 For-Profit Higher Education: Godzilla or Chicken Little?No DP-49, Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education from Department of Economics, Williams College Abstract: Student subsidies are large, ubiquitous, and very unevenly distributed in US higher education - covering, on average, two-thirds of a student's educational costs and ranging from $2,600 in the bottom decile of schools ranked by subsidy size to $24,000 in the top. So data on the distribution of those subsidies among colleges and universities identifies the schools that are most vulnerable to the emergence of an accredited, degree-granting for-profit sector: profits (price minus cost) are simply negative subsidies (cost minus price). Roughly a third of private two-year colleges, and doctoral and comprehensive universities are badly protected by their meager student subsidies that put them in the bottom ten percent. In the top decile, with large entry barriers erected by large student subsidies, schools can worry less about survival but no less about for-profit "cherry picking" within their curricula and programs as firms move to take over those courses that give students the smallest subsidies. Keywords: EDUCATION; SUBSIDIES; UNITED STATES (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Change, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jan - Feb 1999), pp. 12-19. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wil:wilehe:49 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education from Department of Economics, Williams College Williamstown, MA 01267. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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