Educational Federalism and the Quality Effects of Tuition Fees

This paper investigates how the abolishment of a ban on tuition fees affects the quality of higher education with centralized and decentralized decision making. It is shown that tuition fees fully crowd public funds under centralization and quality of university education does not improve. However, with decentralized decisions total higher education spending increases in the tuition level. Therefore, decentralization can lead to a higher quality of university education than centralization although the opposite holds when funding is restricted to be public.