Does federal aid drive college tuition? The "greedy colleges" thesis conflicts with how nonprofit universities decide on admissions and pricing.
Archibald, Robert B. ; Feldman, David H.
Does an increase in the generosity of federal financial aid make
college more affordable, or does it simply encourage colleges to raise
tuition? In a Feb. 19, 1987 New York Times op-ed titled "Our Greedy
Colleges," former federal secretary of education William Bennett
made a strong case for the latter when he stated, "If anything,
increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and
universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that federal
loan subsidies would cushion the increase." This seemingly simple
claim has spawned a long, often heated, and highly politicized debate.
The "Bennett hypothesis" often is justified as simple
economics. Federal aid is a subsidy. Increases in subsidies raise
demand, and rising demand pushes up price. Yet the textbook model of a
perfectly competitive market is a poor fit for the higher education
industry as a whole, and it's quite inappropriate for understanding
how tuition is determined at the nonprofit institutions that still
dominate the higher education landscape. Colleges and universities are
price setters, not price takers. Yale, Valparaiso, and Southeast
Missouri State all "sell" education, but the services they
offer are quite differentiated. And unlike most firms, nonprofit
colleges and universities often turn away business. They care about who
purchases their services.
We will present a simple enrollment management model of how
nonprofit colleges jointly decide how to fill their classes and set
tuition. Any vice president for enrollment will recognize this model as
a close representation of how these decisions actually are made. This
simple theoretical structure often is missing from popular discussions
of how federal policy affects affordability, and from empirical tests of
possible links between aid and tuition. The enrollment management model
does not prove kind to the idea that federal aid causes tuition
inflation at nonprofit institutions. On the other hand, there is good
evidence for a Bennett effect at for-profit schools, whose behavior is
better represented by the textbook model.
Although our theoretical framework finds no incentive for most
colleges to adjust their tuition in response to changes in federal aid,
institutions can "tax" away a part of the federal aid by
reducing their own institutional aid. Schools can redirect those
resources to other institutional uses. However, unless this tax rate
implausibly exceeds 100%, students will still see lower net price
tuition. The best evidence on the tax rate is that it is low overall,
but higher at highly selective private institutions that are very
generous with their own aid.
ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT
All schools that are even minimally selective must have a way to
produce the best possible incoming class while also hitting target
levels of enrollment and revenue. The following simple model shows how
this is done. In the short run we will assume the size of the
institution is set. Its buildings, faculty, and staff determine that
size. The school also knows how much revenue it needs in order to
maintain its quality, and how much of that revenue it needs to extract
from students in the form of tuition.
The process begins with the pool of applicants. All selective
schools have some mechanism to rank potential students. For example, a
school might employ a 10-point scale. Students rated 10 are the
highest-quality applicants from the institution's perspective.
Amherst's 10's and "Compass Point" State's
10's aren't the same group. Amherst's 10's will have
ratified test scores and very impressive high school records.
Nonetheless, for Compass Point State, its 10's will have the
highest test scores and the best high school transcripts of its
applicant pool. In addition, many of the 10's will bring something
special to the incoming class: they may be accomplished athletes or
musicians, or they may offer geographic, economic, or racial diversity.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
All schools would love to fill the incoming class with 10's,
but few can come even remotely close to hitting their revenue needs from
that group alone. That brings us to the next step in our representative
school's admission process: estimating the willingness to pay of
this most select group of applicants.
Most schools have information they can use to make this
determination. Some applicants have had siblings or parents who
attended. Some may have applied using "early decision" or
actively pursued the institution in ways that suggest real interest.
Many will have filled out financial aid forms that reveal a lot of
information about family income and assets. On the other hand, the
school will also know that these 10's are very attractive to other
schools. Competing colleges may offer them large scholarships, and this
may affect the applicants' willingness to pay at the school. As a
result, the "yield" from this group may not be particularly
high. The yield is the fraction of any particular group of admitted
students that actually enrolls. This is not as large a problem for
Harvard, Stanford, and Amherst, though even they must compete for the
10's in their pool.
How much revenue can the school extract from its most highly sought
applicants with a 10 ranking? Figure 1 gives an example. The school has
a target enrollment of E* and knows that to hit its revenue target the
average student who enrolls must bring in AT* in net tuition. The
rectangle of AT* x E* is the total revenue the school needs to collect.
