主题：Education in the Context of Demographic Decline: The Case of China's Rural School Closure Initiative

主讲人：Emily Hannum（宾夕法尼亚大学教授）

时间：2021年4月22日9:30-11:00

工作语言：英文（zoom线上会议）

主办单位：北京大学社会研究中心 北京大学社会科学学部

Emily Hannum is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are poverty and child welfare, gender and ethnic stratification, and sociology of education. Current projects focus on childhood poverty in China, the impact of large-scale school consolidations on educational attainment in China, and family separation and children’s education in China and in comparative perspective. Recent publications include “Education in East Asian Societies: Postwar Expansion and the Evolution of Inequality” (2019,Annual Review of Sociology, with Hiroshi Ishida, Hyunjoon Park, and Tony Tam) and “Estimating the Effects of Educational System Consolidation: The Case of China's Rural School Closure Initiative” (forthcoming,Economic Development and Cultural Change, with Xiaoying Liu and Fan Wang).

Global trends of fertility decline, population aging, and rural outmigration are creating pressures to consolidate school systems, with the rationale that economies of scale will enable higher quality education to be delivered in an efficient manner, despite longer travel distances for students. This talk will consider the impact of educational infrastructure consolidation on educational attainment using the case of China's rural primary school closure policies in the early 2000s. The talk will share findings related to gender and ethnic disparities in the implications of consolidation for educational attainment.