Robert

A Look at Admissions Rates by Gender

The newest round of data on American colleges and universities from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) was released last week. While the data—on admissions, financial aid, student charges, and graduation rates—were only a few days later than in past years in spite of the longest government shutdown on record this fall and greatly diminished capacity at ED, the two data releases in recent months have had some uncharacteristic issues. The release earlier this fall was marred with coding issues, and the most recent release had data files not initially posted and issues that make the new cost of attendance survey unusable in my view for vocational institutions.

The Trump administration is keenly interested in the admissions survey, and has proposed a massive expansion that would retroactively collect large amounts of data by race/gender and test scores going back to 2019-20—and that the data collection would happen in the spring of 2026. (James Murphy has covered the government regulation burden angle incredibly well. Check out his work.) This goes well beyond a previously scheduled set of changes for fall 2025 data collection that will collect admissions data by race and gender, which would not be done retroactively.

I took a quick look at fall 2024 admissions data to get a sense of a key policy debate—admissions rates by gender—and to show some of the concerns with drawing policy conclusions from institution-level IPEDS data. A full spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

In aggregate, there is little evidence that men or women are admitted to selective colleges at different rates. For the 298 institutions with acceptance rates below 50%, women were admitted to the median institution at a rate 1.3 percentage points higher than men. This fell to 0.08 percentage points for the 100 institutions accepting fewer than 25% of students and men were favored by 0.04 percentage points for the 31 institutions accepting fewer than 10%.

But there are some interesting items at the institution level. Circle in the Square Theatre School (which I have never heard of, but it seems like a fascinating piece of geometry) admitted 5.01% of women and 1.26% of men. Caltech, MIT, and UCLA admitted higher shares of women, while Chicago, Brown, and Swarthmore admitted higher shares of men. Meanwhile, my university admitted men and women at nearly identical 46% rates…but women were 60% of applicants. Take a spin through to see what you think.

Just cutting the data by gender brings down sample sizes quite a bit, so race/gender admissions rates are going to be noisy at many institutions. For example, the Julliard School accepted men at a higher rate than women (10.6% compared to 7.9%), but only received a total of 2,020 applications. If a racial group represents only a small percentage of applicants (White students are the largest share of current students at just 29%), then a few applications could move percentages quite a bit. Adding test scores or high school GPA to the mix (like the Trump administration proposes) will make data far too volatile for high-stakes accountability, but that appears to be the future as federal investigations are likely to be linked to changes in a small number of student applications or admissions.

On a final note, I wish you a wonderful end to 2025. Check out my interview with the fabulous Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates for my top ten events in American higher education this year. And for those working on college campuses, take the time to learn how both faculty and staff schedules work once classes end. Many faculty are off contract, while staff may be trying to take time off before vacation days expire.

See you in 2026!

College Prices Have Not Risen Dramatically in the Last Decade—But Will That Change?

Higher education is facing a crisis of confidence among the general public, and much of that is driven by concerns regarding affordability. For example, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans alike think that colleges do not sufficiently prioritize affordability.

But while college is still expensive, the narrative that colleges and universities are increasing their tuition willy-nilly has not been true for a decade. See this chart from the College Board’s helpful Trends in College Pricing report, which has data through the 2025-26 academic year—two years ahead of U.S. Department of Education data. Tuition increases have been at or below inflation for the last decade, breaking a decadeslong trend of increases well above the rate of inflation.

This is why I was disappointed to see a recent NPR piece that focused on how college costs (which should be prices—grrrr) have doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars in the last three decades. (The headline of doubling over 20 years is inaccurate, but it is right in the main part of the piece at 30 years.) Yes, listed tuition and fees doubled between 1995 and 2015, but they have not budged in the last decade. And if grant aid is taken into account, much of higher education is close to pre-Great Recession affordability. That is in spite of operating costs (as proxied by the Higher Education Price Index) rising faster than inflation over much of the period, driven by benefits and maintenance costs.

This more nuanced narrative (affordability is still a concern, but the situation has actually improved in public higher education) is important to communicate to the general public. The NPR piece was spot-on in 2015, but less so in 2025.

