Public Tuition Research Articles

Old Neoliberalism in the US University

Old Neoliberalism in the US University

Policy Adoption, Innovation, and Performance Management: The Case of Performance-funding Policies in State Postsecondary Education

Since the 1980s, nearly every state government has implemented some form of performance management. This article turns to the context of public higher education where the use of performance management has been popular but highly controversial and unstable. Using the Cox conditional gap time model for repeating events and state-level panel data, this article investigates the factors associated with the adoption and readoption of performance-based funding policies for public higher education. Results indicate that state higher education governing structures, increases in public tuition, and educational attainment are important predictors of whether a state adopts performance-based funding.

The determination of public tuition fees in a mixed education system: A majority voting model

AbstractWe study the determination of public tuition fees through majority voting in a vertical differentiation model where agents' returns on educational investment differ and public and private universities coexist and compete in tuition fees. The private university offers higher educational quality than its competitor, incurring higher unit cost per trained student. The tuition fee for the state university is fixed by majority voting while that for the private follows from profit maximization. Then agents choose to train at the public university or the private one or to remain uneducated. The tax per head adjusts in order to balance the state budget. Because there is a private alternative, preferences for education are not single‐peaked and no single‐crossing condition holds. An equilibrium is shown to exist, which is one of three types: high tuition fee (the “ends” are a majority), low tuition fee (the “middle” is a majority), or mixed (votes tie). The cost structure determines which equilibrium obtains. The equilibrium tuition is either greater (majority at the ends) or smaller (majority at the middle) than the optimal one.

Judicial Appeal of Due Process Hearing Rulings: The Extent and Direction of Decisional Change

Extending the scope of two exploratory single-state studies, this empirical analysis determined the extent and direction of the outcome change from the impartial hearing officer (IHO) decision to the final court decision for a national sample of cases under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. Based on a random sample of 116 published court decisions from 1998 through 2016, the authors identified the rulings for “issue categories,” such as eligibility, free appropriate public education, and tuition reimbursement, in the final court decision and, via its published opinion, the preceding adjudicative levels down to the IHO. The primary finding for the 183 issue category rulings was that 70% had only slight or no change from the IHO to the final court level. Other findings included the following: (a) the net change was higher for states with a second administrative tier, which is a review officer, than for those with only the single tier of an IHO; (b) the net change was also higher for cases reaching the appellate rather than only the trial court level; and (c) the most frequent issue categories were free appropriate public education (55%) and tuition reimbursement (18%), both with a slight net outcome change in the district’s direction.

Liquidity Constraints, Fiscal Externalities and Optimal Tuition Subsidies

A large literature focuses on two important rationales for government subsidies to college students: positive fiscal externalities from a larger tax base, and liquidity constraints. This paper provides a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of these mechanisms. I use US data in combination with two modeling approaches: calibration of a simple structural model of human capital accumulation, and a ”sufficient statistics” approach. The resulting optimal subsidies are larger than median public tuition by about $3,000 per year. This finding is driven by fiscal externalities; optimal tuition subsidy policy is not sensitive to the extent of liquidity constraints. (JEL H52, H75, I22, I23, I28)

The Master Plan and the California Higher Education System

The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries, brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s strongest system of public research universities. The California idea, combining excellence with access within a tiered system of higher education, and underpinned by a taxpayer consensus on the common good inherent in equality of opportunity in education, became the leading model for higher education across the world. Yet the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. The taxpayer consensus broke down two decades after the Master Plan began and California no longer provides the fiscal conditions necessary to ensure both excellence and access, especially access for non-white and immigrant families. Many students are now turned away, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face resource challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader in the United States, lags far behind. The article traces the rise and partial fall of the Californian system of higher education as embodied in the Master Plan, and draws out lessons for other countries in general, and China in particular.

