The Political Economy of Higher Education Admission Standards and Participation Gap

Philippe De Donder and Francisco Martínez-Mora

No 17/11, Discussion Papers in Economics from Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester

Abstract: We build a political economy model in order to shed light on the empirically observed simultaneous increase in university size and participation gap. Parents differ in income and in the ability of their unique child. They vote over the minimum ability level required to attend public universities, which are tuition-free and financed by proportional income taxation. Parents can invest in private tutoring to help their child pass the admission test. A university participation gap emerges endogenously with richer parents investing more in tutoring. A unique majority voting equilibrium exists, which can be either classical or “ends-against-the-middle” (in which case parents of both low- and high-ability children favor a smaller university). Four factors increase the university size (larger skill premium enjoyed by university graduates, smaller tutoring costs, smaller university cost per student, larger minimum ability of students), but only the former two also increase the participation gap. A more unequal parental income distribution also increases the participation gap, but barely affects the university size.

Keywords: majority voting; ends-against-the-middle equilibrium; non single-peaked (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 I22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.le.ac.uk/economics/research/RePEc/lec/leecon/dp17-11.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The political economy of higher education admission standards and participation gap (2017)
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:lec:leecon:17/11

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www2.le.ac.u ... -1/discussion-papers

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Economics from Division of Economics, School of Business, University of Leicester School of Business, University of Leicester, University Road. Leicester. LE1 7RH. UK Provider-Homepage: https://le.ac.uk/school-of-business. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Abbie Sleath ().