The height of the bars represents the willingness to pay of the
10's the school believes actually will enroll after the dust
settles on the admissions game. The diagram is constructed by placing
students from left to right in declining order of willingness to pay.
The shaded area under the bars gives the total willingness to pay from
the portion of the 10's group the school reasonably expects to
matriculate. If the institution can design its financial aid offers
adroitly, it will charge each student his or her full willingness to
pay. The shaded area is the revenue the school can get from this group.
A quick look shows that the school cannot reach its revenue requirement
or its enrollment goal from the group of students with the highest
admission rating. Given the fact that these 10's have many other
options, there simply aren't enough of them with a high willingness
to pay who will choose to attend the school.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
In order to meet revenue and enrollment goals, almost all selective
programs admit and enroll students with lower admission ratings. Knowing
the odds of enrolling students with successively lower admission
ratings, schools can eventually craft a class with the highest possible
average admission rating that satisfies the tuition revenue requirement
while filling the seats in the entering class. In its enrollment
decisions, a school may find that many of its 6's and 7's have
a higher willingness to pay than many or most of the 10's. These
lower-ranked applicants have fewer opportunities to earn merit
scholarships at more selective schools, and many come from high-income
families that do not qualify for need-based aid. For some schools this
means that a student from the 6-group with a very high willingness to
pay may get preference over a student from the 8-group with a very low
willingness to pay. These schools practice "need aware"
admissions.
Figure 2 illustrates the full outcome of the enrollment management
process after the school has accepted students as far down the list as
it thinks it needs to go. The area covered by the willingness to pay
bars above AT* is exactly equal to the area below AT* not covered by
student willingness to pay. If each student is charged exactly what the
family is willing to pay, the average tuition will be AT* and the
institution will sell all of its seats. Institutions accomplish this by
setting the list-price tuition at LT, the height of the highest
willingness to pay bar, and giving the remaining students tuition
discounts. Often these tuition discounts are given added marketing
cachet with scholarship names.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
This model is clearly a simplification. The real tuition-setting
process is more uncertain and haphazard. For example, we assumed that
the institution knows each family's willingness to pay and we also
assumed it could accurately forecast the yield for each group of
students. Some students do reveal their willingness to pay by presenting
schools with competing offers as part of a bargaining process. But for
the most part schools make guesses about willingness to pay using rules
of thumb or with some type of forecasting model. Also, the yield on
offers of admission can vary unexpectedly from year to year, and between
the 10's, 9's, 8's, and so on down the list. Nonetheless,
we think this simple discussion captures the essence of how tuition is
set in much of the nonprofit sector. The model presumes the revenue
needs are set first, based on the existing size and cost structure of
the school, and the tuition setting and admission decisions are made
together afterward.
At many public institutions, the legislature or a state board sets
the list-price tuition. These schools have fewer levers to pull in
crafting the incoming class. But selective public institutions still
follow most of the enrollment management process. Their discount rates
tend to be lower.
For-profit schools/ The model is not a good description of how
for-profit schools operate. These schools maximize revenue in the short
run and profits in the long run.
For-profit schools do face some constraints on their selection of
students. To keep their access to Title IV programs (Pell Grants and
federally backed students loans), they need to ensure that their
three-year cohort default rates on student loans remain within federal
limits, and they need to get at least 10 percent of their revenues from
non-Title IV sources (i.e., money from students and their families). But
this sets a bare minimum quality standard for students.
For-profit schools do not sculpt their classes to improve the
learning environment for everyone, and they have no particular interest
in offering scholarships to attract particularly talented students to
the residential mix. Most applicants to these schools will pay a set
price with little or no internal discount. The financial aid that is
available to students at for-profit institutions is almost wholly made
up of federal Pell Grants and loans.
THE BENNETT HYPOTHESIS
We can now ask how a nonprofit institution practicing the
enrollment management approach we've described might change its
behavior when the federal government makes financial aid more generous.
Let's consider an increase in the maximum Pell Grant. Pell support
goes to students with the lowest ability to pay. Because they are
income-constrained, these students also have the lowest willingness to
pay. If the Pell Grant maximum is raised, many of these lower-income
students will be willing to pay more for a chance at a degree. Figure 3
illustrates this situation. The lighter-shaded portion of the
willingness-to-pay bars shows the increased willingness to pay of
students whose maximum Pell Grant has grown.
