Public Choices in Public Higher Education
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Description
Public institutions of higher education have grown in prominence in the United States over the past 200 years. By the mid-l980s, total public enrollments were roughly twice the level of private enrollments. Important as they are, these aggregate trends mask the substantial and systematic state-by-state variation in public and private enrollments that is the primary focus of this paper. The outputs associated with public higher education are notoriously difficult to conceptualize and to quantify. We therefore concentrate attention on input measures that can proxy for educational output: enrollments per capita and expenditures per student. To a large extent, current enrollment levels reflect a historical set of decisions by state legislatures concerning the appropriate “supply” of public higher education. But they also depend on the demand for higher education by both residents and nonresidents. In this paper, we relate the 1985 statewide pattern of publicly provided higher education to the political conditions and choices that have confronted legislatures, along with the labor market conditions and other economic forces that affect students’ (and families’) demands for higher education. Section 8.2 provides the conceptual overview. We sketch out some of the alternative political-economic theories that might serve to explain the current pattern of student enrollments. Section 8.3 begins the empirical analysis by describing the statewide public enrollment pattern as it has developed historically and as it relates to other input and output measures (expenditures per pupil and a quality index). In this section, we flesh out the public-choice problem of the legislature which causes states to provide alternative packages of postsecondary education services. Section 8.4 describes the regression analyses that attempt to sort out the effects of legislative supply variables from the important demand-oriented variables. Some brief concluding remarks appear in the final section.
Source Publication
Studies of Supply and Demand in Higher Education
Source Editors/Authors
Charles T. Clotfelter, Michael Rothschild
Publication Date
1993
Recommended Citation
Quigley, John M. and Rubinfeld, Daniel L., "Public Choices in Public Higher Education" (1993). Faculty Chapters. 1863.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1863
