Schwartz, Amy Ellen, and Benjamin Scafidi. 2004. "What’s Happened to the Price of College? Quality-Adjusted Net Price Indexes for Four-Year Colleges." Journal of Human Resources 39(3): 723-745.

In this paper we estimate hedonic models of the (consumer) price of college to construct quality-adjusted net price indexes for U.S. four-year colleges, where the net price of college is defined as tuition and fees minus financial aid. For academic years 1990–91 to 1994–95, we find adjusting for financial aid leads to a 22 percent decline in the estimated price index for all four year colleges, while quality adjusting the results leads to a further, albeit smaller, decline. Nevertheless, public comprehensive colleges, perhaps an important gateway to college for students from low-income backgrounds, experienced the largest net price increases.

Amy Ellen Schwartz is a professor of public policy at New York University. Benjamin Scafidi is an assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University. This work is partially funded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Any findings or views expressed in this paper are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of BLS. The authors thank two anonymous referees, John Bishop, Ron Ehrenberg, Dennis Fixler, Barbara Fraumeni, Judith Hellerstein, Abigail Payne, Jack Triplett, Larry White, Gordon Winston, and seminar participants at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Brookings Institution, the NBER Spring 2000 Productivity Meeting, and NBER Fall 2000 Higher Education Meeting for helpful comments. They take responsibility for all remaining errors. The data contained in this article may be obtained between January 2005 and December 2008 from the authors.