After an increase in the Pell maximum, an institution has many
options and they're all good. However, some of them are less good
for the average student who relies on Pell Grant support to pay for
school. The best thing the institution could do to make college more
affordable for its Pell recipients is to subtract the full increase in
the Pell Grant from the amount the student needs to borrow. At the other
extreme, the institution could cut its own institutionally funded
scholarships dollar-for-dollar with the increased federal support. In
the first case, the institution has not taxed the extra federal support
at all; every dollar of added Pell support goes directly to the student
in the form of a lower net price. In the latter case, the institution
would get a tuition windfall; the institution has effectively imposed a
100% tax rate on the added Pell money, leaving the average Pell
recipient's net price unchanged. But notice that in neither case
would the student see a higher list price or net price.
A 100% tax rate is not 100% bad news for students, depending on
what the college does with the found money. That extra revenue could be
used to improve programming that benefits all students, Pell recipients
and full-paying students alike. Alternatively, it could be targeted to
student support services that are of disproportionate benefit to
students from a disadvantaged background and to students who are the
first in their family to experience the college world.
The federal government might prefer the first option, a zero
internal tax rate. But it's up to the schools to set the tax rate
because they know the Pell Grant award students are getting before they
make their decisions about financial aid awards. The Pell program is an
example of a 'first dollar" award. Schools get to give the
last dollar and the giver of the last dollar has more choice.
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
The school's most pressing needs will have a strong effect on
the tax rate it chooses. Passing extra federal support to students as a
lower net price can enlarge the applicant pool and this could help a
university to attract a few more 10's and 9's compared to
schools that tax the extra Pell money heavily. This would improve the
quality of the incoming class and boost the graduation rate a few years
later. In fact, for students who are near the threshold of Pell
eligibility, the desirability of getting students tagged as Pell
recipients may encourage some schools to add more institutional aid to
those students' packages to boost the yield in that group, and
there is very good evidence that many schools do behave this way. On the
other hand, schools that offer very generous internal grant aid to
low-income families may divert a large fraction of the extra federal aid
into programming to aid students. At some elite programs, the net price
is already zero for low-income families, so there is little incentive
not to tax extra federal aid.
In our enrollment management model, list-price tuition is set by
the willingness to pay of the wealthiest families whose children attend
the institution. These students won't be eligible for Pell Grants.
Moreover, schools cannot increase a student's Pell Grant by raising
the list-price tuition. The size of the Pell Grant is determined by the
difference between the Pell maximum and the expected family contribution
(EFC). Congress controls the Pell maximum, and the EFC is a formula
based on family income, family assets, and the number of children the
family is supporting in college.
High-income families aren't the ones on the borderline between
getting some Pell support and getting none. And at most nonprofit
institutions, these families are unlikely to be eligible for subsidized
federal loans or tuition tax credits. According to the Digest of
Education Statistics, for the 2010-2011 academic year, 37% of students
at private four-year schools did not borrow and 11% received no
financial aid at all. Most nonprofit colleges have at least a few
students who pay the full list-price tuition, and these families
aren't affected by funding increases in need-based federal
programs.
Some states offer their own tuition assistance grants to students
attending in-state nonprofit institutions (public and private). These
state grants often are not need-based. Making these programs more
generous could induce tuition increases because they affect the
willingness to pay of high-income families. These are not the programs
that concerned Bennett.
There are some institutions that offer fertile ground for a Bennett
effect. The first is the set of relatively non-selective colleges, which
pull in no students from the high-income families that are immune to
direct federal (or state) subsidy policies. An increase in the
generosity of federal financial aid might affect the willingness to pay
of the students with the highest willingness to pay at these
institutions. The second and more important category is the large set of
for-profit schools. For-profit schools do very little if any tuition
discounting. These institutions do not try to shape the incoming class
with an educational goal in mind or a mission to achieve. A cosmetology
school or a school that trains medical coders will not offer tuition
discounts to particularly able or needy students in the same way that a
private nonprofit institution or a state-supported institution might.
These institutions also are heavily dependent on federal funds. In
2013, the for-profit sector absorbed 20% of the total allocation of Pell
grants and 42% of Post-9/11 GI Bill dollars. In the 2009-2010 academic
year, over 75% of the revenue in the for-profit sector came from federal
Title IV sources. In 2014, only 12% of the 1,947 proprietary schools
earned more than half of their revenues from non-Title IV sources.
