How does a policy of free tuition affect student applications to universities? This article assesses how free tuition influences applications in terms of the selectivity of the university, length of the degree program, cost of the program, and application to a program in the STEM field. The study based on a quasi-experimental design was carried…

The bounds testing (augmented autoregressive distributed lag, ARDL) technique to cointegration was used in this study to investigate the effect of household income and expenditure on tertiary school enrolment in Nigeria from 1970 to 2020. The model was employed to estimate the relationship between these three variables while also accounting for…

Substantial increases in public university tuition often raise concerns about college affordability. But assessment of the impacts on low- and moderate-income families requires consideration of whether net tuition--tuition less grant aid--has increased commensurately. This paper describes recent shifts in net tuition by family income and…

In 2011, Chile experienced massive student protests against the marketization of education. During 2013, center-left President Michelle Bachelet proposed tuition-free higher education for Chile's families in the bottom 70th percentile of the income distribution, fueling controversy due to the uncertainty and unexpected consequences of the policy.…

While the tuition fee system has had a large amount of political and media attention in the last two decades, far less attention has been paid to the student maintenance system -- the amount of funding students have access to for day to day living expenses. But for many students, this funding is of more immediate importance, and can have a major…

With student loan debt reaching approximately $1.6 trillion, many are concerned that student loans may be the next financial bubble to burst. CARES Act funding and U.S. Department of Education actions led to historically low levels of delinquency in 2020-2021. However, there is concern that issues will balloon as soon as governmental action and…

This study investigates how the affordability of 4-year public higher-education tuition in China changed during the massification period. To conduct an in-depth analysis, this paper examines a wide range of data from the National Bureau of Statistics and adopts a series of measurement indicators, including average tuition as a percentage of…

This dissertation consists of two chapters studying the importance of household income for shaping student outcomes in the market for higher education in the United States. The first chapter uses the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to document that conditional on student ability, high-income students are more likely to enroll in college and…

The Cal State Student Association (CSSA) and The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) examine trends in college affordability for California State University (CSU) bachelor's degree recipients compared to its original analysis published six years ago. This new report finds that in 2021-2022, nearly two in three CSU bachelor's degree…

Tuition prices, as well as the living expenses students must cover, have risen rapidly while household incomes have grown slowly or even declined except for those at or near the top of the income distribution. As incomes have stagnated and the savings rate has declined, students have come to depend more and more on financial aid from federal and…

This study examines the tuition elasticity of student enrollment for a public regional comprehensive master's university, Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Tuition elasticity is a measure of the responsiveness of student enrollment decisions due to changes in tuition over time. This measure is useful as it indicates how changes in tuition…

Is the end in sight for college tuition hikes? Tuition and fees at public colleges and universities consistently have risen twice or even three times as fast as comparable increases in the Consumer Price Index in recent years. Since 2000 these costs have even grown 60 percent faster than health care costs. The results have been rapidly rising…

As tuition-free college policies spread rapidly across the states, an increasingly important policy debate has emerged regarding the optimal policy design of tuition-free college. However, existing scholarly evidence has focused almost exclusively on student outcomes, leaving the political decision-making processes among the public and…

Does the gender pay gap affect women's ability to repay their student debt? This study investigates the extent to which an income contingent scheme benefits women because of their individual earnings. Using the Australian Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, gender differences in debt repayment behaviour over the past two…

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary elevated free-college plans to the top of the national agenda, with many candidates proposing expansive programs to help states make public colleges and universities free for in-state students. Proponents of these plans argue that tuition at public colleges and universities has become increasingly…