Free teacher education in rural China: Incentives and challenges1

In 2007, China launched a nationwide Free Teacher Education (FTE) program, offering conditional tuition waivers and stipends to teaching-track students at six elite teachers' colleges. This study examines the impacts of three phases of the FTE program on college admission outcomes in Ningxia, a rural and racially diverse province. Using administrative data on College Entrance Exams (CEEs) and admission records between 2003 and 2018, we find that the program's initial phase motivated applications from disadvantaged students but did not significantly improve the academic qualification of admitted students. In contrast, later phases attracted high-performing applicants, especially in STEM disciplines, raising the admission standards by up to 7 percentiles. However, the increased competition unintentionally deterred financially constrained students, reducing their representation among the program's admitted cohorts. We supplement our analysis with a randomized survey experiment at a large high school in Ningxia to uncover the behavioral mechanisms underlying our findings.