Cohort Crowding: How Resources Affect Collegiate Attainment
John Bound and
Sarah Turner
No 12424, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
Analyses of college attainment typically focus on factors affecting enrollment demand, including the financial attractiveness of a college education and the availability of financial aid, while implicitly assuming that resources available per student on the supply side of the market are elastically supplied. The higher education market in the United States is dominated by public and non-profit production, and colleges and universities receive considerable subsidies from state, federal, and private sources. Because consumers pay only a fraction of the cost of production, changes in demand are unlikely to be accommodated fully by colleges and universities without commensurate increases in non-tuition revenue. For this reason, public investment in higher education plays a crucial role in determining the degrees produced and the supply of college-educated workers to the labor market. Using data covering the last half of the twentieth century, we find strong evidence that large cohorts within states have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment, reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market. That large cohorts receive lower public subsidies per student in higher education explains this result, indicating that resources have large effects on degree production. Our results suggest that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of college-educated workers entering the labor market.
JEL-codes: H52 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-pbe
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)
Published as Bound, John & Turner, Sarah, 2007. "Cohort crowding: How resources affect collegiate attainment," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(5-6), pages 877-899, June.
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12424.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Cohort crowding: How resources affect collegiate attainment (2007) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12424
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12424
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().