Can conditional grants attract better students? Evidence from Chinese teachers’ colleges

Li Han and Jiaxin Xie

Economics of Education Review, 2020, vol. 78, issue C

Abstract: This paper examines whether a conditional grant program for teacher trainees helped attract better students to teaching majors in Chinese universities. The Free Education for Future Teachers program implemented in top teachers’ colleges provides tuition exemption and a generous stipend package to students in teaching majors under the condition that the recipients teach in their home provinces after graduation. By comparing score changes between teaching and nonteaching (“regular”) majors and between program colleges and nonprogram teachers’ colleges, we find that this grant program helps attract students scoring 0.4–0.5 percentiles higher in the score distribution to teaching majors. Further analysis shows that the program impact is stronger in places where more students are likely to be credit-constrained. Our results suggest that conditional grants targeting university-based teacher training programs are effective in improving the selection of teachers.

Keywords: Teacher selection; Conditional transfer; Teacher quality; Financial aid; College major choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775720305203
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:78:y:2020:i:c:s0272775720305203

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2020.102034

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().