The Economic Structure of Higher Education : Subsidies, Customer-Inputs, and Hierarchy

Misurderstanding its economic structure will make it more difficult to predict the effects of changes that are sweeping higher education : increasing price competition, the weakening of tenure, taxpayer revolts, new technologies, the reduction in research support, etc. This paper follows Hansmann, James, Rothschild-White, Baku, and Clotfelter, inter alia, to describe the economic structure of higher education and identify its unique characteristics and circumstances.