Are Public Subsidies to Higher Education Regressive?

William Johnson

Education Finance and Policy, 2006, vol. 1, issue 3, 288-315

Abstract: This article estimates the dollar amount of public higher education subsidies received by U.S. youth and examines the distribution of subsidies and the taxes that finance them across parental and student income levels. Although youths from high-income families obtain more benefit from higher education subsidies, high-income households pay sufficiently more in taxes that the net effect of the spending and associated taxation is distributionally neutral or mildly progressive. These results are robust to alternative assumptions and are consistent with Hansen and Weisbrod's earlier celebrated findings for California, although not with the conclusions often drawn from those findings. © 2006 American Education Finance Association

Keywords: public subsidies; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp.2006.1.3.288 (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:tpr:edfpol:v:1:y:2006:i:3:p:288-315

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().