IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/umc/wpaper/1514.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition

Author

Abstract

We develop a quantitative model of higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. The framework extends the quality maximizing college paradigm of Epple, Romano, Sarpca, and Sieg (2013) and embeds it in an incomplete markets, life-cycle environment. We measure how much changes in underlying costs, reforms to the Federal Student Loan Program (FSLP), and changes in the college earnings premium have caused tuition to increase. All these changes combined generate a 106% rise in net tuition between 1987 and 2010, which more than accounts for the 78% increase seen in the data. Changes in the FSLP alone generate a 102% tuition increase, and changes in the college premium generate a 24% increase. Our ?ndings cast doubt on Baumol’s cost disease as a driver of higher tuition.

Suggested Citation

  • Grey Gordon & Aaron Hedlund, 2015. "Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition," Working Papers 1514, Department of Economics, University of Missouri.
    • Handle: RePEc:umc:wpaper:1514
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EaEctpMvSc6m0qiikHirFfhA8LgsQkfe/view?usp=sharing
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Chao Fu, 2014. "Equilibrium Tuition, Applications, Admissions, and Enrollment in the College Market," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(2), pages 225-281.
    2. Brant Abbott & Giovanni Gallipoli & Costas Meghir & Giovanni L. Violante, 2013. "Education Policy�and Intergenerational Transfers in Equilibrium," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1887R2, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised May 2018.
    3. David Card & Thomas Lemieux, 2001. "Can Falling Supply Explain the Rising Return to College for Younger Men? A Cohort-Based Analysis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(2), pages 705-746.
    4. Stephanie Riegg Cellini & Claudia Goldin, 2014. "Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 6(4), pages 174-206, November.
    5. David H. Autor & Lawrence F. Katz & Melissa S. Kearney, 2008. "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(2), pages 300-323, May.
    6. Brant Abbott & Giovanni Gallipoli & Costas Meghir & Giovanni L. Violante, 2019. "Education Policy and Intergenerational Transfers in Equilibrium," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 127(6), pages 2569-2624.
    7. Felicia Ionescu, 2011. "Risky Human Capital and Alternative Bankruptcy Regimes for Student Loans," Journal of Human Capital, University of Chicago Press, vol. 5(2), pages 153-206.
    8. John Bailey Jones & Fang Yang, 2016. "Skill-Biased Technical Change and the Cost of Higher Education," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 34(3), pages 621-662.
    9. Robert B. Archibald & David H. Feldman, 2008. "Explaining Increases in Higher Education Costs," The Journal of Higher Education, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 79(3), pages 268-295, May.
    10. Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz, 2007. "The Race between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005," NBER Working Papers 12984, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Kjetil Storesletten & Chris I. Telmer & Amir Yaron, 2004. "Cyclical Dynamics in Idiosyncratic Labor Market Risk," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(3), pages 695-717, June.
    12. Philippe Belley & Lance Lochner, 2007. "The Changing Role of Family Income and Ability in Determining Educational Achievement," Journal of Human Capital, University of Chicago Press, vol. 1(1), pages 37-89.
    13. Charles T. Clotfelter, 1996. "Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number clot96-1, March.
    14. Gianluca Violante & Giovanni Gallipoli & Costas Meghir, 2005. "Education Decisions, Equilibrium Policies and Wages Dispersion," 2005 Meeting Papers 522, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    15. Rodney J. Andrews & Jing Li & Michael F. Lovenheim, 2012. "Quantile Treatment Effects of College Quality on Earnings: Evidence from Administrative Data in Texas," NBER Working Papers 18068, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Bridget T. Long, 2004. "The Impact of Federal Tax Credits for Higher Education Expenses," NBER Chapters, in: College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It, pages 101-168, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Grey Gordon & Shi Qiu, 2018. "A divide and conquer algorithm for exploiting policy function monotonicity," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 9(2), pages 521-540, July.
    18. Rajindar Koshal & Manjulika Koshal, 2000. "State Appropriation and Higher Education Tuition: What is the relationship?," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(1), pages 81-89.
    19. Frederick, Allison B. & Schmidt, Stephen J. & Davis, Lewis S., 2012. "Federal policies, state responses, and community college outcomes: Testing an augmented Bennett hypothesis," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 908-917.
    20. David O Lucca & Taylor Nadauld & Karen Shen, 2019. "Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(2), pages 423-466.
    21. Michael Rizzo & Ronald G. Ehrenberg, 2004. "Resident and Nonresident Tuition and Enrollment at Flagship State Universities," NBER Chapters, in: College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It, pages 303-354, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    22. Singell, Larry Jr. & Stone, Joe A., 2007. "For whom the Pell tolls: The response of university tuition to federal grants-in-aid," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 285-295, June.
    23. Dennis Epple & Richard Romano & Holger Sieg, 2006. "Admission, Tuition, and Financial Aid Policies in the Market for Higher Education," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(4), pages 885-928, July.
    24. Kartik B. Athreya & Janice Eberly, 2013. "The supply of college-educated workers: the roles of college premia, college costs, and risk," Working Paper 13-02, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    25. Turner, Nicholas, 2012. "Who benefits from student aid? The economic incidence of tax-based federal student aid," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 463-481.
    26. Keane, Michael P & Wolpin, Kenneth I, 2001. "The Effect of Parental Transfers and Borrowing Constraints on Educational Attainment," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 42(4), pages 1051-1103, November.
    27. Bridget Terry Long, 2004. "How do Financial Aid Policies Affect Colleges?: The Institutional Impact of the Georgia HOPE Scholarship," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 39(4).