With all that being said, colleges are under more pressure to generate revenue than at any point in recent years. State funding has been an unsung hero for the last decade, and that is likely to take a hit as budgets get tight. With all of the pressures coming out of Washington, institutions are likely to turn to larger tuition increases if at all possible. Public institutions are frequently constrained by state-level tuition controls, which are present in about 30 states. But other public and private institutions may try to get more revenue out of tuition, breaking a promising trend that few people outside of higher education even knew was in progress.

Examining the Debt and Earnings of “Professional” Programs

Negotiated rulemaking, in which the federal government convenes representatives of affected parties before implementing major policy changes, is one of the wonkier topics in higher education. (I cannot recommend enough Rebecca Natow’s book on the topic.) Negotiated rulemaking has been in the news quite a bit lately as the Department of Education works to implement changes to federal student loan borrowing limits passed in this summer’s budget reconciliation law.

Since 2006, students attending graduate and professional programs have been able to borrow up to the cost of attendance. But the reconciliation law limited graduate programs to $100,000 and professional programs to $200,000, setting off negotiations on which programs counted as “professional” (and thus received higher loan limits). The Department of Education started with ten programs and the list eventually went to eleven with the addition of clinical psychology.

In this short post, I take a look at the debt and earnings of these programs that meet ED’s definition of “professional,” along with a few other programs that could be considered professional but were not.

Data and Methods

I used program-level College Scorecard data, focusing on debt data from 2019 and five-year earnings data from 2020. (These are the most recent data points available, as the Scorecard has not been meaningfully updated during the second Trump administration. Five-year earnings get students in health fields beyond medical residencies. I pulled all doctoral/first professional fields from the data by four-digit Classification of Instructional Programs codes, as well as master’s degrees in theology to meet the listed criteria.

Nine of the eleven programs had enough graduates with debt and earnings to report data; osteopathic medicine and podiatry did not. There were five other fields of study with at least 14 programs reporting data: education, educational administration, rehabilitation, nursing, and business administration. All of these clearly prepare people for employment in a profession, but are not currently recognized as “professional.”

Key takeaways

Below is a summary table of debt and earnings for professional programs, including the number of programs above the $100,000 (graduate) and $200,000 (professional) thresholds. Dentistry, pharmacy, and medicine have a sizable share of programs above the $100,000 threshold, while law (the largest field) has only four of 195 programs over $200,000. Theology is the only one of the nine “professional” programs with sufficient data that has higher five-year earnings than debt, suggesting that students in other programs may have a hard time accessing the private market to fill the gap between $200,000 and the full cost of attendance.

On the other hand, four of the five programs not included as “professional” have higher earnings than debt, with nursing and educational administration being the only programs with sufficient data that had debt levels below 60% of earnings. More than one-third of rehabilitation programs had debt over the new $100,000 cap, while few programs in other fields had that high of a debt level. (Education looks pretty good now, doesn’t it?)

I expect the debate over what counts as “professional” to end up in courts and to possibly make its way into a future budget reconciliation bill (about the only way Congress passes legislation at this point). Until then, I will be hoping for newer and more granular data about affected programs.

Public Higher Education is Splitting in Two

Even though there have been longstanding ideological differences across states, higher education leadership was largely insulated against these differences over the last half-century. Yes, they popped up in meaningful ways on topics such as South African divestment, affirmative action, and antiwar protests, but it was possible for university leaders to move from red states to blue states and vice versa. It helped to share the state’s political leanings, but it was generally not a requirement.

The last month has clearly shown that potential presidents now must pass an ideological litmus test in order to gain the favor of governing boards and state policymakers. Here are three examples:

Santa Ono’s hiring at Florida was rejected by the system board (after being approved by the campus board) due to his previous positions in favor of diversity initiatives and vaccine mandates. He tried to pivot his views, but it was not enough for Republican appointments on the board.
Six red states, led by Florida and North Carolina, are seeking to launch a new accreditor to break free from their longtime accreditor (which was the only major institutional accreditor to never have a DEI requirement, although their diversity page is now blank). Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used his press conference to go on a tirade against higher education, but the North Carolina system’s statement was more cautious, focused on academic quality.
The Trump administration’s Justice Department effectively forced out University of Virginia president James Ryan over his alleged noncompliance in removing diversity initiatives from campus. This effort was successful because Virginia’s Republican governor also supported removal and has the ability to push the institution’s governing board to take action.

