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...

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...

Using Mellon Foundation's College and Beyond survey of alumni from 34 colleges and universities spanning 40 years, Clotfelter found that those who reported that someone "... besides students [took] a special interest in you or your work" also reported greater general satisfaction with their...

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...

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...

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...

A sophisticated and widespread intuition is supported by our experience with business firms. And it is confirmed, influenced, and expanded by the formal microeconomic analysis of those firms and their markets. This paper asks if that theory and intuition are helpful for understanding colleges...

Data on institutional saving in US higher education have not been available until now yet they are useful in several ways. They describe how various types of schools are doing financially, and whether their present behavior is sustainable. They complete the picture of sources and uses of revenue...

Data from a panel of 2,269 colleges and universities track the major changes in educational costs, prices, subsidies, and financial aid over the seven eventful years from 1986-87 to 1993-94.