Does School Consolidation in Rural Areas Affect Students' Education? Empirical Evidence From China

ABSTRACT In the late 1990s, an extensive consolidation of schools in rural China led to the amalgamation of numerous primary and secondary schools into urban schools or their discontinuation. The study aimed to investigate whether China's school consolidation movement has influenced the educational attainment of rural students. The data are sourced from the China Household Income Project (CHIP) and regional statistical yearbooks, and the cross‐section difference‐in‐differences (DID) method is used to analyse the differences in high school enrolment of rural students between regions with different degrees of school consolidation. Empirical analysis results indicate that school consolidation substantially enhances the probability of rural students receiving high school education, as well as having a positive impact on rural students taking the college entrance examination and receiving a longer formal education. Moreover, the findings of the empirical analysis remain significant even after controlling for variations in government educational expenditures, substituting the explained variables, as well as eliminating the influence of school‐entering age. The adjustment of rural schools, as an inevitable historical trend, is beneficial to improving rural educational attainment.