While there has been a long history of politicians across the ideological spectrum leading universities (such as Mitch Daniels at Purdue, John King at the State University of New York, and Dannel Molloy at Maine), these politicians have generally set aside most of their ideological priors that are not directly related to running an institution of higher education. But now a growing number of states are expecting their campus presidents to be politicians that are perfectly aligned with their values.

There are two clear takeaways from recent events. The first is that college presidents are now political appointments in the same way that a commissioner of education or a state treasurer would be in many states. Many boards will be instructed (or decide by themselves) to only hire people who are ideologically aligned to lead colleges—and to clean house whenever a new governor comes into power. The median tenure of a college president is rapidly declining, and expect that to continue as more leaders get forced out. Notably, by threatening to withhold funding, governors do not even have to wait for the composition of the board to change before forcing a change in leadership. New presidents will respond by requesting higher salaries to account for that risk.

Second, do not expect many prominent college presidents to switch from red states to blue states or vice versa. (It may still happen among community colleges, but even that will be more difficult). The expectations of the positions are rapidly diverging, and potential leaders are going to have to choose where they want to be. Given the politics of higher education employees, blue-state jobs may be seen as more desirable. But these positions often face more financial constraints due to declining enrollments and tight state budgets, in addition to whatever else comes from Washington. Red-state jobs may come with more resources, but they also are likely to come with more strings attached.

It is also worth noting that even vice president and dean positions are likely to face these same two challenges due to presidential transitions and the desire of some states to clean house within higher education. That makes the future of the administrative pipeline even more challenging.

The View from a Closed Campus

Quite a bit of my research and public writing in the last few years has been on the topic of college closures and institutions in financial distress. I’m also a bit on the nerdy side, as evidenced by the fact that I am still trying to figure out who sent us a Stata onesie when our first child arrived several years ago. So it’s not a surprise that I jumped on the opportunity to be able to visit the former Iowa Wesleyan University while taking a family trip this summer.

A bit of the backstory on Iowa Wesleyan: it was founded in 1842 in Mount Pleasant, Iowa as the first co-educational private institution west of the Mississippi River. After Parsons College in nearby Fairfield suddenly collapsed and closed in 1973, it was the only traditional four-year institution within a 50-mile radius. And the two closest larger institutions (the University of Iowa and Truman State University in Missouri—my alma mater) are relatively selective, leaving Iowa Wesleyan with a market niche.

But as the tri-state area of southeast Iowa, northeast Missouri, and western Illinois saw a decline in the number of high school graduates, the university struggled. The university received $26 million in a US Department of Agriculture loan to help avoid a closure in 2018 (helped by the Secretary of Agriculture’s wife being on the board. But even as enrollment increased (thanks to athletics), tuition revenue did not. A last-ditch appeal to Iowa’s governor for $12 million failed, and the college closed in 2023; the campus then went to the USDA as its main creditor.

Figuring out what to do with a closed college campus is always a challenge, as these campuses are built for a particular purpose and deferred maintenance is often an issue. Campuses in rural areas face particular concerns, as it is much harder to attract a buyer when there is a smaller population base nearby. Mount Pleasant was fortunate to find several buyers for parts of the campus when the USDA put it up for sale. The primary owner of the campus is the local school district, which bought athletic facilities and an auditorium. The district is also considering putting an elementary school on the site to use existing facilities as much as possible.

Here are some pictures of the campus, and a big thank you to P.E.O. International (my wife is a member of this group that supports women’s education) for the opportunity to tour the campus’s oldest building. The campus grounds are neat and tidy, but there are certainly signs of deferred maintenance issues throughout.

The Iowa Wesleyan signs have been replaced with signs for the local school district.

The main quad of campus. It still looks like a great place to hang out.

The original building on IWU’s campus. It is stately, but also has maintenance issues.

Stained glass windows just don’t exist like this any more.

Providing a sense of the facilities challenges of a campus that is well over 100 years old.

And as an aside, a Google search for Iowa Wesleyan shows the following website as the top result. Note the .com on the website and the random international phone number (from India) at the bottom right corner. It looks like a fraud.

The admissions page is actually active, but it seems even more dubious than the rest of the site. Someone duplicated the website for their own uses.

