Search Results
Working Paper
The Effect of Shocks to College Revenues on For-Profit Enrollment: Spillover from the Public Sector
This paper investigates whether declines in public funding for post-secondary institutions have increased for-profit enrollment. The two primary channels through which funding might operate to reallocate students across sectors are price (measured by tuition) and quality (measured by resource constraints). We estimate, on average, that a 10 percent cut in appropriations raises tuition about 1 to 2 percent and decreases faculty resources by 1/2 to 1 percent, creating substantial bottlenecks for prospective students on both price and quality. These cuts, in turn, generate a nearly one ...
Discussion Paper
The Changing Higher Education Landscape
The past decade and a half has seen dramatic changes in the higher education landscape, characterized by significant growth in enrollment. This growth has been concentrated mostly in for-profit schools, where enrollment skyrocketed in the first decade of the period, nearly quadrupling between 2000 and 2011. The post-2011 period has been marked by an abatement of this growth. These patterns have strong implications not only for the higher education market but also for the labor force and the economy more broadly. Therefore, it is essential to understand the evolution of the different sectors ...
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 ...
Briefing
Who Values Access to College?
A quantitative model of college enrollment suggests that the value of college access varies greatly across individuals. Forty percent place no value on the option to attend despite large public subsidies, while 25 percent would enroll even without the subsidies. In the model, redirecting public funds from those who attend college irrespective of subsidies to those who don’t attend even with subsidies both preserves college enrollment and improves overall outcomes. While these two groups are clearly visible only in the model, and not in the data, this analysis suggests that more-targeted ...