This study used the historical research method to explore the Chinese government's role in building world-class universities. We traced the government's role in pushing policies for: (1) accelerating academic improvement; and (2) enhancing the involvement of provincial governments in achieving universities' world-class status. The findings…

Researchers, policymakers, and the public are increasingly interested in judging colleges and universities on measures beyond selectivity and prestige. When Opportunity Insights compiled the first-ever dataset to highlight colleges that are the best at promoting economic mobility among students, these groups embraced the new information with…

Studies on faculty income have typically focused on disparities associated with gender and race. Surprisingly, much less attention has been paid to the social class background of university faculty and how it might affect their pathways to the professoriate and their opportunities to access high-paying positions. We attempted to address this gap…

Income inequality has been increasing in the United States, and "intraoccupational" processes are partly responsible (Kim and Sakamoto 2008; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). To date, scholars have focused on suboccupational divisions, such as specialty areas, to understand why some members of an occupation earn more than others. In this article we…

The analysis of educational vouchers has evolved from market-based analogies to models that incorporate distinctive features of the educational environment. These distinctive features include peer effects, scope for private school pricing and admissions based on student characteristics, the linkage of household residential and school choices in…

Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one…

The focus of this essay is on the persistently rising costs in higher education and the role that incentives play in pushing those costs up. Data from the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics reveal that the rise in higher education cost exceeds the rise in service-sector prices and even the rise in health-care costs…