College curriculum, diverging selectivity, and enrollment expansion

Kaganovich, Michael; Su, Xuejuan

doi:10.1007/s00199-018-1109-9

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Future study may endogenize the reputation of HE institutions and their ways to attract students besides student subsidies. These may include better 'services,' quality and availability of staff and teachers, a friendlier approach, college campus visits, letter campaigns, flexible schedules, convenient locations, labor‐market oriented programs, and others (see Barham, 2019; Eisenkopf & Wohlschlegel, 2012; Kaganovich & Su, 2019; Swanson et al, 2019). Future study may also consider peer effects generated by the self‐selection of students and how student subsidies affect the individual incentives to invest effort in basic education.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They observe that increased enrollment in tertiary education does not always enhance the economic growth. Kaganovich and Su (2019) analyze the diverging selectivity of Colleges and its implications on the labor market. Eckwert and Zilcha (2020) consider within an information‐based model the implications of Colleges to the human capital accumulation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Subsidizing heterogeneous higher education systems

Hatsor

Zilcha

2020

J Public Economic Theory

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In many countries, there is an ongoing debate on the public funding of the higher education (HE) system. Our goal is to examine the theoretical justification for the establishment of HE institutions and analyze the self‐selection of students under different policies of student subsidies. We study nonstationary equilibria of an overlapping‐generation economy in a hierarchical education system. Given the capacity constraints of Universities, we explore the impact of adding new institutions, to be called Colleges, to the HE system, focusing on three issues. Given that Colleges are less productive and less selective than Universities: (a) Should the government establish Colleges? (b) Should the government divert funds from Universities to Colleges? On the basis of long‐run economic growth considerations, we obtain positive answers to both questions. (c) Then, we compare several policies of student subsidies across the board. Our results suggest that much caution is needed in the implementation of student subsidies. Specifically, targeting subsidies to the highly‐ranked students in each institution may distort their self‐selection across institutions and downgrade the human capital accumulation in the economy. To offset this distortion in the demand for HE it may be useful to target subsidies to the low‐ranked students in each institution. Our model also accounts for several stylized facts over time: (1) the increase in the number of institutions and students, (2) the decline in College admission standards, and (3) the decline in public budget per student and the corresponding increase in out‐of‐pocket student payments.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subsidizing heterogeneous higher education systems

Hatsor

Zilcha

2020

J Public Economic Theory

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“…These relationships are in line with recent work attributing earnings differences to college selectivity [ 64 ], and are not surprising since admission to and graduation from a more selective school contributes in multiple and reinforcing ways to workplace success: 1) via signaling of ability, and 2) by learning from other high-ability peers and from well-paid faculty. In turn, this raises the curricular standard and prestige of selective schools [ 65 ], which can charge more and, consequently, can spend more on students, further enhancing their future success. The fact that schools fall on a common curve suggests that schools from different sectors are competing in a common market to enroll students.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systematic shifts in scaling behavior based on organizational strategy in universities

Taylor

Liang²,

Laubichler

et al. 2021

PLoS ONE

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To build better theories of cities, companies, and other social institutions such as universities, requires that we understand the tradeoffs and complementarities that exist between their core functions, and that we understand bounds to their growth. Scaling theory has been a powerful tool for addressing such questions in diverse physical, biological and urban systems, revealing systematic quantitative regularities between size and function. Here we apply scaling theory to the social sciences, taking a synoptic view of an entire class of institutions. The United States higher education system serves as an ideal case study, since it includes over 5,800 institutions with shared broad objectives, but ranges in strategy from vocational training to the production of novel research, contains public, nonprofit and for-profit models, and spans sizes from 10 to roughly 100,000 enrolled students. We show that, like organisms, ecosystems and cities, universities and colleges scale in a surprisingly systematic fashion following simple power-law behavior. Comparing seven commonly accepted sectors of higher education organizations, we find distinct regimes of scaling between a school’s total enrollment and its expenditures, revenues, graduation rates and economic added value. Our results quantify how each sector leverages specific economies of scale to address distinct priorities. Taken together, the scaling of features within a sector along with the shifts in scaling across sectors implies that there are generic mechanisms and constraints shared by all sectors, which lead to tradeoffs between their different societal functions and roles. We highlight the strong complementarity between public and private research universities, and community and state colleges, that all display superlinear returns to scale. In contrast to the scaling of biological systems, our results highlight that much of the observed scaling behavior is modulated by the particular strategies of organizations rather than an immutable set of constraints.

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“…For instance, Arcidiacono and Lovenheim (2016) distinguish between the "quality effect" of a more selective college (such as better instructional resources), which can benefit any student, from the "match effect" benefiting only students whose adequate prior preparation makes the college a good "match" for them. Kaganovich and Su (2019) explicitly incorporate the latter feature by defining the value added of a university as student-specific, dependent on the relationship between a student's preparation and the level of the university's curriculum. For a given such level, returns to education will be low for insufficiently prepared students as well as for the "overqualified" ones, as opposed to students whose aptitude is a "good match" for this curriculum.…”

Section: Standard Differentiation Across Institutions and Their Diverging Selectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%