In our 1991 Brookings book, "Keeping College Affordable: Government and Educational Opportunity", we examined whether our nation's colleges and universities were affordable for Americans of all economic and social backgrounds, and outlined policies aimed at the efficient allocation of government...

Using data generated for a study of student subsidies (in WPEHE Discussion Paper No. 32), this paper reports on the distribution of capital stocks and the costs of capital services in 2700 colleges and universities in 1991. The $330 billion in physical capital estimated for these institutions...

This paper reports on the distribution of capital stocks and the costs of capital services in 3148 colleges and universities in 1993.

It is increasingly clear that price competition is escalating in the market for higher education. We attempt to understand how price competition would work in higher education and explore the likely long run equilibrium structure of prices in that context. We draw inferences using both...

Colleges and universities in the US differ markedly in their access to economic resources, hence in what they can do for their students. National (IPEDS) data are used here to describe the resulting hierarchy that's reflected in schools' spending on their students, the prices those students pay,...

Student subsidies are large, ubiquitous, and very unevenly distributed in US higher education - covering, on average, two-thirds of a student's educational costs and ranging from $2,600 in the bottom decile of schools ranked by subsidy size to $24,000 in the top. So data on the distribution of...

There's a new "global" way of organizing the economic information about an individual college or university that leads to a new way of tracking and understanding the changes that have been overtaking higher education, natioinally. The paper gives a simple introduction to this way of looking at...

In this paper we summarize our recent work analyzing pricing, aid, access and choice in American higher education, and we draw out implications from those findings for national higher education policy. We find that real increases in net tuition have impaired access and choice principally for...