IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32162.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

English Language Requirement and Educational Inequality: Evidence from 16 Million College Applicants in China

Author

Listed:
  • Hongbin Li
  • Lingsheng Meng
  • Kai Mu
  • Shaoda Wang

Abstract

This paper studies the unintended effect of English language requirement on educational inequality by investigating how the staggered rollout of English listening tests in China’s high-stakes National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) affected the rural-urban gap in college access. Leveraging administrative data covering the universe of NCEE participants between 1999 and 2003, we find that the introduction of English listening tests significantly lowered rural students’ exam score percentile ranks relative to their urban counterparts, resulting in a 30% increase in the rural-urban gap in college access. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, as a result of this policy change, more than 54,000 rural students lost college seats to their urban peers between 1999 and 2003, and another 11,000 rural students who elite colleges could have admitted ended up in non-elite colleges, causing them significant future income losses.

Suggested Citation

  • Hongbin Li & Lingsheng Meng & Kai Mu & Shaoda Wang, 2024. "English Language Requirement and Educational Inequality: Evidence from 16 Million College Applicants in China," NBER Working Papers 32162, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32162
    Note: ED LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32162.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sirui Li & Philip Verwimp, 2024. "Standardized Testing for College Entrance: Evidence from a Major Examination Reform in China," Working Papers ECARES 2024-17, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F69 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Other
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32162. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.