Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Left-behind children (LBC) are the children who are younger than 18 years old from rural areas and having at least one parent move to the urban area to work (China Women's Federation 2013). China has estimated 61 million LBC, which is the largest LBC population in the world and covers 37.7 % of the total rural children in China. Meanwhile, the Rural Boarding School Construction Program financially supports building boarding schools since 2004. By the end of 2017, there are 9.35 million rural boarding elementary students (Ministry of Education of China, 2018). A recent study finds negative effect of boarding on LBC's sense of school belonging and academic achievement in western China (Wang & Mao 2018). Nevertheless, the comprehensive effects of boarding at school and being left behind to the child well-being have not been examined. This paper uses the baseline survey data of China Family Panel Study (CFPS), a nationally sampled data from 25 provinces in China to examine boarding school impact on LBC's physical health, cognitive outcome and mental health. We examine the cohort of children who were between 10 and 15 years old and live in the rural area at the survey time. Our findings show that boarding at school has no significant effect on the physical and mental health outcomes for LBC. However, the math and word scores increase for both girls and boys, which is on the contrary of Wang & Mao (2018)’s findings. In addition, we find boarding school also improves the cognitive outcomes of non-left-behind children. However, boarding at school might negatively affect the mental health of the non-left-behind boys.

Different from the private elite boarding schools, the public boarding schools in rural China offer the option for all the students who are living in remote areas or lack of caregivers. With free or low-cost policy for LBC, boarding at school becomes a practical solution for LBC to receive better care and relieve the pressure of senior caregivers of LBC. For the LBC, who are considered as disadvantaged children with many studies (Wang & Sheikh-Khalil 2014, Zhao et al. 2014), the outcome of boarding at school could be disparate. Thus, our research is demonstrating the effects of boarding school on the LBC's well-being in rural China to reflect the policy impact.

We make several contributions to the literature. First, this is the first study that investigates the comprehensive impacts of boarding school on LBC to all our knowledge. We thus have evidence that boarding schools are effective for LBC's academic development but enhancing the nutrition care and mental care in boarding school is indispensable to improve LBC's well-being as a policy implication. Second, we exploit the richness of the CFPS data and invoke several relevant contemporary econometric approaches to control the unobserved individual heterogeneity. Third, our paper fits within a larger body of evidence that attempts to examine the causal relationship between parental migration, school type and children's well-being.