The Determination of Public Tuition Fees in a Mixed Education System: A Majority Voting Model

We study the determination of public tuition fees through majority voting in a vertical differentiation model where agents’ returns on educational investment differ and public and private universities coexist and compete in tuition fees. The private university offers higher educational quality than its competitor, incurring higher unit cost per trained student. The tuition fee for the State university is fixed by majority voting while that for the private follows from profit maximization. Then agents choose to train at the public university or the private one or to remain uneducated. The tax per head adjusts in order to balance the State budget. Since there is a private alternative, preferences for education are not single-peaked and no single-crossing condition holds. An equilibrium is shown to exist which is one of three types: high tuition fee (the “ends” are a majority), low tuition fee (the “middle” is a majority) or mixed (votes tie). the cost structure determines which equilibrium obtains. The equilibrium tuition is either greater (majority at the ends) or smaller (majority at the middle)than the optimal one.

The Changing Landscape of Tuition and Enrollment in American Public Higher Education

The costs of public higher education have risen dramatically in recent years, causing anger among students and concern among policymakers worried about falling college completion rates. In this paper, we explore how public tuition costs affect postsecondary enrollment choices. We examine changes over time in the enrollment decisions of students in states where tuition and fees at public four-year institutions increased rapidly, compared with changes for observationally similar students in states with more modest tuition increases. Using student-level data on twelfth graders in 1992 and 2004 linked to institution-level data, we find a relative decline in the likelihood of attending an in-state public four-year institution among high school graduates from states where public tuition costs increased substantially over this period. Students in states where public tuition increased the most were considerably more likely to enroll in a public two-year college than their counterparts in states that adopted more modest increases. We explore heterogeneity in this pattern of substitution between institutions of varying selectivity and control and for students in policy-relevant socio-demographic subgroups, including those in different parts of the twelfth-grade achievement distribution. Generally, large tuition increases at public four-year colleges have weakened the propensity of high school graduates to enroll in such institutions in their state, and increased their likelihood of enrollment in less prestigious in-state public colleges, out-of-state public institutions, or private universities. These effects are most pronounced among students from families of low socioeconomic status, and nonelite students who perform below the 90th percentile on twelfth-grade math tests.

Liquidity Constraints, Fiscal Externalities and Optimal Tuition Subsidies

A large body of research focuses on two important rationales for government subsidies to college students: positive fiscal externalities from a larger tax base, and liquidity constraints among students. This paper provides a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of these mechanisms. I use US data in combination with two modelling approaches: calibration of a simple structural model of human capital accumulation, and a "sufficient statistics" approach. The results imply optimal subsidies that are larger than median public tuition. This finding is driven by fiscal externalities; optimal tuition subsidy policy is not sensitive to the extent of liquidity constraints.

Do Public Tuition Subsidies Promote College Enrollment? Evidence from Community College Taxing Districts in Texas

This paper estimates the effect of tuition rates on college enrollment using data for Texas from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses and the 2004-2010 American Community Surveys and geographical data on Community College Taxing Districts. The effect of tuition on enrollment is identified by the facts that tuition rates for those living within a taxing district are lower than those living outside the taxing district and in Texas not all geographic locations are in a taxing district. While the estimated effect of tuition on enrollment depends on the sample used, it is negative and mostly statistically significant in the samples of adults 18 and older and negative and sometimes statistically significant in the samples of traditional age students 18 to 24. The estimated effect of tuition on enrollment, however, is found to vary considerably by poverty level status with an increase in tuition rates having a statistically significant negative effect on college enrollment for those with household incomes that are at least 200% of the poverty level both for traditional aged students 18 to 24 years old and all adults 18 and older.

Post‐secondary attendance by parental income in the U.S. and Canada: Do financial aid policies explain the differences?

AbstractWe examine the extent to which tuition and needs‐based aid policies explain important differences in the relationship between family income and post‐secondary attendance relationships between Canada and the U.S. Using data from recent cohorts, we estimate substantially smaller attendance gaps by parental income in Canada relative to the U.S., even after controlling for family background, cognitive achievement, and local‐residence fixed effects. We next document that U.S. public tuition and financial aid policies are actually more generous to low‐income youth than are Canadian policies. Equalizing these policies across Canada and the U.S. would likely lead to a greater difference in income‐attendance gradients.

