From Village Classrooms to University Campuses: The Impact of Free Compulsory Education on Access to Higher Education in Rural China

This paper examines the long-term effects of China’s 2006–2007 Free Compulsory Education Reform on educational attainment in rural areas. The reform eliminated tuition and textbook fees for nine years of schooling, but its staggered rollout across provinces and cohorts created a quasi-natural experiment in exposure. Using nationally representative survey data, I construct an individual-level measure of reform exposure based on the number of tuition-free semesters. The estimates show that each additional semester of exposure raises the probability of completing high school by about two percentage points and of completing college by nearly one percentage point. The effects appear to operate mainly through reduced adolescent farm work and improved academic performance. These findings suggest that lowering the cost of basic education promotes educational progression beyond the compulsory stage and helps expand the supply of educated labor in rural China.