The marketization of educational resources and individual choice: Examining the heterogeneous treatment effect of private tutoring in middle schools

In recent decades, with the rapid marketization of educational resources in K–12 education, private tutoring has become extremely popular in China, yet the previous research has not yet reached a consensus on the impact of private tutoring on academic outcomes, and has also overlooked the influence of individual choice under the exam-oriented educational system in China. By using data drawn from the China Education Panel Survey, this study examines the heterogeneous treatment effect of private tutoring on 8th graders’ academic performance from the perspective of individual choice. The results show that a propensity to attend private tutoring can differentiate the class disparities among middle school students in terms of individual, family, school, and other factors. Furthermore, the results indicate that private tutoring generally has limited impacts on academic achievement, net of all background factors. However, students whose propensity to attend private tutoring lies in the intermediate range tend to benefit the most from private tutoring. For both students from socioeconomically disadvantaged families with a low propensity and their advantaged counterparts with a high propensity, private tutoring has little effect on their academic performance. Sensitivity analysis further shows that the heterogeneous effects of private tutoring differs across cognitive ability, subject types, and tutoring periods. The finding has important implications for understanding the consequences of China's policy interventions in terms of reducing educational inequality.