Can Eliminating School Fees in Poor Districts Boost Enrollment? Evidence from South Africa

Many developing countries continue to charge fees to students attending public schools. Considerable concern has been expressed that such fees may represent a barrier to school enrollment, lowering investment in human capital and reducing economic growth. Motivated by these concerns, several developing countries have recently adopted policies to eliminate school fees. The decision to target this program at schools serving poor communities is in contrast to the recent fee-elimination programs in many lower-income countries that have involved scrapping fees across the board. Methodologically, the results here emphasize the importance of interpreting RD estimates as only applying to units in the vicinity of the treatment cutoff score. In the presence of heterogeneous responses to treatment, these estimates may be uninformative about the treatment effect for units far from the cut off or the average treatment effect.