Free teacher education in rural China: Incentives and challenges11We thank Jesse Bruhn, Olivia Chi, Heather Hill, Brian Jacob, Susanna Loeb, David Monk, Emily Rauscher, Eric Taylor, and seminar participants at AEFP, AERA, APPAM, Brown University, Peking University, Southern University of Science and Technology, University of Michigan, as well as one anonymous reviewer at AERA for their insightful comments. We also thank Yang Song for her inputs in the early stage of this project and Jing Liu, Will Grossenbacher, and Xiu Wu for their excellent research assistance. This paper uses confidential data from the China Institute for Educational Finance Research and the Institute of Economics of Education at Peking University, China Ministry of Education, and Ningxia Department of Education. The experiment was approved by the University of Michigan IRB (HUM00127559). The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors

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.