Tuition fees and educational attainment

Jan Bietenbeck, Andreas Leibing, Jan Marcus and Felix Weinhardt

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which were subsequently abolished until 2015. We exploit the unusual lack of grandfathering in these policies to show that fees increase study effort and degree completion among incumbent students. However, fees also decrease first-time university enrollment among high school graduates. Combining this enrollment impact with the effect on completion, we find that fees around the zero-price margin have only little effect on overall educational attainment. We conclude by discussing policies targeting the separate effect margins of fees and caution against a general abolition.

Keywords: higher education; fees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2022-03-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/117828/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tuition fees and educational attainment (2023)
Working Paper: Tuition fees and educational attainment (2022)
Working Paper: Tuition Fees and Educational Attainment (2020)
Working Paper: Tuition Fees and Educational Attainment (2020)
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:ehl:lserod:117828

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().