Almost 20% of them received more than 85% of their revenues from Title
IV programs. The legal limit is 90%. In the proprietary sector, the
willingness to pay of almost all of their students will be affected by
an increase in the generosity of federal financial aid.
In his op-ed, Bennett argued that "our greedy colleges"
would tax any increases in the generosity of federal financial aid by
raising the tuition students have to pay. We have argued at length that
this conclusion has very limited scope. In the traditional nonprofit
sector, neither list price tuition nor the net price that students face
is likely to rise following an increase in the generosity of federal
financial aid. The one exception is in the for-profit sector where the
competitive model seems more appropriate than the enrollment management
process in use at mission-driven nonprofits.
Yet Bennett's broader point may hold. Schools can tax an
increase in federal aid. We simply posit a different mechanism. In the
enrollment management model, taxation is much more likely to come in the
form of reducing eligible students' tuition discounts rather than
in the form of higher tuition (list or net). The traditional nonprofit
sector can siphon off a portion of the government aid and repurpose it
toward other institutional goals. How much of this goes on is an
empirical question.
EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF THE BENNETT HYPOTHESIS
There is a long and growing body of empirical work on possible
links between federal aid policy and the list price (or net price)
tuition that colleges and universities charge. Instead of offering
another exhaustive review of this increasingly complex econometric work,
we will focus on two aspects of it. First, we want to summarize the main
contributions and identify what we see as some fundamental weaknesses.
These weaknesses should cause analysts and policymakers alike to shy
away from overarching or hard-edged claims about the tuition-raising
effect of U.S. policy toward higher education. The evidence is nuanced,
not conclusive. Secondly, recent evidence from a number of papers fits
nicely into the enrollment management framework we outlined earlier.
The enrollment management model offers no firm prediction about the
tax rate an institution might choose, but it does highlight the role of
competition. Schools that are not very selective have to work harder to
enroll a student of a given quality than do more selective schools.
Other things equal, this suggests that less selective programs are
likely to pass more of the subsidy through to applicants as a lower net
price. Other things, however, are rarely equal. Schools that need extra
revenue more than they need the benefits of higher yield on offers of
admission might choose to tax at a higher rate. On this margin, less
selective schools may be the ones with a stronger need for extra
revenue. These two incentives may push a school in opposite directions
in deciding how to tax an extra dollar of federal aid, which is why we
offer no clear prediction about the tax rate set by these institutions.
On the other hand, well-endowed, highly selective schools that fully
meet all or most financial need with internal grant aid may see little
need to pass additional federal aid through to students. We would
forecast a higher tax rate at these highly selective schools.
What does the empirical literature actually tell us? First, the
overall evidence about the Bennett hypothesis isn't remotely
conclusive. In an early work on Pell Grants, Michael McPherson and
Morton Schapiro examined institution-level data from the U.S. Department
of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. They
found a positive relationship between gross tuition revenue and federal
aid revenue at public universities but not at private institutions. This
suggests that the public schools taxed the aid but private schools did
not. By contrast, an exhaustive congressionally mandated study conducted
by the National Center for Education Statistics found no relationship
between federal/state grant aid or loans and institution-level tuition
increases. In a third study, Larry Singell and Joe Stone looked at the
relationship between the total amount of tuition revenue collected at
public and private nonprofit institutions and the size of the average
Pell Grant award per recipient. They found no relationship at public
universities but a positive relationship at private schools, suggesting
that the private schools taxed the aid but the public schools did not.
One of the most recent studies in this vein is a 2015 working paper
from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They found
that an additional Pell dollar to an institution leads to a 55 cents
rise in sticker price, while an extra unsubsidized loan dollar has a 30t
effect. While this paper is not yet final, the loan effects appear to be
statistically robust but the Pell effect is less so. This study
recognizes that tuition and loans/grants are bi-directionally linked,
i.e., easier loan availability could cause tuition to increase or rising
tuition could cause loan demand to rise. But like much of this
literature, this paper lacks a convincing causal story for why tuition
might be linked with federal policy and it omits many controls that in
theory could have generated the observed correlation.
This very partial review tells us a number of things. First, no
clear answer has emerged. If you look around, you can find any result
you want. One reason for this is that there is no consensus on what
relationship should be tested. What is the right measure of federal
policy, for instance? Is it the maximum Pell Grant (or loan) a student
can get (as in the New York Fed study), the average level of Pell
support per student at affected institutions (Singell and Stone), or the
total amount of federal funding an institution receives (McPherson and
Schapiro)? Different studies use different measures and there is no
agreement about the appropriate relationship to test. There is also no
common understanding of the right set of control variables to use. One
reason is that all of this work is at best only lightly related to any
structural model of how colleges and universities actually behave.
