The Economist Presents REAP Research on Rural Secondary School Dropout

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An article in The Economist published on August 23, 2014, on school dropouts in rural China cites REAP research on the matter.

"In the past three decades China has made impressive gains in sending rural children to school. This has helped fuel its rise as a low-end manufacturing power. But the easy gains have been achieved. If the country is to create the 'knowledge economy' it says it wants, the government will have to change the way rural teenagers are educated and schools in the countryside are funded...

"Yi Hongmei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues at Stanford’s Rural Education Action Programme found that the most impoverished students dropped out of middle-school at twice the rate as the others they surveyed. Students with at least one sibling were also more likely to drop out because of the strain on family resources. If parents fell ill, they found, needy students would often leave school to earn money to pay for treatment. The scholars concluded that giving money to students would help. In one trial, financial aid reduced the drop-out rate by 60%. In another, giving it to impoverished students in the final year of junior middle-school increased their chances of staying at least another year at school by 10%."

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