Yes, Aid Fuels Tuition Inflation
By Neal McCluskey
At this point, I think I’ve said all I need to about the doubling of interest rates on subsidized federal student loans. Basically, the doubling won’t have a big impact one way or another, but putting a little more payment burden on the students consuming higher education is probably a good thing. Why? Because cheap aid encourages students to demand stuff they otherwise wouldn’t, and enables colleges to raise their prices at excessive rates.
That said, since the nation will likely be talking about student aid for a while longer, now is probably a good time to reprint – and expand – the list of empirical studies that have, in one way or another, found that schools in large part capture aid money rather than becoming more affordable. The list probably isn’t exhaustive, and there are many limitations that make it impossible to prove that aid fuels inflation, but combined with the logic that you’ll willingly pay more if you have someone else’s money, these studies show that there is very good reason to conclude that aid is counterproductive:
John D. Singell, Jr., and Joe A. Stone, “ For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition to Federal Grants-in-Aid,” Economics of Education Review 26, no. 3 (2006): 285-95.
Bridget Terry Long, “ How Do Financial Aid Policies Affect Colleges? The Institutional Impact of Georgia Hope Scholarships,” Journal of Human Resources 30, no. 4 (2004): 1045-66.
Bradley A. Curs and Luciana Dar, “ Do Institutions Respond Assymetrically to Changes in State Need- and Merit-Based Aid? ” Working Paper, November 1, 2010.
Rebecca J. Acosta, “ How Do Colleges Respond to Changes in Federal Student Aid,” Working Paper, October 2001.
Michael Rizzo and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, “ Resident and Nonresident Tuition and Enrollment at Flagship State Universities,” in College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay for It, edited by Caroline M. Hoxby, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Nicholas Turner, “ Who Benefits from Student Aid? The Economic Incidence of Tax-Based Federal Student Aid,” Economics of Education Review 31, no. 4 (2012): 463-81.
Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Claudia Goldin, “ Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges,” NBER Working Paper No. 17827, February 2012.
Lesley J. Turner, “ The Incidence of Student Financial Aid: Evidence from the Pell Grant Program,” Columbia University, April 2012.
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