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...

Sweden has a school voucher system with universal coverage and full acceptance of corporate providers. Using a value added approach, we find that students at upper-secondary voucher schools on average score 0.06 standard deviations lower on externally graded standardized tests in first year core...