have a more significant impact on preschool attendance than per capita household income.Second,household cultural capital is the main factor affecting children's admission to the kindergarten.The research results show that family cultural capital is a key factor affecting preschool education opportunities,and the marginal impact of cultural capital is about 0.124,namely every 100%increase of family cultural capital will significantly increase preschool admission by 12%.The marginal impact of family cultural capital is stronger than that of other capitals.At the same time,through the regression analysis of subsamples,it tested that the influence of family cultural capital on the preschool opportunity of rural children is significantly stronger than that of urban children.Compared with boys,girls' educational opportunities are more susceptible to the influence of family cultural capital.Third,household social capital is also an important factor affecting kindergarten admission.The results show that the household social capital has a significant positive impact on the preschool admission,and the marginal impact of social capital is about 2%,that is,every 100%increase of family social capital will significantly increase the preschool attendance by 2%.The results show that the influence of family social capital on rural children is smaller than that on urban children.From the perspective of gender,the influence of social capital on the opportunities for boys is significantly lower than that of girls.Fourthly,household political capital has no significant influence on children's chances to enter kindergarten.The results in this paper show that the influence of family political capital on preschool opportunity does not show statistical significance no matter it is the total sample or the sub-sample regression.