Public Universities: The Supply Side of Building a Skilled Workforce

John Bound, Breno Braga, Gaurav Khanna and Sarah Turner

No 25945, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Over the past few decades, public universities have faced significant declines in state funding per student. We investigate whether these declines affected the educational and research outcomes of these schools. We present evidence that declining funding induced public universities to shift toward tuition as their primary source of revenue. Selective research universities enrolled more out-of-state and international students who pay full fare and increased in-state tuitions, moderating impacts on expenditures. Public universities outside the research sector had fewer options to replace stagnating state appropriations, requiring diminished expenditures and increased in-state tuitions. The evidence we present suggests that the cuts negatively affected degree attainment at the undergraduate and graduate levels. While the evidence on research is mixed, there are indications that the impact of spending declines on research outcomes may become evident over a longer time period

JEL-codes: I25 J24 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published as John Bound & Breno Braga & Gaurav Khanna & Sarah Turner, 2019. "Public Universities: The Supply Side of Building a Skilled Workforce," RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, vol 5(5), pages 43-66.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25945.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:25945

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25945

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 ().