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...

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...

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...