Long Run Follow-Up to Delhi Voucher RCT

We follow-up on a voucher experiment conducted among low-cost private schools in low-income neighborhoods of East Delhi. The program was designed to mimic and hence test the model of the nation-wide Right to Education Act, which mandates private schools to reserve 25% of seats for disadvantaged students. Using a lottery among 1,618 children, the charity Absolute Return for Kids provided vouchers to 815 of them for the 2010-11 through 2015-16 school years. All of the 105 private schools participating in the program committed to accepting all voucher winners without discrimination, admissions tests, or additional fees. We conducted a survey in 2017, six years after the start of the lottery. The voucher increased the portion of the six years between baseline and endline survey spent in private schools by 34 percentage points (off of a control mean of 30.5%). We found strong positive effects on English for students predicted to have gone to government schools in the absence of treatment and strong negative impacts for those who would have attended other private schools. We found no impacts on math or Hindi. We now follow-up with these same students more than a decade after the program began to examine whether treatment effects have persisted and the extent to which these English skills translated into different educational decisions after primary school and other economic outcomes.