Higher education is an industry where markets don't clear, prices on average cover less than a third of production costs, the resulting student subsidies are given in strikingly different amounts by different schools, creating a sharply hierarchical market. And an input important to production...

Working from the financial aid records of individual students at 28 highly selective private colleges and universities, we were able to calculate both the price the low-income students at these schools actually pay for a year’s education, net of financial aid grants, and how the schools...