Physical capital represents an important input to the production of higher education--the essential services of buildings, equipment, and land--for which we have only highly inadequate measures. This paper has three objectives: to report estimates of the value of the capital stocks used by 3,148...

Using data for 2008/09, we update a 2001/02 study that examined the pricing policies with respect to family income at highly selective private colleges and universities and the distribution of students by family income at these schools. We find significant reductions in net prices relative to...

This brief paper asks if the proposition that "growth is good" applies with equal force to private business and to private colleges and universities. An increasing appreciation of the fundamental differences in economic structure between business firms and academic institutions suggests that...

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...

With only a small number of their students coming from families with the lowest incomes (10% from the bottom two family income quintiles), the nation's most selective private colleges and universities need to know why. Two ready ideological answers are (1) that low-income high-ability students...

This paper was prepared as a chapter for College Decisions: How Students Actually Make Them and How They Could, edited by Caroline Hoxby for publication by the University of Chicago Press for the NBER. In this chapter, we describe the potential significance of student peer effects for the...

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...