Collaborative Research: Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition

摘要：美国持续上涨的大学学费和学生债务日益成为公共政策关注的焦点，但推动其增长的因素仍未得到解决。由于广泛的公共补贴、复杂的财政援助规则、细分的市场结构和普遍使用的差别学费定价，高等教育市场的功能与许多其他市场截然不同。此外，大多数传统大学都是非营利性机构，其追求的目标与追求利润最大化的公司不同。此外，大学面临的激励机制也不太为人所知。本研究项目开发了一种新的方法来量化美国大学学费的决定因素及其对学费通胀的影响，并评估旨在扩大大学入学机会和减轻学生债务负担的项目的影响。它将重点解释大学学费上涨的总体趋势，揭示不同大学类型的差异，并研究在社会经济范围内促进教育机会的方法。本研究所采用的方法也可作为未来有志于研究复杂高等教育市场的学生和研究人员的模板。这项研究的结果可以帮助政策制定者制定更好的政策来提高美国劳动力的高等教育程度，从而提高美国的竞争力。本文建立了一个均衡结构模型，该模型考虑了家庭的生命周期决策、高等教育部门的不完全竞争和价格歧视、学生贷款借款和毕业后不可保险的收入风险。与现有文献相比，前瞻性行为和较高的毕业后预期收入的存在内生地激励了大学入学率，并有利于将模型应用于数据。然后，该模型被用于测试和量化大学学费上涨的各种假设——这种方法允许对学费驱动因素进行反事实分析和分解。最后，该项目将使用该模型来研究最近和拟议的改革的效果，这些改革的目标是抑制学费和学生债务的增长。这项研究项目的结果将有助于指导旨在改善大学教育的政策，从而增加美国的经济增长。人力资本与竞争力。

Abstract: Collaborative Research: Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition Persistent rising college tuition and student debt in the U.S. are growing public policy concerns, yet factors driving their growth remain unresolved. With its combination of extensive public subsidies, complicated financial aid rules, segmented market structure, and widespread use of differential tuition pricing, the higher education market functions quite differently from many other markets. In addition, most traditional colleges are non-profit institutions that pursue objectives that differ from those of profit-maximizing firms. In addition, the incentives colleges face are less well understood. This research project develops a new approach to quantify the determinants of U.S. college tuition and how they contribute to tuition inflation, as well as assess the impact of programs aimed at expanding college access and easing the burden of student debt. Focusing on explaining the aggregate trends in college tuition increases, it will shed light on differences across college types and investigates ways to promote educational opportunity across the socioeconomic spectrum. The methods used in this research can also serve as a template for future students and researchers interested in studying the complex higher education market. The results of this research can help policy makers develop better policies to increase higher education attainment for the American workforce, hence improving U.S. competitiveness. The proposed research develops an equilibrium structural model that includes life-cycle decision-making by households, imperfect competition and price discrimination in the higher education sector, student loan borrowing, and uninsurable post-graduation earnings risk. Relative to the existing literature, the presence of forward-looking behavior and higher expected post-graduation earnings endogenously motivates college attendance and facilitates taking the model to the data. The model is then used to test and quantify various hypotheses for the rise in college tuition---an approach which permits counterfactual analysis and decomposition of tuition drivers. Lastly, the project will use the model to study the efficacy of recent and proposed reforms whose goals are to restrain the growth of tuition and student debt. The results of this research project will help guide policies aimed at improving college education, thereby increasing the U.S.?s human capital and competitiveness.