New Research on the Prevalence and Effects of Differential Tuition Policies

I am thrilled to share a new open-access article in AERA Open that I wrote on the topic of differential tuition policies at public universities. Differential tuition, in which students pay higher charges for fields of study that are more expensive to operate and/or are in high demand among students, have anecdotally become more popular in recent years. Yet the only published research on the effects of differential tuition (a great study that motivated my work) focused on public research universities that adopted differential tuition by the 2007-08 academic year.

I decided to slowly chip away at collecting data on the presence of differential tuition in business, engineering, and nursing programs between the 2003-04 and 2022-23 academic years. It took me more than three months to compile a dataset that you can download here, and then several additional months to do data checks and write the paper (with the help of a new research assistant who debuted during the project and alternated between sleeping and data entry).

Notably, nearly half of all public universities—and just over half of all research universities—adopted differential tuition by the 2022-23 academic year. While I did not have the resources to collect data on the amount of the differential (funders, reach out if you’re interested in supporting an extension of this work!), differentials ranged from a few dollars per credit hour to several thousand dollars per year.

I then examined whether the adoption of differential tuition increased the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in business, engineering, or nursing. In general, there were no effects on business or nursing and some modest increases in the number of engineering degrees. However, any benefits of expanded access largely accrued to White students.

Check out the full article and let me know what you think. I am certainly open to extending this work, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Post-Pandemic Trends in Student Fees at Public Universities

Amid everything going on in the world of higher education right now, it is easy to forget that this is the time of year that students and families are trying to figure out whether they can afford to attend college. This is when I typically get a bunch of questions from journalists across the country about the extent to which college is affordable, and I do my best to provide helpful information.

I have written about student fees at public universities in the past, and the topic is the source of several questions in the last few weeks. In response to that, I updated my work to examine the most up-to-date data available on trends in student fees at public universities that include a look at what has happened since the pandemic. I did this using data on 499 public universities from the 2011-12 through the 2023-24 academic years, excluding about two dozen institutions (including all of Massachusetts) that “reset” fees by shifting most of their fees into tuition at some point during the period. The data for this analysis can be downloaded here.

Overall, tuition went up by 37% between fall 2011 and fall 2023, while fees went up by 40%. This is slightly higher than the 35% overall rate of inflation (as measured by the Consumer Price Index) over this same period. It also marks a change from the 2000s, in which fees went up substantially more than tuition. The growth in tuition and fees slowed considerably around the pandemic, which reflects an increase in the number of tuition freezes during the period and difficulties increasing fees while many students were studying remotely.

But in fall 2023, fees increased more quickly than tuition. The question is whether that becomes a trend—and whether that will be able to be studied using federal data. It would be possible to continue this analysis by collecting data from institutional websites or fact books, but it would also require a number of assumptions about how to handle the complicated structures of differential tuition by field of study and number of credits taken.

Budget Freezes Are Coming for Higher Education

During the last three weeks, I have thought a lot about the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. By the end of the first full week of March, it was clear to me that colleges would close their physical campuses for a while. I had stepped in as the department chair at Seton Hall just a few months prior, but I immediately stepped into action by trying to prepare my faculty and staff as much as possible for a period of remote operations.

We still had two faculty searches scheduled during March, and we went ahead and brought the first set of candidates to campus even though everyone began to realize that things were shutting down shortly. It was an awkward set of interviews because I had a strong sense that the positions would be cancelled on account of the financial losses coming from students being sent home. And although one search was able to proceed, the other search was scuttled as the effects of the pandemic became clear.

Fast forward five years. I’m now a veteran department head at a much better resourced university, but higher education is facing more uncertainty now than since March 2020 due to the bulldozer of the Trump administration’s attempted and proposed changes. While it does not appear that student financial aid will be affected in the short term, all federal grants and contracts are certainly up in the air even though some of them enjoy legal protections. It’s one heck of a semester to be teaching higher education finance, as I found out during class Monday night that the wrecking ball came for the legally mandated Institute of Education Sciences. (I had a sizable grant proposal under review there to study the woke topic of career and technical education, but I guess that isn’t happening.)

The higher education field still bears scars from the pandemic, and one key one is the need for financial liquidity. Colleges are scared about making long-term financial commitments in general, as they are concerned about future enrollment and cost trends. So throw in potentially massive cuts to research support and other federal grants to institutions, and there is a natural tendency to pull back funding.

