We examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we show that online education is concentrated in large for-profit chains and less-selective public institutions. Colleges with a...

Gary Fethke and Andrew Policano's book "Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America's Public Universities" paints a picture of a future for public research universities that is very different than what many people will want to see. Their message is that the financial and governance...

Charitable donations are an important revenue source for many institutions of higher education. We explore how donations respond to economic and financial market shocks, accounting for both supply and demand channels through which these shocks operate. In panel data with fixed effects to control...

I propose a positive model of the university that generates many apparently peculiar features of universities such as endowments and tuition subsidies. The model proposes a specific objective function: a university maximizes its contribution to the intellectual capital of society, valued at...

Using data for more than 800 college and university endowment funds over 2003-2011, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the spending policies used in practice as well as how frequently and why those mandates are revised over time. Given the long-term and relatively static nature of the...

The non-resident student market brings monetary resources to colleges and universities in the U.S. Previous research on price-setting has been predominantly limited to public institutions. This study offers geospatial indicators to capture local competition and influence from public and private...

Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education, yet previous research has emphasized the impact of merit aid on four-year students rather than two-year students. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of merit aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but to my...

Does financial aid increase college attendance and completion? Selection bias and the high implicit tax rates imposed by overlapping aid programs make this question difficult to answer. This paper reports initial findings from a randomized evaluation of a large privately-funded scholarship...

Previous work (Hoxby and Avery 2014) shows that low-income higher achievers tend not to apply to selective colleges despite being extremely likely to be admitted with financial aid so generous that they would pay less than they do to attend the non-selective schools they usually attend. The...

In the U.S. there are large differences across States in the extent to which college education is subsidized, and there are also large differences across States in the proportion of college graduates in the labor force. State subsidies are apparently motivated in part by the perceived benefits...