Higher education has many of the attributes of a competitive industry. Many enterprises compete for inputs and sell similar outputs to a great variety of buyers. The competitive perspective has not been much used in the analysis of higher education. In this paper we find such a point of view yields both insights and puzzles. The familiar "stand alone" test from industrial organization casts doubt on the claim that undergraduate education subsidizes graduate education in the large research university; since institutions that sell both graduate and undergraduate education survive in competition with institutions that sell only undergraduate education, the claim of cross subsidization is hard to maintain. We note that the analysis of the use of prices to regulate admission to universities is complex because students are both inputs and outputs of the educational process. We note, but do not explain, some conspicuous failures of universities to use incentives and prices. Perhaps most interesting are the failures of research universities to reward excellent teaching (which has a clear" market value) and the failure of elite institutions, particularly professional schools, to exploit their preeminent market positions by charging a tuition which begins to capture the rents that graduation confers.
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3853.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 1991 Date of revision: Publication status: published relationship to a non-chapter. This should not happen. Please contact NBER. Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3853
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Roth, Alvin E. & Sotomayor, Marilda, 1992.
"Two-sided matching,"
Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,
in: R.J. Aumann & S. Hart (ed.), Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 16, pages 485-541
Elsevier.
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Dale W. Jorgenson & Barbara M. Fraumeni, 1992.
"The Output of the Education Sector,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Output Measurement in the Service Sectors, pages 303-341
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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