The financial burden of attending university in Georgia: Implications for rural students

By evaluating the impact of policies to financially support university students in Georgia, this article demonstrates the systematic spatial disparities that exist in a context of formally equal competition. The author uses a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative evidence on the entire population of Georgian university applicants in 2005–2009 with data obtained through in-depth interviews with rural families and with policy-makers, to understand the costs associated with attending universities, based on their prestige and location, as well as inequalities stemming from existing policies on the allocation of public funding. She suggests that the distribution of public funding is apparently fair, as urban and rural students incur the same average out-of-pocket tuition costs. Behind the facade of the fair outcome, however, lie serious spatial inequalities based on the complex interplay between the residential origin of higher education applicants, tuition costs, public funding allocations, university locations, and prestige. The analysis shows that urban applicants apply, and gain admission, to more prestigious universities which charge higher tuition than the universities where rural applicants enrol; urban students also manage to obtain higher proportions of the public tuition grant than their rural peers. Thus, rural and urban students purchase higher education of different quality for the same out-of-pocket costs, with urban students being more privileged and rural students relatively less so. Exacerbating this injustice is the fact that rural residents in Georgia earn half of the average urban income.

Public subsidies, tuition, and public universities’ choices of undergraduate acceptance and retention rates in the USA

We model how public undergraduate universities alter acceptance and retention rates due to changes in tuition and enrollment-based subsidies. Per student subsidies differ for senior and freshman students, as is true in most states. The university accepts students from an applicant pool which is influenced by quality of education and the probability of completion, both of which are influenced by retention rates. The model predicts that changes in admission and retention rates depend on how the applicant pool changes with retention, whether or not net revenue from undergraduate education is positive, and differences between marginal revenue and marginal cost for senior students.

Financing higher education in South Africa: Public funding, nongovernment revenue and tuition fees

The funding of public higher education is currently a moot issue in South Africa. Public funding has been declining and opportunities for winning non-government revenue remain limited. The frequent raising of tuition fees, which is one of the main strategies public universities have resorted to mitigate declining state funding is not without controversy. The article discusses these funding challenges. It argues that the current higher education funding conundrum will hamstring the achievement of the important higher education policy goals articulated in the National Plan on Higher Education. The article finally argues for a shift towards a redistributive funding model by changing the current formula for allocating funding for student aid to universities so that resources are redistributed in favour of the genuinely poor. By so doing, it is anticipated that higher education will be affordable for the poor who are generally sensitive to tuition fee increases, and also the rich, who can afford the current (high) tuition fee charges. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 22 (4) 2008: pp. 906-919

Testimony to Constitution Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Regarding the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007 and the Constitutional Duty of Congress to Restore Citizens' Seventh Amendment Rights