    28. Caroline Minter Hoxby, 2004. "Introduction to "College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It"," NBER Chapters, in: College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It, pages 1-12, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    29. Caroline M. Hoxby, 2004. "College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number hoxb04-1, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zhifeng Cai & Jonathan Heathcote, 2022. "College Tuition and Income Inequality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(1), pages 81-121, January.
    2. Ian Goldin & Pantelis Koutroumpis & François Lafond & Julian Winkler, 2024. "Why Is Productivity Slowing Down?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 62(1), pages 196-268, March.
    3. Lutz Hendricks & Christopher Herrington & Todd Schoellman, 2018. "College Access and Attendance Patterns: A Long-Run View," Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers 10, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    4. Ciprian Domnisoru & Ioana Cosmina Schiopu, 2021. "The Rise of For-Profit Higher Education: A General Equilibrium Analysis," CESifo Working Paper Series 9134, CESifo.
    5. Aaron Hedlund & Grey Gordon, 2017. "Accounting for Tuition Increases at U.S. Colleges," 2017 Meeting Papers 1550, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    6. Holger Sieg & Yu Wang, 2017. "The Impact of Student Debt on Education, Career, and Marriage Choices of Female Lawyers," NBER Working Papers 23453, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Emily E. Cook, 2021. "Competing Campuses: Equilibrium Prices, Admissions, and Undergraduate Programs in US Higher Education," Working Papers 2120, Tulane University, Department of Economics.
    8. Rodrigo Azuero & David Zarruk Valencia, 2016. "The Effects of Student Loans on the Provision and Demand for Higher Education," PIER Working Paper Archive 17-020, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 22 Oct 2017.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Aaron Hedlund & Grey Gordon, 2017. "Accounting for Tuition Increases at U.S. Colleges," 2017 Meeting Papers 1550, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    2. Lance Lochner & Alexander Monge-Naranjo, 2014. "Student Loans and Repayment: Theory, Evidence and Policy," Working Papers 2014-40, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    3. Brant Abbott & Giovanni Gallipoli & Costas Meghir & Giovanni L. Violante, 2019. "Education Policy and Intergenerational Transfers in Equilibrium," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 127(6), pages 2569-2624.
    4. John Bailey Jones & Fang Yang, 2016. "Skill-Biased Technical Change and the Cost of Higher Education," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 34(3), pages 621-662.
    5. Christian Belzil & Jörgen Hansen, 2020. "The evolution of the US family income–schooling relationship and educational selectivity," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 35(7), pages 841-859, November.
    6. Kelchen, Robert, 2019. "An empirical examination of the Bennett hypothesis in law school prices," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    7. Zhifeng Cai & Jonathan Heathcote, 2022. "College Tuition and Income Inequality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(1), pages 81-121, January.
    8. Ionescu, Felicia & Simpson, Nicole, 2016. "Default risk and private student loans: Implications for higher education policies," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 119-147.
    9. Rodrigo Azuero & David Zarruk Valencia, 2016. "The Effects of Student Loans on the Provision and Demand for Higher Education," PIER Working Paper Archive 17-020, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 22 Oct 2017.
    10. Brant Abbott & Giovanni Gallipoli & Costas Meghir & Giovanni L. Violante, 2013. "Education Policy�and Intergenerational Transfers in Equilibrium," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1887R2, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised May 2018.
    11. Nicholas Lawson, 2017. "Liquidity Constraints, Fiscal Externalities, and Optimal Tuition Subsidies," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 9(4), pages 313-343, November.
    12. Robert Kelchen, 2020. "Does the Bennett Hypothesis Hold in Professional Education? An Empirical Analysis," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 61(3), pages 357-382, May.
    13. Elizabeth M. Caucutt & Lance Lochner & Youngmin Park, 2017. "Correlation, Consumption, Confusion, or Constraints: Why Do Poor Children Perform so Poorly?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 119(1), pages 102-147, January.
    14. Ferreyra,Maria Marta & Garriga,Carlos & Martin,Juan David & Sanchez Diaz,Angelica Maria, 2020. "Raising College Access and Completion : How Much Can Free College Help ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9428, The World Bank.
    15. Stephanie Riegg Cellini & Claudia Goldin, 2014. "Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 6(4), pages 174-206, November.
    16. Zimmerman, Seth D., 2011. "The Returns to Four-Year College for Academically Marginal Students," IZA Discussion Papers 6107, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. Elizabeth M. Caucutt & Lance Lochner, 2020. "Early and Late Human Capital Investments, Borrowing Constraints, and the Family," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 128(3), pages 1065-1147.
    18. Michael Bahrs & Thomas Siedler, 2019. "University Tuition Fees and High School Students’ Educational Intentions," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 40(2), pages 117-147, June.
    19. Lance Lochner & Alexander Monge-Naranjo, 2012. "Credit Constraints in Education," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 225-256, July.
    20. Dennis A. Kramer & Justin C. Ortagus & T. Austin Lacy, 2018. "Tuition-Setting Authority and Broad-Based Merit Aid: The Effect of Policy Intersection on Pricing Strategies," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 59(4), pages 489-518, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Higher Education; College Costs; Tuition; Student Loans;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General
    • D58 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Computable and Other Applied General Equilibrium Models

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:umc:wpaper:1514. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chao Gu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edumous.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.