Putting Children Into Place: Village Context and Educational Inequality in Rural China

Abstract

To what extent do heterogeneous village contexts lead to diverging educational opportunities for the children living in them? This study investigates the relationship between residential context and educational inequality in rural China, drawing on data from the most recent, near-nationwide longitudinal survey. The study first shows that total inequality in child educational attainment in rural China is driven as much by inequality among villages as by inequality among households in the same village. Villages matter the most at the compulsory level of education: between living in two villages, population-average probabilities of discontinuing school at primary and lower secondary levels can differ by as much as 16 to 17 percentage points. Second, between the two structural dimensions of village contexts, access to off-farm employment opportunities, but not village resource constraints, is significantly associated with child educational attainment. Third, the study finds opposite associations of village out-migration opportunities with girls’ and boys’ educational attainment. These findings not only highlight the interplay between micro- and macro-level processes in shaping educational inequalities but also call attention to the social consequences of spatial inequality in economic development in rural China and beyond.