I’m not the smartest person out there, but I would be shocked if research universities in particular are not having serious conversations about freezing unnecessary spending given the potential scope of federal funding cuts (which are currently paused per a court order, but it isn’t clear if the federal government will actually follow the order). Washington State University announced yesterday afternoon that they are starting to plan for budget cuts, and I would not be surprised if politically insulated blue-state public and wealthy private universities follow suit. Other institutions are also likely doing so, but it will stay behind the scenes due to the fear of potential political retribution. Either way, expect quite a few pauses or freezes in institutional budgets, and we will see how long they last.

Although my university has not made any public statements about the potential financial path forward and I am not involved in any university budget conversations, I am certainly nervous about the path forward given that my department has three open faculty searches. We are in outstanding financial shape overall, but there is no telling what will happen in the coming weeks and months. I’m going to do everything I can to move quickly on searches just in case.

Finally, two other thoughts about the current situation. The first one is that while the higher education industry cares deeply about the finances of our sector and potential budget or hiring freezes, this is not an argument that resonates at all among most of the public. Plenty of Americans see higher education as in need of going on a diet, so fighting budget cuts on fairness arguments will not be effective. But talking about what would be lost, such as medical and agricultural research, can be a lot more effective. Higher education needs to do much more to convince a skeptical public of its value.

Second, I am concerned about how the leadership pipeline will be affected by all of the uncertainty coming out of Washington. I often wonder why anyone would want to be a college president, but that is amplified even more given the near impossibility of the current situation. It’s much better for individuals (especially those who desire some kind of work/life balance or have dependents) to stay put in the short term and let things play out instead of jumping into positions where it may be impossible to succeed.

Which Colleges Always Lose Money?

It is safe to say that there is a lot of concern right now about the financial viability of higher education. And while I think fewer colleges are going to close than pundits predict (and check out my recent NBER working paper on factors associated with college closures), it is still going to be a bumpy ride as colleges try to cut costs after efforts to increase revenue are unsuccessful.

By far, the most popular piece on my blog in 2024 (representing nearly one-fourth of all traffic to my website) was a fairly quick look at which private colleges consistently lost money over the last decade. Now that a new year of data on institutional finances (through Fiscal Year 2023) came out through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, I am revisiting this and also including public universities.

I looked at the operating margins (revenues minus expenses) private nonprofit colleges and public universities for the past ten years (Fiscal Years 2014 through 2023). This analysis included 938 private and 525 public institutions in the 50 states and Washington, DC and excluded colleges with any missing data, two-year institutions, or special-focus institutions based on the most recent Carnegie classifications.

You can download the dataset here, with highlighted private colleges having closed since IPEDS data were collected.

The first takeaway is that the share of private colleges with losses varies much more than the share of public institutions, and this is driven by a combination of investment returns at private institutions and the backstop that state funding provides for public universities. More than four in ten private colleges posted a loss in Fiscal Year 2023—twice the rate of public universities. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the percentage of public universities with revenues failing to match expenditures has been cut in half. Federal covid relief funds are now gone, however, and state budgets look wobbly.

The two figures below show the number of years in the last decade that both private and public universities posted losses. Most private colleges saw surpluses more often than deficits, with only 14 percent of institutions losing money in more than five years. Seventy-one private colleges never posted a loss during this period, and they are generally less-selective institutions such as Miles College in Alabama, Dordt University in Iowa, and the University of Northwestern in Minnesota (the better-known Northwestern in Illinois posted losses in three years when the stock market went down). A few better-known private universities that managed to stay in the black every year included Southern Methodist University, Liberty University, Southern New Hampshire University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, 27 colleges posted losses in eight or more years. Notably, five of these colleges (bolded) have closed or announced closures in the last year or so, and another one (Bacone College in Oklahoma) is not currently offering classes. While some institutions can withstand consistent losses through one-time donations or activities that are not well captured on balance sheets, it is difficult for most colleges. Take for example Judson Universitty in Illinois, which has lost money in eight of the last ten years. Their IRS Form 990 filings show that net assets have declined from more than $44 million in the early 2010s to just under $27 million today—not a good trend.

