Colleges and universities in the US differ markedly in their access to economic resources, hence in what they can do for their students. National (IPEDS) data are used here to describe the resulting hierarchy that's reflected in schools' spending on their students, the prices those students pay,...

Data on 2,822 Vanderbilt University graduates are used to investigate alumni giving behavior during the eight years after graduation. A two stage model accounting for incidental truncation is used to first estimate the likelihood of making a contribution and second estimate the average gift size...

Misurderstanding its economic structure will make it more difficult to predict the effects of changes that are sweeping higher education : increasing price competition, the weakening of tenure, taxpayer revolts, new technologies, the reduction in research support, etc. This paper follows...

Three studies tested the hypothese that 1) people know very little about the extent to which colleges and universities subsidize their students and 2) providing people with subsidy information leads them to judge the prices that such schools charge as more reasonble. The results offered...

Student subsidies are large, ubiquitous, and very unevenly distributed in US higher education - covering, on average, two-thirds of a student's educational costs and ranging from $2,600 in the bottom decile of schools ranked by subsidy size to $24,000 in the top. So data on the distribution of...

There's a new "global" way of organizing the economic information about an individual college or university that leads to a new way of tracking and understanding the changes that have been overtaking higher education, natioinally. The paper gives a simple introduction to this way of looking at...

In this paper we summarize our recent work analyzing pricing, aid, access and choice in American higher education, and we draw out implications from those findings for national higher education policy. We find that real increases in net tuition have impaired access and choice principally for...

The high price of attending college has generated a great deal of discussion and some heated controversy in recent years. Popular opinions generally depict college prices as unreasonable, unjustified, and unpayable. In the context of thinking seriously about the ways colleges and universities...

It is increasingly clear that price competition is escalating in the market for higher education. We attempt to understand how price competition would work in higher education and explore the likely long run equilibrium structure of prices in that context. We draw inferences using both...