父母外出务工对子女高中教育的影响

A Study On Labor Migration And The Educational Attainment Of High School In Rural China

本文利用陕西、江苏、四川、河北、吉林五省农村的入户调查所收集的一手数据,采用倾向得分匹配法,考察了农村父母外出务工对子女高中升学的影响。研究结果发现,相对于父母没有外出务工的农村家庭,没有任何证据表明父母外出务工对子女的高中升学造成显著的负面影响。研究显示,父母外出务工对子女升学有一定的促进作用,但统计上这种作用并不显著。

XIE Bei-ni, LI Yue-yun （ College of Economics And Management, Nanjing Agricuhural University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210009, China） This paper addresses how migration of parents affects the high school enrollment of their children, including vocational and academic high school. As labor migration from rural areas to cities has become one of the significant social-economic phenomena in China, the lack of an efficient labor market and the existence of institu- tional barriers have led to labor migration incomplete： only parents migrate to cities, leaving their children at home and educated without the guildanee of parents. Due to the long distance of labor migration, children are seprated with their parents. Whereas middle school completion is mandated by policy in China, high school education is nei- ther compulsory nor heavily subsidized in rural areas. High school tuition can be a substantial share of household annual income and credit constrained families may be unable to enroll children in school. As the supply of high school education is deficient, the academic performance is also the key to enroll in high school. Lacking guidance from their parents will probably further worsen their children＇ s education in rural china. But labor migration could increase families＇income, releases the income restraint that faces rural families on educaitonal investments. They could probably improve the quality of education by consuming more informal educational services such as taking ex- tra remediation lessons. This may lead to higher enrollment rates to this point. However, as migration becomes eas- ier, improved migrant opportunities also raise the net return to migrant enployment and the cost opportunity remai- ning in school,which may result in~ negative effects on high school educational attainment. Considering methodolo- gies, most of the existing researches adopt descriptive methods or case studies, only a few uses econometrics meth- ods to measure effects of labor migration quantitatively. Alan de Brauw and John giles （2004） find a robust negative relationship between migrant opportunity and high school enrollment using exogenous variation across countires in the timing of national identity card distribution with a large panel household and village data set. But his research does not involve vocational education. The poor academic performance is considered to may result in failure in the high school entrance exam. Hu Feng and Li Shantong（2009） indicate that migration across provinces has a signifi- cant negative impact on their children＇ s academic performance with Ordered Probit Model. But remittance can re- lease the income restraint that faces rural families on educational investments, especially have a positive effect on students in middle school and above. Whatever, the self selected bias still exists. Meanwhile Chen Xinxin （2009） find that there is no significant negative affect of migration on school performance with the method of Difference in Difference with a panel data in 2002 and 2006. In order to accurately analyze the influence of rural migrant labor on their children＇ s high school enrollment and clear up the self-selected bias between migration and rural students＇ high school enrollment, we empirically estimated the impact using data collected from a household survey in five provinces in rural China, based on the method of propensity score matching. Our results show that there exists no evidence that migration of parents have a significant negative impact on high school enrollment of their children. The increase labor incomes has brought out better effects for rural families to invest on children＇ s education rather than letting their children out of school to labor market. And our government should consider expanding subsidies for high school education in rural china and consummating the financial aid to poor rural families. And the govern- ment should end the formal restrictions on Hukou which has caused educational barrier to make sure migrant chil- dren could enroll in the high school of migrant city so that they could have more educational choices. Further more, the migrant labor wages should be ensured and the labor market should be completed.