Do Expenditures Other Than Instructional Expenditures Affect Graduation and Persistence Rates in American Higher Education

Douglas Webber and Ronald Ehrenberg

No 15216, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: During the last two decades, median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American 4-year colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate than median spending per FTE student in a number of other expenditure categories including academic support, student services and research. Our paper uses institutional level panel data and a variety of econometric approaches, including unconditional quantile regression methods, to analyze whether these non instructional expenditure categories influence graduation and first-year persistence rates of undergraduate students. Our most important finding is that student service expenditures influence graduation and persistence rates and their marginal effects are higher for students at institutions with lower entrance test scores and higher Pell Grant expenditures per student. Put another way, their effects are largest at institutions that have lower current graduation and first year persistence rates. Simulations suggest that reallocating some funding from instruction to student services may enhance persistence and graduation rates at those institutions whose rates are currently below the medians in the sample.

JEL-codes: I22 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lab
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Webber, Douglas A. & Ehrenberg, Ronald G., 2010. "Do expenditures other than instructional expenditures affect graduation and persistence rates in American higher education?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 947-958, December.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15216.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do expenditures other than instructional expenditures affect graduation and persistence rates in American higher education? (2010)
Working Paper: Do Expenditures Other Than Instructional Expenditures Affect Graduation and Persistence Rates in American Higher Education? (2009)
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:15216

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15216

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 ().