Misurderstanding its economic structure will make it more difficult to predict the effects of changes that are sweeping higher education : increasing price competition, the weakening of tenure, taxpayer revolts, new technologies, the reduction in research support, etc. This paper follows...

Three studies tested the hypothese that 1) people know very little about the extent to which colleges and universities subsidize their students and 2) providing people with subsidy information leads them to judge the prices that such schools charge as more reasonble. The results offered...

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...