Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Competing Campuses: College Majors, Tuition and Admissions

美国大学提供的专业差别很大。 这意味着学生对专业的偏好可能会决定他们对大学的选择。 一所大学，寻求合格的申请人将选择学费水平和主要产品鉴于其资源，学生需求，并从其他大学的竞争。 拟议的研究将研究学生申请和入学决策以及大学对学费、专业和录取的选择，重点是大学对学生的竞争及其财务状况如何影响录取和入学。 这项研究将联合收割机结合几个大型数据集和现代方法，研究学生和大学的选择如何相互作用，以确定大学入学率。 本研究之结果将提供一个工具，让学生和大学的专业设置政策的高等教育决策。 目前促进和鼓励美国STEM教育的政策的成功取决于大学提供这些专业;因此，这项研究为如何最好地发展美国STEM劳动力提供了指导。 本研究项目开发并评估了美国高等教育市场的均衡模型。 PI指定了高中生的效用函数和大学的目标函数。学生效用函数估计使用GMM估计器，仪器的内源性大学的特点。 然后，PI估计大学的目标函数的参数，假设大学玩纳什博弈，其中他们共同设定价格和专业提供考虑其他大学的行动。大学目标的估计将遵循以前的工作，在产业组织，使用部分识别，以解决多重均衡中出现的同时游戏。 该研究项目的成果将为美国STEM教育队伍的发展提供投入，从而促进美国的全球技术领先地位和经济增长。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

American universities differ greatly in the majors they offer. This means that students' preference for a major may determine their choices of university. A university, seeking qualified applicants will select tuition levels and major offerings given its resources, student demand, and competition from other universities. The proposed research will study student application and enrollment decisions and university choices of tuition, majors offered, and admissions, focusing on how university competition for students and its financial conditions affect admissions and enrolments. The research will combine several large data sets and modern methods to study how choices made by students and universities interact to determine university enrolments. The result of this research will provide a tool for making higher education decisions by students and universities policies on majors to offer. The success of current policies to promote and encouraged STEM education in the U.S. depends on providing these majors by universities; this research therefore provides a guide on how best to develop U.S. STEM workforce. This research project develops and estimate an equilibrium model of the US higher education market. The PIs specify a utility function for high school seniors and an objective function for universities. The student utility function is estimated using a GMM estimator that instrument for endogenous university characteristics. The PIs then estimate the parameters of the university's objective function assuming universities play a Nash game, in which they jointly set prices and majors offered considering the actions of other universities. The estimation of the university objective will follow previous work in Industrial Organization that uses partial identification to address multiple equilibria that arise in simultaneous games. The results of this research project will provide an input into the development U.S. STEM education workforce, hence US's global technological leadership and economic growth.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.