Government subsidies for higher education suffer from serious design defects that contribute to seemingly contradictory problems — (1) too few individuals earn college degrees because the United States underinvests in prospective students and (2) too many students enroll in bad schools that...

We estimate the effects on workforce and location outcomes of the Kalamazoo Promise, a generous, place-based college scholarship. Drawing upon administrative unemployment insurance wage records merged with individual-level education data, we identify Promise effects by comparing eligible to...