Differential Pricing in Undergraduate Education: Effects on Degree Production by Field

Kevin Stange

No 19183, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In the face of declining state support, many universities have introduced differential pricing by undergraduate program as an alternative to across-the-board tuition increases. This practice aligns price more closely with instructional costs and students' ability to pay post-graduation. Exploiting the staggered adoption of these policies across universities, this paper finds that differential pricing does alter the allocation of students to majors, though heterogeneity across fields may suggest a greater supply response in particularly oversubscribed fields such as nursing. There is some evidence that student groups already underrepresented in certain fields are particularly affected by the new pricing policies. Price does appear to be a policy lever through which state governments can alter the field composition of the workforce they are training with the public higher education system.

JEL-codes: I20 I22 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Differential Pricing in Undergraduate Education: Effects on Degree Production by Field Kevin Stange Journal of Policy Analysis and Management Volume 34, Issue 1, pages 107–135, Winter 2015

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19183.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Differential Pricing in Undergraduate Education: Effects on Degree Production by Field (2015)
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:19183

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19183

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 ().