The decision to attend college is a question of human capital investment. However, resources to help practitioners frame human capital investment decisions remain elusive and few include the “gold standard” of finance: Net Present Value (NPV). Can one discuss human capital investment with an...

Using the W.E. Upjohn Institute's Promise Programs Database - a searchable data set covering about 200 place-based scholarship programs-this paper explores how the design of Promise programs can shape their equity impacts. The authors first examine the landscape of place-based programs to...

The number of international students worldwide has almost doubled in the last decade. In higher education systems that are partly tax-funded, a country's labour force might not be willing to subsidize the education of international students who might move away after graduation. This paper...

I examine differences in the competitive behavior between for-profit and traditional universities by modeling how these institutions allocate financial aid packages and set net cost according to differing objective functions. I test the implications of the model using data from the 2003-2004 and...

How have changes in the costs of enrolling full-time at public two- and four-year colleges affected student decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? Using local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public four-year colleges we study the impact of public...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

Using an unbalanced panel of close to 12,000 academic records, and difference-in-differences models and event study analyses with individual fixed effects, we evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on lower-income students' academic performance during the spring 2020 semester relative to...

The recent pressure on public finances in Bulgaria has exposed the need for a performance-based system of public funding for higher education. This article estimates the relative technical and cost efficiency of Bulgarian universities and explores the correlation between public funding and...

Higher education is subsidized worldwide, although with pronounced differences in levels of subsidization. While public funds account for about 90% of universities' budgets in Scandinavian countries, the share of public funds in Great Britain and the US is less that 30%. Subsidization is...

Higher education has been viewed as a potential instrument of national economic development. Human resource development in Eritrea is important for making the nation self-reliant thus the efforts are exerted to achieve this objective. However, Eritrea has been facing so many challenges in its...