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,...

This paper reviews the major conceptual and practical problems that emerge in estimating the cost of producing a year of undergraduate education. The three major areas discussed are the complicated issues in estimating the yearly cost of physical capital, the treatemtn of student financial aid,...

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 our 1991 Brookings book, "Keeping College Affordable: Government and Educational Opportunity", we examined whether our nation's colleges and universities were affordable for Americans of all economic and social backgrounds, and outlined policies aimed at the efficient allocation of government...

Using data generated for a study of student subsidies (in WPEHE Discussion Paper No. 32), this paper reports on the distribution of capital stocks and the costs of capital services in 2700 colleges and universities in 1991. The $330 billion in physical capital estimated for these institutions...

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...

This paper reports on the distribution of capital stocks and the costs of capital services in 3148 colleges and universities in 1993.

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...