The Framers' election to preserve the common law right to civil jury trial in the Bill of Rights means that businesses may not remove this right from citizens by making its waiver a precondition to delivery of goods, services or employment. This conclusion is compelled by two considerations. First, the decision by the Framers to include this right in the Bill of Rights designates it as the kind of fundamental right waiver of which must be protected from any form of coercion, including the coercion imposed when a business makes waiver of the right a non-negotiable condition to delivery of a good, service or employment. Second, looking to the text of the Constitution, the decision by the Framers to protect the civil jury trial right with Article V's strong supermajority amendment requirements evinces their intent that the scope of the right's applicability not be subject to reduction by a less restrictive amendment mechanism - be it a majoritarian statutory amendment process (something the Framers contemplated) or what amounts to private legislation through standardized contractual waivers, a future development that the Framers, understandably, failed to anticipate. Pursuant to the Supreme Court's unconstitutional conditions doctrine, the state may not seek advance waiver of a citizen's Sixth Amendment criminal jury trial right in favor of bench trials in return for some unrelated benefit such as subsidized public housing or college tuition assistance. The coerciveness of such an offer becomes clear when one realizes that if the benefit offered were sufficiently valuable the citizen would readily waive her criminal jury trial right even if she strongly preferred jury trials over bench trials. Symmetrically, the Seventh Amendment civil jury trial right should enjoy the same protection against coercive removal as that provided the Sixth Amendment criminal jury trial right. Thus, a business should not be permitted to require that a citizen waive his jury trial right as a take-it-or-leave-it precondition to delivery of goods, services or employment. Coercion is coercion whether imposed by the state or a private party. Properly understood, it is protection against this form of coercion that constitutes the core minimum distinction between fundamental Constitutional rights and ordinary property interests. Viewed from a slightly different perspective, the very fact that lawmakers set forth an individual right applicable against other private parties in a constitution instead of a statute signals an intent that such right trump other persons' standard property rights where necessary to preserve citizens' ability to invoke such constitutional right. For example, in PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, California's Supreme Court held, and the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed, that California shopping centers may not make waiver of a customer's reasonably exercised state constitutional free speech and petition rights a condition to entry. Thus, the California Supreme Court found that the inclusion of these individual rights in California's constitution signals an intent that such rights trump a shopping center owner's common law rights to exclude people from its property and to control the activities permitted thereon. Following the same logic, the decision by the Framers to preserve in the Bill of Rights rather than in an ordinary statute (or not at all) the common law civil jury trial right signals an intent that such right trump the otherwise operable common law right of a business to make waiver of this or any other right a condition to delivery of goods, services or employment.

The Promise of Opportunity

THE SIMPLE bargain at the heart of the American dream offers opportunity to every American who takes the responsibility to make the most of it. That bargain is the great source of American strength, because it unleashes the amazing talent and determination of our people. As our people seize the opportunity to build a better life, they build a stronger country. Now as never before, education is the key to opportunity, essential to a strong America. In an age when our people compete with workers on every continent and information flows across oceans, high-wage jobs are more dependent than ever on high-level skills. Together, we must build an America that offers the best education to all our children -- wherever they live, whatever their background. That means we need more resources and more reform for our schools. Resources-without-reform is a waste of money, and reform-without- resources is a waste of time. John Edwards and I are committed to an agenda that offers both. For the sake of our children, we must set the bar high. Every child should come to school ready to learn. Every student should be held to high standards, and every school should have the resources and responsibility to meet those standards. Every classroom should have a great teacher, and every student should get enough personal attention to foster talents and overcome difficulties. Every teenager should expect to graduate from high school with a meaningful diploma. Every qualified young person who wants to go to college should be able to afford it. And every adult who needs additional job training should be able to get it. Today, our country is not living up to those ideals. The shameful truth is that too often the quality of a child's education depends on the wealth of that child's neighborhood. Our best public schools are the best schools in the world, but too many children go to schools that just don't work. Too many children who beat the odds and succeed in school can't afford to go to college. Too many adults who need added training are not able to get it. When the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was signed, the Bush Administration said the right things -- asking more from our schools and pledging to give them the resources to get the job done. But by now, funding for NCLB has fallen $27 billion short of the promised levels, literally leaving millions of children behind. The Bush Administration proposed eliminating the smaller schools initiative and the dropout prevention initiative, both proven methods of reducing dropout rates. Over the last three years, public college tuition has risen by 35%, pricing 220,000 students out of college. Yet President Bush has tried to charge more for student loans and eliminate Pell Grants for 84,000 students. If we're going to give all of our children the education they deserve, we have to be willing to make tough choices. While extending and expanding tax cuts for the middle class, John Edwards and I will roll back the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000. We just can't afford to keep those tax cuts and make our schools work as they should. With those savings, we will fully fund No Child Left Behind -- so our children have smaller classes, more textbooks, and more after-school opportunities. We will also fund our other education priorities -- like getting on the path to full funding for special education and making college affordable for all young people through a generous new tax credit. John Edwards and I will make reform work for our schools. That means high standards -- and common sense. Today, many states are measuring student achievement with fill-in-the-bubble tests that limit both teaching and learning. We will offer the support needed for states to use sophisticated tests that capture the full range of skills that we want students to develop. We will also ensure accurate assessments of schools' success. Having correctly revised key regulations measuring school achievement under No Child Left Behind, the current Administration is refusing to apply those new regulations retroactively. …

Modern Chinese Writers: Self Portrayals.

