Tuition, Debt, and Human Capital
Rajashri Chakrabarti,
Vyacheslav Fos (),
Andres Liberman and
Constantine Yannelis
No 912, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of college tuition on student debt and human capital accumulation. We exploit data from a random sample of undergraduate students in the United States and implement a research design that instruments for tuition with relatively large changes to the tuition of students who enrolled at the same school in different cohorts. We find that $10,000 in higher tuition causally reduces the probability of graduating with a graduate degree by 6.2 percentage points and increases student debt by $2,961. Higher tuition also reduces the probability of obtaining an undergraduate degree among poorer, credit-constrained students. Thus, the relatively large increases in the price of education in the United States in the past decade can affect the accumulation of human capital.
Keywords: human capital; credit constraints; tuition; student debt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 H52 H81 I23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51
Date: 2020-02-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
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Journal Article: Tuition, Debt, and Human Capital (2023) 
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