How have changes in the costs of enrolling full-time at public two- and four-year colleges affected student decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? Using local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public four-year colleges we study the impact of public...

Using a unique corporate loans dataset for entrepreneurs with small and microenterprises, this paper examines how educational attainment affects bank credit decisions and subsequent individual and firm outcomes. Our results highlight a "Matthew Effect," where an initial advantage is...

This paper investigates the effect of local labor market shocks during the Great Recessionon subsequent student debt-related outcomes for a panel of 1 million student loan borrowers between the ages 17 and 34 in 2009, following that cohort for the subsequent 10 years.We find that the Great...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

For-profit providers are becoming an increasingly important fixture of US higher education markets. Students who attend for-profit institutions take on more educational debt, have worse labor market outcomes, and are more likely to default than students attending similarly-selective public...

Three tax credits benefit households who pay tuition and fees for higher education. The credits have been justified as an investment: generating more educated people and thus more earnings and externalities associated with education. The credits have also been justified purely as tax cuts to...

In the Fall of 2000, the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program dramatically changed the menu of college prices offered to residents of the District of Columbia. The program allowed residents of D.C. to attend public institutions in Maryland and Virginia and pay the same tuition as residents of...

The growth of for-profit colleges has been historically aided by online instruction, and budget crunches at public institutions, circumstances which have resurfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We set up and calibrate a general equilibrium model of competition between public and for-profit...

We investigate the welfare implications of income-contingent loans (ICLs) used for financing college education in presence of the dropout risk that depends on unobservable effort. While providing insurance through ICLs increases college enrollment, it also generates a moral hazard cost of...

Does the format of a financial aid program influence how it affects college decisions? This paper examines this question by focusing on state appropriations to public postsecondary institutions. While these funds subsidize tuition costs for in-state students, the in-kind format of the aid an...

This paper defines and estimates general equilibrium treatment effects. The conventional approach in the literature on treatment effects ignores interactions among individuals induced by the policy interventions being studied. Focusing on the impact of tuition policy, and using estimates from...

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...

Our nation’s consumer bankruptcy system supposedly gives “honest but unfortunate” individuals “a new opportunity in life with a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of preexisting debt.” Access to bankruptcy’s discharge of debt is especially...

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...

We analyse the effects of a national reform of higher education financing on the decisionmaking of secondary school students in the Netherlands. The reform eliminated a universalsubsidy for higher education students and replaced it by a low-interest loan, causing asubstantive increase in the...

Since the early Nineties, a dozen states have established broad-based merit aid programs. The typical program waives tuition and fees at public colleges and universities in one's home state. Unlike traditional merit programs, such as the National Merit Scholarship, this aid requires relatively...

We study the distributional consequences of student debt forgiveness in present value terms, accounting for differences in repayment behavior across the earnings distribution. Full or partial forgiveness is regressive because high earners took larger loans, but also because, for low earners,...

Does student aid increase college attendance or simply subsidize costs for infra-marginal students? Settling the question empirically is a challenge, because aid is correlated with many characteristics that influence educational investment decisions. A shift in financial aid policy that affects...

Merit requirements in need-based student aid may exacerbate inequality in higher education but at the same time improve efficiency of aid expenditure by increasing on-time graduation, for instance. Disentangling the effect of the two building blocks of student aid ("need" and "merit") is...

After increasing in the 1970s and 1980s, time to bachelor's degree has declined since the 1990s. We document this fact using data from three nationally representative surveys. We show that this pattern is occurring across school types and for all student types. Using administrative student...

In the last two decades, access to higher education has increased substantially in Latin America. The quantity of new programs available has created concerns about education quality, which has implications for the labor market. We use rich longitudinal data from a Peruvian cohort tracked from...

Higher education finance depends on the public's preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

The growth of for-profit colleges has been historically aided by online instruction, and budget crunches at public institutions, circumstances which have resurfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We set up and calibrate a general equilibrium model of competition between public and for-profit...

Fiscal externalities arise if subsidies to higher education raise future net fiscal revenues. We investigate in which countries fiscal externalities provide a justification for increasing subsidies to higher education. First, we show that the marginal fiscal recovery rate, i.e. the ratio of the...

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student and degree quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities and tax authorities. We analyse two measures of match at the university-subject level: undergraduate enrollment qualifications, and graduate earnings. We...

We analyse the effects of a national student finance reform in the Netherlands, which replaced universal subsidies for higher education students by low-interest loans. We show that this reform had a large impact on education choices of secondary school students, lowering their enrolments in...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

This paper analyzes higher education funding in Germany from a distributional perspective. For this, I first compare the quantitative importance of different funding instruments, from free tuition to subsidized health insurance for students. I show that free tuition is, by far, the most...

We estimate the effects on workforce and location outcomes of the Kalamazoo Promise, a generous, place-based college scholarship. Drawing upon administrative unemployment insurance wage records merged with individual-level education data, we identify Promise effects by comparing eligible to...

There is a little-discussed type of student debt hanging over the heads of millions of Americans. These debts often come in small amounts. A few hundred here. A few thousand there. These are debts that students and former students owe directly to their schools, for everything from unpaid library...

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...

Each year, a quarter of a million student loan debtors file for bankruptcy. Of those, fewer than three hundred discharge their educational debt. That is a success rate of just 0.1 percent. This chasm between success and failure is the titular Student Loan Bankruptcy Gap, and it is a phenomenon...

Student loan is a pervasive problem in the United States. Historically, higher education has been a major driver of intergenerational mobility in the United States. The current student loan has increased substantially over the years, surpassing credit card and auto loans. Using panel data from...

A tax system should be fair. According to conventional wisdom, this fairness mandate means that similarly situated taxpayers should pay similar taxes. Notably absent from most discussions about tax fairness or equity is any consideration of race. This makes sense, if one focuses on the tax...

In this paper, we investigate the responsiveness of the demand for college to changes in student aid arising from a Danish reform. We separately identify the effect of aid from that of other observed and unobserved variables such as parental income. We exploit the combination of a kinked aid...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Secretary of Education to submit a report on private student loans. This report addresses the following topics, as set forth in the Act:1) The private lenders,...

Globally, the increasing cost of university education, growing student enrolments and weak economic of nations have caused a reduction in public funding for university education. This decline in public funding seems to have increased tuition fees, caused deterioration of infrastructure, thereby...

Outstanding student loan indebtedness in the United States exceeds $1.67 trillion and it is projected to exceed $2 trillion by 2021 or 2022 (varying by source). The United States has decided that broad access to higher education is an important social policy, and a decision has been made to...

The District of Columbia's Tuition Assistance Grant Program (DCTAG), instituted in 1999, allows DC residents to attend public colleges and universities throughout the country at considerably lower in-state tuition rates. We use the sharp decline in the price of public colleges and universities...

Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loans Program, we document that parental support and personal savings substantially lower student loan repayment problems. We develop a theoretical model for studying student borrowing and repayment in the presence of risky...

Rapidly increasing student loan debt has become a major policy issue in many countries over the past several decades. In the United States, student loan debt expanded from $0.2 trillion in 2003 to $1.5 trillion in 2020. Student loan debt is the second-largest category of household debt,...