As the richest cities in the world's most populous nation, Hong Kong and Shanghai have recently experienced dynamic growth spurred by more and better-managed capital. These cities also have social problems whose solutions will cost money. Their urban populations are aging. Health finance at the level these First World cities demand threatens to consume a large portion of the municipal budgets. Eldercare and social security are now less well covered by traditional Chinese families. Education has become more complex and public tuition, where it occurs, brings with it official plans for schools. Immigrants have flocked to Shanghai from inland China, and Hong Kong's border has become a protector of the former colony's high productivity jobs. Housing problems also have deeply affected both cities, albeit in somewhat different ways. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the similarities and differences between social policies in the two cities. Each chapter covers a different issue: health finance, housing, education, labor, poverty and social security, eldercare, and migration and competitiveness. The contributors explore pertinent developments in each city and analyze the similarities and differences between the two cities' approaches to social policies. They focus on policy reform and the interface between social policy and its environment. One main theme throughout the book is the extent to which spending for capital accumulation is in conflict with spending for social policies.

Why We Still Need Public Schools: Church/State Relations and Visions Of Democracy

Two cornerstones of American democracy - separation of church and state, and public schools - are under increasing attack. As this collection of essays, written by some of America's leading educators, political figures, and advocates of religious liberty shows, universal public education and the separation of church and state are related. The eminent contributors to this book argue that we need to defend both institutions against increasing onslaughts by the Religious Right and other self-proclaimed arbiters of societal behavior, who seek to dictate public policy and who are labeling the public schools themselves as immoral institutions. At issue here is not whether public schools need to be improved. It is assumed that improvement is necessary. Part One of this volume testifies to the need for separation of church and state, explores the intent of our nation's founders on the subject, and deals with issues of separation within education. Several historical examples are given of battles between the upholders of strict separation and those who would ignore this constitutionally mandated principle. Part Two discusses the dangers of heeding the current call - under the banner of school choice - to ingore the principle of separation by allowing public tuition subsidies of private schools, the great majority of which are parochial. This drive to underwrite school tuition via vouchers, tax credits, or tuition tax deductions would create not only a dangerous entanglement of government with religion but could lead to the eventual demise of America's public schools. Contributors to this important collection are Robert Alley, Ann Bastian, Charles Bergstrom, Robert Bullough, Michael Casserly, Edd Doerr, Arnold Fege, Florence Fast, Donald Frey, Colin Greer, Herbert Grover, T. Jeremy Gunn, Bill Honig, Shirley McBay, Al Menendez, Michael Oleska, Sam Rabinove, William Rioux, William Schulz, Eugenie Scott, August Steinhilber, John Swomley, Oliver Thomas, Julie Underwood, and James Wood.

A Public Choice Note on College Student Migration

Provides a compatible model to previous work on college student migration in the form of a recursive set of equations. Points out that “hidden resource distortion”, a form of rent seeking in the political process, is positively related to institutional support for public colleges and universities in the United States. This result has implications concerning the goals of educational administrators, namely the incentive to “budget‐maximize”. This activity relates to the setting of public college tuition levels, which is a major factor determining the migration incentives of college students. In this model, resource distortion in the educational production function ultimately alters the choice set facing “consumers” in the search for optimal human capital attainment.

Tuition and U.S. private college characteristics: The hedonic approach

Tuition at private colleges in the United States for the academic year 1982–1983 were statistically very closely related to quality characteristics associated with those colleges. Reduced form hedonic regressions reveal the equilibrium marginal tuition revenue estimates for over twenty important measures of quality, including faculty-student ratios, library size, and the percentage of the faculty holding Ph.D. degrees. These findings show that private college tuition responds in economically sensible ways to changes in public tuition, and changes in the quantity and quality of the faculties, facilities, and student bodies at private colleges.