Abstract:

This research investigates the effect of attending academically selective Chinese high schools on test scores taken at the end of the penultimate year. We leverage administrative data that matches high school preferences of the population of urban middle school graduates in one Chinese prefecture in 2010 with the corresponding register-based high school student records.

Admission is generally driven by ability and the costs of tuition are nominal. But the system also provides for an alternative admission channel for lower-ability students, subject to tuition fees, alongside the dominant merit-based standard channel. In addition, the system provides for contextual admissions for disadvantaged students who face a lower entry requirement.

We combine a normalizing-and-pooling fuzzy RDD strategy with a cumulative multi-cutoff regression discontinuity design (RDD) setup to address the complexity of the under-funded Chinese public education system. Multiple-cutoffs RDD estimates based on publicly announced school-specific admission cut-offs of the city-wide High School Entrance Exam (HSEE) scores set by the local education authorities show heterogeneous effects of attending schools with different degrees of selectivity - from “flagship”, “elite”, through to “normal’, and thence to fee-paying “private”, but relatively low-quality provision, in a uniform setting.

Cutoff-specific RDDs differ across student types as defined by willingness to pay extra tuition-fees and eligibility for contextual admissions, using a common zero normalized HSEE score cutoff for different application types. The estimated effects on high school leaving exam scores of attending normal public high schools versus low-quality private schools, and of attending elite schools relative to normal public schools are indistinguishable from zero. Indeed, the estimated effect of attending the most selective flagship school, as opposed to elite schools, has a large negative and statistically significant effect. We find that this is driven by the much lower relative performance in science-track subjects by students who barely made it into the flagship school.

About the Speaker:

Prof. Yu Zhu joined the University of Dundee as Professor of Economics in 2014. After completing my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Economics at the University of Oslo, Prof. Zhu undertook a PhD in Economics at the University of Cambridge which was awarded in 1998. Before coming to Dundee, Prof. Zhu was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Labour Economics at the University of Kent. Prof. Zhu had also been a Research Officer/Fellow at Keele University and Warwick University.

My main research interests include the economics of education, labour economics, and applied microeconometrics. Prof. Zhu was Research Fellow of the IZA - Institute of Labor Economics and Fellow of the Global Labor Organization (GLO). Prof. Zhu also has consulting experience with the UK Department for Education (DfE), Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop), among others. Prof. Zhu has been an elected council member of the Scottish Economic Society (SES) and a Visiting Professorial Fellow at UNSW Canberra, Australia.

Prof. Zhu is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Family and Economic Issues. Recently Prof. Zhu has been a Guest Managing Editor of the “Higher Education Reforms” Special Issue for the China Economic Review.