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Discussion Paper
The Cost of College Continues to Climb
College is much more expensive than it used to be. Tuition for a bachelor’s degree has more than tripled from an (inflation-adjusted) average of about $5,000 per year in the 1970s to around $18,000 today. For many parents and prospective students, this high and rising tuition has raised concerns about whether getting a college degree is still worth it—a question we addressed in a 2014 study. In this post, we update that study, estimating the cost of college in terms of both out-of-pocket expenses, like tuition, and opportunity costs, the wages one gives up to attend school. We find that ...
Journal Article
Too Small to Succeed?
The hard facts of education economics are putting some small colleges at risk
Briefing
College Towns and COVID-19: The Impact on New England
The abrupt closing of college campuses this spring due to the spread of COVID-19 upended the lives of students and their families and disrupted the higher education sector. The impact of these closures and the questions of whether and how to reopen campuses this fall have been widely discussed. Less attention has been paid to the potential consequences for the local economies of the cities and towns that depend heavily on higher education. This issue is particularly important in New England, where in many communities, colleges and universities are among the largest employers and make an ...
Working Paper
Saving and Wealth Accumulation among Student Loan Borrowers: Implications for Retirement Preparedness
Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households' balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on retirement preparation. We demonstrate that families holding student loan debt later in life have less savings than their similarly educated peers without such debt. However, these comparisons are misleading if the goal is to characterize the experience of the typical student borrower, as they fail to ...
Discussion Paper
Measuring Racial Disparities in Higher Education and Student Debt Outcomes
Across the United States, the cost of all types of higher education has been rising faster than overall inflation for more than two decades. Despite rising costs, aggregate undergraduate enrollment rose steadily between 2000 and 2010 before leveling off and dipping slightly to its current level. Rising college costs have steadily increased dependence on student debt for college financing, with many students and parents turning to federal and private loans to pay for higher education. An earlier post in this series reported that borrowers in majority Black areas have higher student loan ...
Discussion Paper
Delaying College During the Pandemic Can Be Costly
Many students are reconsidering their decision to go to college in the fall due to the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, college enrollment is expected to be down sharply as a growing number of would-be college students consider taking a gap year. In part, this pullback reflects concerns about health and safety if colleges resume in-person classes, or missing out on the “college experience” if classes are held online. In addition, poor labor market prospects due to staggeringly high unemployment may be leading some to conclude that college is no longer worth it in this economic environment. ...
Working Paper
Should Children Do More Enrichment Activities? Leveraging Bunching to Correct for Endogeneity
We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and extracurricular lessons on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We take into consideration that children forgo alternative activities, such as play and socializing, in order to spend time on enrichment. Our study controls for selection on unobservables using a novel approach which leverages the fact that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, which gives us direct information about the effect of confounders on skills. ...
Briefing
How Does Family Structure during Childhood Affect College Preparedness and Completion?
From 1996 through 2015, the share of twenty-eight-year-olds in the United States who attended college grew 8 percentage points while the share who completed college also grew 8 percentage points. But college attainment trends varied significantly by family structure. In particular, completion grew much faster for children from "high-resource" households (two parents with at least one holding a four-year degree) compared with children from "low-resource" households (one parent and no degree). New research suggests that this attainment gap expanded because high-resource households increased ...
Discussion Paper
The Lingering Fiscal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Higher Education
The unprecedented challenges from COVID-19 present many institutions of higher education with liquidity, and even solvency, concerns. In this report, we provide guidance to institutions and policymakers about the short- and medium-term revenue losses that are likely to materialize as a result of the ongoing pandemic and associated disruptions to revenue and expenses. Using historical data on states’ responses to previous economic downturns and contemporaneous measures of the severity of the current economic predicament, we project state and local appropriation reductions that public ...