Avoiding Tunnel Vision in the Study of Higher Education Costs

Robert Archibald () and David H Feldman ()
Additional contact information
Robert Archibald: Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

No 53, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: Much of the literature on the causes of rising costs in higher education focuses on specific features and pathologies of decision-making within colleges and universities. We argue that this inward-looking focus on the specifics of higher education as an industry is a form of tunnel vision that can lead to poor public policy decisions. In this paper we show that cost disease and capital-skill complementarity are two crucially important causes of rising costs in higher education. These two economy-wide forces are something higher education shares with other skilled-labor-intensive services.

Keywords: discrete games; cost disease; capital-skill complementarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm and nep-lab
Date: 2007-06-05

Downloads: (external link)
http://web.wm.edu/economics/wp/cwm_wp53.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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:53

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Beth A Freeborn ().