The Department of Justice's (DOJ's) investigation of private colleges for price-fixing caused the Overlap' group of colleges to discontinue their meetings. DOJ alleged that the meetings enabled the colleges to collude on higher tuition and increase their tuition revenue. The colleges claimed...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrating the ways in which" the changing market structure of American higher education from 1940 to the present affected" college prices and college quality. Over this period, the market for baccalaureate education" became significantly...

While there is evidence of a substantial and rising labor market premium associated with college attendance, little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different quality and across time. Previous research which has estimated the return to college quality has not taken...

Though economists have spent the past decade analyzing the rising payoff to schooling, we know much less about the responses of youth or the effectiveness of policies aimed at influencing those decisions. States and the federal government currently spend more than $53 billion annually, hoping to...

Recent federal cut-backs of financial support for undergraduates have worsened the financial position of colleges and universities and required them to debate how they will allocate their scarce financial aid resources.Our paper contributes to the debate by providing a model of optimal financial...

As a companion paper to our work on students' application and colleges' admission decisions, we have estimated a joint discrete-continuous utility maximization model of college attendance and college completion. The paper is motivated by the possibility that test scores are poor predictors of...

In this paper we are concerned with the characteristics of colleges which serve to increase subsequent monetary incomes of those who attend. Usually, lifetime earnings are explained by variables such as innate ability, experience in the labor force and years of education, although other...

Government backed income contingent student loans are an increasingly being used to fund higher education. An income contingent repayment plan acts as an incremental marginal tax on labor earnings, which could cause individuals to distort their work effort. This paper uses an administrative...

This paper studies how private equity buyouts create value in higher education, a sector with opaque product quality and intense government subsidy. With novel data on 88 private equity deals involving 994 schools, we show that buyouts lead to higher tuition and per-student debt. Exploiting loan...