Building a causal model of university behavior is certainly not the
only path to wisdom, but the absence of one makes interpreting these
very contradictory results quite difficult. A positive link between aid
and tuition could be simple spurious correlation, while the absence of a
link might reflect a failure to include an important control variable
that is positively correlated with aid but negatively correlated with
tuition.
Our model of tuition setting suggests a particular way to use
control variables. For instance, you should clearly control for
different types of institution if your structural model tells you that
they behave differently. You should control for-profit schools
separately because their pricing mechanism is quite different from
nonprofits. Within nonprofits, state schools operate quite differently.
You should control for differences in the pattern of state-level higher
education spending per student (their business cycle), and at what level
they set their public university tuition (at the institution level, by a
state board, or by the legislature). The size and composition of
state-level financial aid programs is another important control that is
rarely used.
Lastly, the private nonprofit sector is not monolithic. Our model
suggests that schools without a meaningful cadre of wealthy families
will set their list price differently than schools that have a sizeable
contingent of wealthy families. Studies that do not control for these
predictable effects are unlikely to offer good tests of institutional
behavior, and any correlations that emerge may very well be spurious.
As one example, we know of no study of the Bennett Effect that has
attempted to control for the tuition-setting mechanism at the state
level, or for the interaction of state policymaking with federal aid
policy. Increases in non-need-based state aid to students can indeed
create a Bennett Effect, so any study that does not control separately
for changes in state aid programs may very well find a spurious link
between federal policy and list price tuition at institutions in that
state. Likewise, controlling for institution type often is not done (as
in the New York Fed study cited above), and the groups of schools that
are often aggregated may contain subgroups that behave in opposite ways.
We realize that charges of omitted variable bias are sometimes the
last refuge of an intellectual scoundrel. After all, anyone can dismiss
evidence he dislikes by claiming that the study in question has not
controlled for every possible influencing factor. But when the
literature in question has coughed up clearly contradictory findings and
many of the papers have left out seemingly crucial correlates (sometimes
for lack of data), the case for worrying about omitted variables is
quite strong. Omitted variable problems seem endemic in this literature.
There are a number of recent studies that do capture important
features of the simple model of institutional price setting that we have
outlined. The first is a study of the for-profit sector by Stephanie
Cellini and Claudia Goldin. Our model suggests that a Bennett effect is
quite plausible in the for-profit sector, and that is exactly what
Cellini and Goldin observe. They identify a set of for-profit
institutions in five states that offer very similar services to very
similar students. The major difference is that some of the schools are
eligible to participate in Title IV programs. Their students are
eligible to receive federal grant and loans. Other for-profit schools in
the study are not Title IV-eligible because they lack accreditation.
Cellini and Goldin find that the Title IV-eligible schools charge a
higher tuition than the schools not eligible for Title IV programs
across all states, samples, and specifications, controlling for program
length, enrollment, how long the school has operated, and a set of other
school, location, and year effects. The tuition premium is 78%. They
also show that tuition at Title IV schools for particular programs that
are too short to qualify for federal aid is about the same as what is
charged for similar programs at non-Title IV schools. This suggests that
school quality differences are not driving the result.
In a recent working paper, Christopher Lau confirms this finding
about for-profit institutions, whose students use a surprisingly large
fraction of federal aid. In the 2008-2009 academic year, students at
for-profit schools comprised only 11% of the total postsecondary
population, but they received 24% of Pell allocations, 28% of
unsubsidized Stafford loans, and a quarter of the subsidized Stafford
loans. Lau estimates a differentiated product model of monopolistic
competition in the for-profit sector and shows that for-profit schools
absorbed 57% percent of Pell grants and 51% of extra loan amounts,
passing through the remainder to students as consumer surplus (a lower
net price).