Name	State	Losses
Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico-Orlando	FL	10
Roberts Wesleyan University	NY	10
Trinity International University-Florida	FL	9
Cambridge College	MA	9
Fontbonne University	MO	9
Bethany College	WV	9
Golden Gate University	CA	8
Pacific Union College	CA	8
Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico-Miami	FL	8
Hawaii Pacific University	HI	8
Judson University	IL	8
Southwestern College	KS	8
Webster University	MO	8
University of Providence	MT	8
Drew University	NJ	8
Elmira College	NY	8
Hilbert College	NY	8
St. Francis College	NY	8
The College of Saint Rose	NY	8
Yeshiva University	NY	8
Antioch College	OH	8
Lourdes University	OH	8
Bacone College (on hiatus)	OK	8
Warner Pacific University	OR	8
Cabrini University	PA	8
University of Valley Forge	PA	8
Waynesburg University	PA	8

While a larger share of public universities than private colleges never posted a loss, more public universities (16 percent) lost money in at least five of the last ten years. In general, most flagship public universities did exceedingly well and many never lost money. But 22 institutions lost money in eight out of ten years, with 15 of them being located in New York. It is indeed a tough time for many regional public universities, even though they are at very low risk of closure.

Name	State	Losses
University of New Hampshire at Manchester	NH	10
SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry	NY	10
SUNY College of Technology at Delhi	NY	10
SUNY at Fredonia	NY	10
SUNY at Purchase College	NY	10
Rutgers University-Camden	NJ	9
SUNY Buffalo State University	NY	9
SUNY College at Geneseo	NY	9
SUNY College at Potsdam	NY	9
SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill	NY	9
SUNY Maritime College	NY	9
SUNY Old Westbury	NY	9
University of Hawaii-West Oahu	HI	8
Northern Illinois University	IL	8
University of Illinois Springfield	IL	8
Northern Kentucky University	KY	8
CUNY Graduate School and University Center	NY	8
College of Staten Island CUNY	NY	8
SUNY Brockport	NY	8
SUNY College of Technology at Canton	NY	8
State University of New York at Oswego	NY	8
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania	PA	8

In addition to new finance data, there are also new data on fall enrollments and staffing levels. I encourage researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to take a look through the data to learn more about the current (well, as current as possible given data lags) state of higher education.

My 2025 Higher Ed Finance Reading List

I hope that everyone had a restful break and is excited to come back for what will undoubtedly be an eventful year in the world of higher education. This spring is going to be quite busy for me with three faculty searches, our once-a-decade academic program review, the most travel for presentations that I have had since before the start of the pandemic, and responding to a host of media and policymaker requests about what will be happening over the next few months.

To add to the excitement of the coming few months, I have the pleasure of teaching my PhD class in higher education finance again. As a department head, I typically only get to teach one class per year. This is my absolute favorite class to teach, as it aligns well with my research areas and on-the-ground experience as a cog in the bureaucratic machine at two different universities. Each time, I have updated the readings considerably as the field is moving quickly and I figure out what works best for the students. I use articles, working papers, news coverage, and other online resources to provide a current look at the state of higher education finance.

Here is the reading list I am assigning my students for the course (see here for past versions and other teaching musings). I link to the final versions of the articles whenever possible, but those without access to an academic library should note that earlier versions of many of these articles are available online via a quick Google search.

Happy reading!

The higher education finance landscape and data sources

Burke, L. (2023). Department of Education. In P. Dans & S. Groves (Eds.), Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise (pp. 319-362). The Heritage Foundation.(link)

Schanzenbach, D. W., Bauer, L., & Breitwieser, A. (2017). Eight economic facts on higher education. The Hamilton Project. (link)

Webber, D. A. (2021). A growing divide: The promise and pitfalls of higher education for the working class. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 695, 94-106. (link)

Recommended data sources:

College Scorecard: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ (underlying data at https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/)

Equality of Opportunity Project: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/college

IPEDS: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data

NCES Data Lab: https://nces.ed.gov/datalab/index.aspx

Postsecondary Value Commission’s Equitable Value Explorer: https://www.postsecondaryvalue.org/equitable-value-explorer/

ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

Urban Institute’s Data Explorer: https://educationdata.urban.org/data-explorer/colleges/

