Search Results
Journal Article
A ticket to the middle class: working off college debt
A proposed program?in which each year of paid public service would cancel one year of college expense?could lift the burden of debt from graduates while supplying capable workers to municipalities and nonprofits.
Journal Article
Moving beyond the 13th grade
Two-year colleges still battle an inferiority complex, despite strong enrollment growth and relevance in today's economy.
Journal Article
Family resources and college enrollment
This article reviews the literature on the effects of family income and tuition costs on college and enrollment and finds mixed evidence in support of tuition subsidies. The author also presents new evidence showing that college enrollment is especially sensitive to income for families with modest amounts of wealth, suggesting that borrowing constraints may be a factor in limiting access to higher education.
Journal Article
Stop paying more for less: ways to boost productivity in higher education
College tuition has increased dramatically over the past decade, yet few think the quality of graduates has kept up. Decentralizing the administration and privatizing such things as housing and food service would boost productivity, as would ditching tenure and improving teaching.
Report
The incentive effects of higher education subsidies on student effort
This paper uses a game-theoretic model to analyze the disincentive effects of low-tuition policies on student effort. The model of parent and student responses to tuition subsidies is then calibrated using information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the High School and Beyond Sophomore Cohort: 1980-92. I find that although subsidizing tuition increases enrollment rates, it reduces student effort. This follows from the fact that a high-subsidy, low-tuition policy causes an increase in the percentage of less able and less highly motivated college graduates. ...
Journal Article
Is college unaffordable?
Tuition and student debt have skyrocketed, but higher education still pays off.
Working Paper
Imperfect information, self-selection and the market for higher education
This paper explores how the steady trends in increasing tuition costs, college enrollment, and the college wage gap might be related to the quality of college graduates. The model shows that the signaling role of education might be an important yet largely neglected ingredient in these recent changes. I develop a special signaling model in which workers of heterogeneous abilities face the same costs, yet a larger proportion of able individuals self-select to attend college since they are more likely to get higher returns. With imperfect information, the skill premium is an outcome which ...
Report
Merit Aid, Student Mobility, and the Role of College Selectivity
In this paper, we investigate the role of college selectivity in college choice decisions (both in-state and out-of-state) of freshmen students following Georgia's HOPE scholarship program. How did HOPE affect the selectivity of colleges attended by Georgia's freshmen students? Did it induce Georgia's freshmen students who would have otherwise attended more selective out-of-state colleges to instead attend less selective in-state ones? Or was there movement to more selective ones, both in-state and out-of-state? Using student residency and enrollment data from IPEDS and selectivity data from ...
Working Paper
A general equilibrium theory of college with education subsidies, in-school labor supply, and borrowing constraints
This paper analyzes the effectiveness of three different types of education policies: tuition subsidies (broad based, merit based, and flat tuition), grant subsidies (broad based and merit based), and loan limit restrictions. We develop a quantitative theory of college within the context of general equilibrium overlapping generations economy. College is modeled as a multi-period risky investment with endogenous enrollment, time-to-degree, and dropout behavior. Tuition costs can be financed using federal grants, student loans, and working while at college. We show that our model accounts for ...
Working Paper
Cohabitation, Child Development, and College Costs
US college-educated couples with children marry at higher rates than those without a college degree. We argue that marriage, which entails lower separation risk and more equitable asset division if separation occurs, provides insurance to the lower-earning spouse, facilitating child investment. Investing in children is more valuable for college-educated couples, who are more likely to send their children to college. Using an OLG model of marriage, cohabitation, wealth accumulation, and educational investments where college is costly and completion is risky, we find that high college costs ...