Lesley Turner directly addresses the tax rate question that we pose
by estimating the economic incidence of the Pell program, taking into
consideration how schools can adjust their own aid packages for
individual students. She exploits two features of the aid system to
separately identify the effects of federal aid programs. The Pell
program has discontinuities in both the level of aid and the slope (rate
of change) that lead similar students to get different amounts of
support. Overall, she finds the tax rate is a modest 12-16%. Things are
more interesting when she breaks the higher education industry down into
specific subsectors. Selective nonprofits tax at a much higher rate
(79%). This could be a function of their market power, though as we have
noted it could also be caused by the fact that these schools already
offer a very low net price to low-income students. Public
universities' net tax rate is close to zero. In fact, public
universities exhibit a willingness to pay for students categorized as
Pell recipients, though some of the increased aid that they give to
students who are near the Pell threshold comes from Pell recipients who
are even more needy. She also finds that the for-profit schools tax rate
is a low 18%, which is similar to the amount appropriated by most
non-selective schools.
The fact that for-profit schools assess a modest tax rate is
perfectly consistent with the finding that they raise their list price
in response to federal subsidization. A strong Bennett effect coupled
with a low tax rate may seem odd at first, but this sector does not use
institutional aid to craft the group of students who enroll, unlike
their more selective nonprofit brethren, so there is little
institutional aid to displace. That does not mean that aid is passed
through to students. As Lau and Cellini and Goldin have shown, the
for-profit sector takes its cut of federal support through list price
increases.
THE HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY DEBATE
We highlight two major conclusions. For the four-year public and
private nonprofit institutions that still educate the bulk of
America's college students, our enrollment management model tells
us that increases in the generosity of need-based federal financial aid
are unlikely to cause schools to raise list price tuition. Most of the
evidence suggests that a significant portion of any increased aid does
get through to students as a lower net price. But schools can siphon off
some fraction of the aid, and our second conclusion is that this
"tax rate" is fairly low overall. At state universities, there
is good evidence that virtually all of the aid reaches its target and
schools do not tax it. Schools that are the most generous with their own
aid assess the highest tax rate.
The original Bennett hypothesis does have some empirical support.
With more than a touch of irony, the "greedy colleges" that
would react to increases in the generosity of federal financial aid by
hiking tuition tend to be found in the for-profit sector, which is the
most market-oriented segment of the higher education industry.
The debate about the Bennett hypothesis is part of an ideological
tussle that currently dominates public discussion of higher education.
On one side we hear impassioned claims that the magic of unfettered and
unsubsidized markets can solve the college cost problem. On the other
side we have those who believe that free is the right price for
everything of social value. And from both sides we are regularly treated
to finger-wagging about costly and wasteful amenities. But the college
cost problem has deep roots in the nature of higher education as a
personal service industry with a highly educated workforce. Our
student-centered federal financial aid system is not a significant
driver of the tuition bill at the nation's nonprofit colleges and
universities.
READINGS
* "Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence
from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs," by David O.
Lucca, Taylor Nadauld, and Karen Shen. Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Staff Report #733, July 2015, revised March 2016.
* "Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on
For-Profit Colleges," by Stephanie R. Cellini and Claudia Goldin.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 6, No. 4 (November
2014).
* "For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition
to Federal Grants-in-Aid," by Larry D. Singell Jr. and Joe A.
Stone. Economics of Education Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (June 2007).
* Keeping College Affordable: Government and Educational
Opportunity, by Michael S. McPherson and Morton O. Schapiro. Brookings
Institution, 1991.
* "Overview of the Relationship between Federal Aid and
Increases in College Prices," published by the Congressional
Research Service. 2014.
* "Study of College Costs and Prices, 1988-89 to
1997-98," Vol. 2, edited by Alisa F. Cunningham, Jane V. Wellman,
Melissa E. Clinedinst, Jamie P. Merisotis, and C. Dennis Carroll.
National Center for Education Statistics, 2001.
* "The Incidence of Federal Subsidies in For-Profit Higher
Education," by Christopher V. Lau. Northwestern University working
paper, November 17, 2014.
* "The Incidence of Student Financial Aid: Evidence from the
Pell Grant Program," by Lesley J. Turner. Columbia University
Department of Economics working paper, April 29, 2012.
* "The Road to Pell Is Paved with Good Intentions: The
Economic Incidence of Federal Student Grant Aid," by Lesley J.
Turner. University of Maryland Department of Economics working paper,
August 14, 2014.
ROBERT B. ARCHIBALD is Chancellor Professor of Economics at the
College of William & Mary. DAVID H. FELDMAN is department chair and
a professor of economics at the College of William & Mary.
This paper draws heavily on their paper, "Federal Financial
Aid Policy and College Behavior," published by the American Council
on Education (2016).