Institutional budgeting

Barr, M.J., & McClellan, G.S. (2010). Understanding budgets. In Budgets and financial management in higher education (pp. 55-85). Jossey-Bass. (link)

Jaquette, O., Kramer II, D. A., & Curs, B. R. (2018). Growing the pie? The effect of responsibility center management on tuition revenue. The Journal of Higher Education, 89(5), 637-676. (link)

Rutherford, A., & Rabovsky, T. (2018). Does the motivation for market-based reform matter? The case of responsibility-centered management. Public Administration Review, 78(4), 626-639. (link)

University of Tennessee System’s FY2025 budget: https://finance.tennessee.edu/budget/documents/

University of Tennessee System’s FY2023 annual financial report: https://treasurer.tennessee.edu/reports/

UTK’s Budget Allocation Model (responsibility center management) website: https://budget.utk.edu/budget-allocation-model/

Higher education expenditures

Archibald, R. B., & Feldman, D. H. (2018). Drivers of the rising price of a college education. Midwestern Higher Education Compact. (link)

Commonfund Institute (2024). 2024 higher education price index. (link)

Griffith, A. L., & Rask, K. N. (2016). The effect of institutional expenditures on employment outcomes and earnings. Economic Inquiry, 54(4), 1931-1945. (link)

Hemelt, S. W., Stange, K. M., Furquim, F., Simon, A., & Sawyer, J. E. (2021). Why is math cheaper than English? Understanding cost differences in higher education. Journal of Labor Economics, 39(2), 397-435. (link)

Korn, M., Fuller, A., & Forsyth, J. S. (2023, August 10). Colleges spend like there’s no tomorrow. ‘These places are just devouring money.’ The Wall Street Journal. (link)

The financial viability of higher education

Britton, T., Rall, R. M., & Commodore, F. (2023). The keys to endurance: An investigation of the institutional factors relating to the persistence of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The Journal of Higher Education, 94(3), 310-332. (link)

Ducoff, N. (2019, December 9). Students pay the price if a college fails. So why are we protecting failing institutions? The Hechinger Report. (link)

Jesse, D., & Bauman, D. (2023, November 13). This small college was out of options. Will its creditors give it a break? The Chronicle of Higher Education. (link)

Kelchen, R., Ritter, D., & Webber, D. A. (2024). Predicting college closures and financial distress. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 33216. (link)

Tarrant, M., Bray, N., & Katsinas, S. (2018). The invisible colleges revisited: An empirical review. The Journal of Higher Education, 89(3), 341-367. (link)

State sources of revenue

Chakrabarti, R., Gorton, N., & Lovenheim, M. F. (2020). State investment in higher education: Effects on human capital formation, student debt, and long-term financial outcomes of students. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 27885. (link)

Gándara, D. (2024). “One of the weakest budget players in the state”: State funding of higher education at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 46(3), 458-482. (link)

Kelchen, R., Ortagus, J. C., Rosinger, K. O., Baker, D., & Lingo, M. (2024). The relationships between state higher education funding strategies and college access and success. Educational Researcher, 53(2), 100-110. (link)

Kunkle, K. (2024). State higher education finance: FY 2023. State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. (link)

Ortagus, J. C., Kelchen, R., Rosinger, K. O., & Voorhees, N. (2020). Performance-based funding in American higher education: A systematic synthesis of the intended and unintended consequences. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(4), 520-550. (link)

Tennessee’s outcomes-based funding formula: https://www.tn.gov/thec/bureaus/ppr/fiscal-policy/outcomes-based-funding-formula-resources/2020-25-obf.html

Federal sources of revenue

American Enterprise Institute, EducationCounsel, and The Century Foundation (2024). Taking a balanced approach: Six proposals to fairly and effectively reform federal graduate financing policy from across the ideological spectrum. (link)

Bergman, P., Denning, J. T., & Manoli, D. (2019). Is information enough? The effect of information about education tax benefits on student outcomes. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 38(3), 706-731. (link)

Black, S. E., Turner, L. J., & Denning, J. T. (2023). PLUS or minus? The effect of graduate school loans on access, attainment, and prices. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 31291. (link)

Graddy-Reed, A., Feldman, M., Bercovitz, J., & Langford, W. S. (2021). The distribution of indirect cost recovery in academic research. Science and Public Policy, 48(3), 364-386. (link)

