Impacts of village preschools on student enrollment and longer-term outcomes: New evidence from the poorest regions in China

This paper examines the impacts of both the availability and the quality of village preschools on student enrollment and longer-term outcomes in the context of the rapid development of early childhood education in the poorest areas of China. After the implementation of one of the world’s largest universal preschool programs for a decade, the number of preschools in China has more than doubled while annual enrollments have increased by 60%. Using nationally representative survey data tracking children from 2010 to 2018, we identify the causal impacts of village preschools using a difference-in-differences instrumental variable approach. Building new preschools substantially increased students’ access to early childhood education in low-income villages. We also find suggestive evidence of positive impacts on their cognitive skills four years after preschool enrollment, but not their non-cognitive skills. To identify the impacts of preschool quality, we re-examined the “One-Village-One-Preschool” experiment in one of China’s poorest counties. High-quality preschools substantially improved students’ academic outcomes, particularly among disadvantaged students. Our findings contribute new evidence on how early childhood education affects human capital development in low-income regions.