The market for undergraduate education has many similarities to an arms race. A school's position - relative to other schools - determines its success in attracting students and student quality. Its position, in turn, is largely determined by the size of its student subsidies, the difference...

All of the financial aid decisions at Williams College for the past fourteen years - nearly 14,000 of them - were used to see how much students actually paid for tuition, room, board, and fees to go to that highly selective and expensive school - their net prices. Williams practices need blind...

Because the rewards of academic performance in college are often delayed, the delay-discounting model of impulsiveness (Ainslie, 1975) predicts that academic performance should tend to decrease as people place less weight on future outcomes. To test this hypothesis, we estimated (hyperbolic)...

A study was conducted to examine peer effects among undergraduates at Williams College, a highly selective four-year liberal arts school. Specifically, the study explored whether students would perform better writing about newspaper articles they read and discussed in academically homogeneous or...

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,...

College tuition, as the price of higher education services, defies familiar economic analysis in important ways. It is recognized that tuition is a price that covers only a fraction of the cost of producing those educational services (about a third, nationally), creating an in-kind subsidy for...

College tuition is frequently compared, in press and politics, to the US median family income. That is, however, a highly misleading benchmark since schools with need-based financial aid rarely charge students from median income families the reported sticker price. Working from the financial aid...

In this paper we present estimates of roommate and institution based peer effects. Using data from the College & Beyond survey, the Freshman survey, and phonebook data that allows us to identify college roommates - we estimate models of students' political persuasion and intellectual engagement....

A study was conducted to see whether peer effects could be observed among undergraduates at Williams College, an elite four-year liberal arts school. Specifically, the study explored whether students in the bottom third of their class, with average SAT's of about 1300, would perform better in...

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...