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...

Our study uses a unique national longitudinal survey, the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), which permits researchers to match individual students and teachers, to analyze issues relating to how a teacher's race, gender, and ethnicity, per se, influence students from both...

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including race and verbal ability, influenced "synthetic gain scores" of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school...

Projections of forthcoming shortages of Ph.D.s and thus new faculty for the academic sector, abound. Among the policies proposed to prevent such shortages is increased federal support for graduate students. Lost in the policy debate, however, has been concern for the possibility that increased...

Within many large states there are multiple 2-year and 4-year public institutions. Our paper develops a methodology that can be used to help evaluate how well each 2-year public institution in a state is doing in preparing those of its students who transfer to 4-year public institutions to...

We use panel data on the salaries and benefits of private university and college presidents for the 1992-93 to 1996-97 period to try to infer the factors that the trustees of these institutions value. Salary level equations suggest that the salary and compensation of the presidents are...

We address the determinants of resident and nonresident tuition and enrollment at public universities. A key explanatory variable is the share of out-of-state students enrolled under reciprocity agreements. We find that public universities use out-of-state enrollments primarily to augment...

This paper addresses three academic labor market issues; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to their private institution counterparts, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and...

Doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long times-to-degree. In response to these problems, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the quality of graduate programs and in turn...

This paper presents an analytical framework that can be used to analyze the effects of unions on productivity in the public sector. Our initial focus is on public libraries because considerable effort has been devoted to conceptualizing library productivity measures and because of the...