Volume 12, Number 3 (Summer) 1977
Bishop, John. 1977. "The Effect of Public Policies on the Demand for Higher Education." Journal of Human Resources 12(3):285-307.
A binomial logit model is fitted to the college attendance behavior of 27,046 male high-school juniors in 1960, divided into 20 subgroups defined by student ability and family income. Tuition, high admissions standards, travel costs, and room and board costs all have significant negative effects on attendance. The highest elasticities of demand are found to occur in the low-income strata and lower-middle ability quartile, suggesting that an efficient subsidy program should focus on these groups. Coefficients of forgone earnings and measures of the local payoff to college attendance are small but generally have the expected sign.
The author is Project Associate, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author is greatly indebted to Nancy Scofield and Anthony Fung for computational assistance, and to Camille Smith for editorial assistance. The research reported here was supported by funds from NIE-G-74-0100 from the National Institute of Education and by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pursuant to the provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Glen Cain, Irwin Garfinkel, W. Lee Hansen, Michael Olneck, Burton E. Weisbrod, and Jeffrey G. Williamson provided helpful comments on previous drafts. The opinions expressed and any remaining errors are the responsibility of the author.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X