Scott Rozelle, a Stanford University professor and economist specializing in development, returned to Middlebury on March 29 to speak about his research on combating mental health among school children in rural China. Rozelle, who holds a doctorate from Cornell University, is one of the co-directors of the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) at Stanford. This is the fourth time Rozelle has visited Middlebury.
Frederick C. Dirks Professor of Economics Will Pyle introduced Rozelle and explained how REAP is “all about making life better for the 10% of humanity that lives in rural China.” Rozelle, who has studied poverty for years, came to focus on the mental health issues among students in rural China as a means of furthering the economic development of the country as a whole.
Rozelle explained that the rural-urban divide in China’s economic structure leaves people in rural areas with fewer opportunities. “No one in this rural economy, which has 600 million workers, no one can do a white-collar job,” he said. “How does China graduate to become a high-income country? That’s when I started to say, well it’s obviously a problem in rural China, and so I started working on REAP.”
Rozelle referred to the vast divide between rural and urban Chinese citizens, likening it to a “caste system more rigid than India’s.” Rural citizens are presented with fewer resources and opportunities than their urban counterparts, according to Rozelle. He explained that students in rural China, on average, were 0.75–1 semester behind in learning compared to their urban counterparts, according to field research carried out by REAP. This research estimated that 31% of rural students dropped out of school before completing nine years of studies, and only 15% tested into high school. And according to Rozelle, “Mental health problems among children in rural China are severely understudied, even though one out of every nine children on earth is growing up in rural China.”
REAP’s focus is improving mental health issues among children in rural China in the hopes that this will lower the dropout rate, help students to perform better academically and pave the way for white-collar careers.
According to Rozelle, it is a seemingly insurmountable task. China has the highest suicide rate among school-aged children in the world. However, for the 400 million children living in China, there are only 500 child psychologists, most of whom are located in urban areas. “Depression and anxiety rates among rural students are nearly 10 times higher than the global prevalence among school age children. It’s almost all learning anxiety… just because it’s so competitive and there’s so much pressure from family, from classmates…” Rozelle said.
REAP also aims to study students with ADHD, which, according to Rozelle, “is an ignored issue in rural China, though the prevalence of ADHD is close to the worldwide rate.”
Rozelle also spoke of another barrier to education for rural students. Due to population decline, many schools in rural villages have been shut down, requiring that some students commute for hours. As a result, around a third of rural Chinese six-year-olds live in boarding schools.
“This isn’t Andover or Exeter, this is, put them in a bunk and tell them to shut up,” Rozelle said. “And a huge problem is bullying.”
Rozelle reported that three out of every four rural Chinese children claim to be the victim of bullying, the highest rate worldwide. In addressing mental health issues, REAP hopes to lower this statistic.
Since 2019, REAP has focused on four initiatives in particular, the first of which is to create mental health toolkits and make them accessible to rural schools. REAP’s second initiative is improving student resilience levels, through Social Emotional Learning programs (SEL). The SEL program consists of a year-long curriculum meant to be taught for one class period a week, addressing units such as “understanding teachers care,” “seeking help” and “emotional control.” Students also receive weekly counseling sessions.
Of the SEL program, Rozelle said, “The kids loved it!” One month after the implementation of the program, Rozelle noticed a 15% drop in non-learning anxiety amongst the tested students. However, the maintenance of the program proved difficult, as many teachers could not find time for the curriculum, or eschewed the program altogether under pressure from principals or parents. Rozelle hopes, “improving resilience might help students cope with mental health problems.”
The third REAP initiative is the exploration of the impact of mindfulness on students.
“We trained volunteers in Shanghai… to go into migrant schools and they ran these after-school mindfulness programs,” Rozelle explained. Upon testing and retesting the children, their math scores improved following the implementation of the program, but their reported level of mental health issues also increased. Rozelle attributes this, drawing from interviews and investigations conducted by REAP after the surprising findings, to the students’ newfound ability to recognize and name their mental health issues after learning about their existence through REAP.
The last initiative is a home-based intervention to improve maternal mental health.
Rozelle explained how, due to stigma, results of the toolkit initiative were frustratingly obscured. In one instance, a principal of a rural school covered up the truthful figures on the number of children suffering from mental illness in his school because “he was thinking, what if someone thinks this is my problem?”
He also said that sometimes even the true results prove difficult for people to accept: “We’ve published a bunch of papers on this,” he said, “and the biggest problem we get from editors is them saying, ‘It’s impossible that 67% of your kids have mental illness. Nowhere in the world is the percentage above 30%,’ they say, and I retort, ‘Welcome to rural China.’”
Jaden Roderique ’24 attended Rozelle’s talk because he is especially interested in the ramifications of the Chinese government’s strict policies concerning their citizens’ lives. “It was really insightful, hearing about mental health in China, especially within younger age groups, where it’s really important to… make sure learning environments are comfortable for everyone,” Roderique said.
Grace Mtunguja ’26 was surprised by Rozelle’s talk.
“I had no idea about any of these issues. It’s just difficult, because there are so many issues in the world, it’s hard to choose a few to focus on,” Mtunguja said. Rozelle’s talk was the first she has attended at Middlebury, and she said that it “inspired [her] to go to many more.”
