Commonfund's Higher Education Price Index® (HEPI) data show that costs for colleges and universities rose 3.4 percent in FY2024, a decreased rate of inflation compared with 4.0 in FY2023 and 5.2 percent in FY2022. (FY2024 covers the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, and coincides with the budget year of most educational institutions.)…

In this dissertation, I explore questions relating to estimating and framing college net pricing. In the first study, I measure variation in actual grant aid awards for students predicted by the federal template Net Price Calculator (NPC) to receive identical aid awards. Estimated aid derived from the federal template NPC accounts for 85 percent…

Student fees make up 20% of the total cost of tuition and fees at the typical four-year public, yet little research has been conducted to examine institutional-level and state-level factors that may affect student fee charges. I use panel data to find that institutional selectivity and athletics spending do not influence student fee levels.…

This Statistics in Brief examines three cohorts of recent college graduates 1 year after they attained their bachelor's degree. The graduation years for the three cohorts span a 15-year period: 1992-93, 1999-2000, and 2007-08. The latest cohort (2007-08) graduated in the midst of the 2008 recession. This Statistics in Brief first examines how…

A heuristic approach to explaining of the Black-Scholes option pricing model in undergraduate classes is described. The approach draws upon the method of protocol analysis to encourage students to "think aloud" so that their mental models can be surfaced. It also relies upon extensive visualizations to communicate relationships that are…

In assessing educational equity among school districts, according to the authors, researchers should control for differences across districts in the prices of educational inputs. This paper tests a suggested index for one educational input, teacher salaries. The suggested teacher-salary index, based on a supply-and-demand model using 12 demand and…

How well does competitive theory explain the outcome in experimental markets? The authors examined the results of a large number of classroom trading experiments that used a pit-trading design found in Experiments with Economic Principles, an introductory economics textbook by Bergstrom and Miller. They compared experimental outcomes with…

A comprehensive faculty flow model developed to forecast a "committed resources index" analyzes the future flexibility of a university. The model's construction, implementation, and assessment are described. (Editor/LBH)

Examines two classes of production functions in which the long-run competitive equilibrium scale of the firm increases when the relative price of the dominant factor decreases. Compares these with a third class of production functions where the equilibrium scale is independent of the relative price of the dominant factor. (MJP)

Ways in which the external financial disclosures by universities may evaluate institutional economic viability are demonstrated. It is argued that the evaluation should take into account the effect of inflation and activity level. The evaluation model requires several years' information about revenues (general operating fund), the impact of…

Price indices related to specific expenditure categories are necessary for realistic budget projections in higher education. Given the erratic inflationary behavior of the past seven years, and the uniqueness of higher education expenditures, realistic inflation prediction requires a balanced combination of analytic forecasting and intuitive…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) commissioned the papers in this publication to address advances in measuring education inflation and adjusting for it, as well as to examine the emergence of a new focus on school spending, rather than school district spending, as well as new, private sources of funding for public education, and…