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...

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...

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...

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...