Kelchen, R., & Liu, Z. (2022). Did gainful employment regulations result in college and program closures? Education Finance and Policy, 17(3), 454-478. (link)

College pricing, tuition revenue, and endowments

American Council on Education (2024). Understanding college and university endowments. (link)

Bauman, D. (2024, April 22). Amid financial headwinds, some colleges are digging deeper into their endowments. Will more follow? The Chronicle of Higher Education. (link)

Delaney, T., & Marcotte, D. E. (2024). The cost of public higher education and college enrollment. The Journal of Higher Education, 95(4), 496-525. (link)

Kelchen, R., & Pingel, S. (2024). Examining the effects of tuition controls on student enrollment. Research in Higher Education, 65, 70-91. (link)

Knox, L. (2023, December 4). Seeking an enrollment Hail Mary, small colleges look to athletics. Inside Higher Ed. (link)

Ma, J. Pender, M., & Oster, M. (2024). Trends in college pricing and student aid 2024. The College Board. (link)

Webber, D. A. (2017). State divestment and tuition at public institutions. Economics of Education Review, 60, 1-4. (link)

Financial aid policies, practices, and impacts

Anderson, D. M., Broton, K. M., Goldrick-Rab, S., & Kelchen, R. (2020). Experimental evidence on the impacts of need-based financial aid: Longitudinal assessment of the Wisconsin Scholars Grant. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 39(3), 720-739. (link)

Billings, M. S., Clayton, A. B., & Worsham, R. (2022). FAFSA and beyond: How advisers manage their administrative burden in the financial aid process. Journal of Student Financial Aid, 51(2), Article 2. (link)

Dynarski, S., Page, L. C., & Scott-Clayton, J. (2022). College costs, financial aid, and student decisions. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 30275. (link)

LaSota, R. R., Polanin, J. R., Perna, L. W., Austin, M. J., Steingut, R. R., & Rodgers, M. A. (2022). The effects of losing postsecondary student grant aid: Results from a systematic review. Educational Researcher, 51(2), 160-168. (link)

Page, L. C., Sacerdote, B. I, Goldrick-Rab, S., & Castleman, B. L. (2023). Financial aid nudges: A national experiment with informational interventions. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 45(2), 195-219. (link)

Student debt and financing college

Black, S. E., Denning, J. T., Dettling, L. J., Goodman, S., & Turner, L. (2020). Taking it to the limit: Effects of increased student loan availability on attainment, earnings, and financial well-being. American Economic Review, 113(12), 3357-3400. (link)

Boatman, A., Evans, B. J., & Soliz, A. (2017). Understanding loan aversion in education: Evidence from high school seniors, community college students, and adults. AERA Open, 3(1), 1-16. (link)

Levine, P. B., & Ritter, D. (2024). The racial wealth gap, financial aid, and college access. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 43(2), 555-581. (link)

Looney, A., & Yannelis, C. (2024). What went wrong with federal student loans? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 38(3), 209-236. (link)

Monarrez, T., & Turner, L. J. (2024). The effect of student loan payment burdens and nonfinancial frictions on borrower outcomes. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 24-08. (link)

Free college/college promise programs

Carruthers, C. K., Fox, W. F., & Jepsen, C. (2023). What Knox achieved: Estimated effects of tuition-free community college on attainment and earnings. The Journal of Human Resources. (link)

Gándara, D., & Li, A. Y. (2020). Promise for whom? “Free-college” programs and enrollments by race and gender classifications at public, 2-year colleges. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(4), 603-627. (link)

Monaghan, D. B. (2023). How well do students understand “free community college”? Promise programs as informational interventions. AERA Open, 9(1), 1-13. (link)

Murphy, R., Scott-Clayton, J., & Wyness, G. (2017). Lessons from the end of free college in England. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. (link)

Perna, L. W., Leigh, E. W., & Carroll, S. (2018). “Free college:” A new and improved state approach to increasing educational attainment? American Behavioral Scientist, 61(14), 1740-1756. (link)

Map of college promise/free college programs (Penn AHEAD) (link)

Returns to education

Conzelmann, J. G., Hemelt, S. W., Hershbein, B. J., Martin, S., Simon, A., & Stange, K. M. (2023). Grads on the go: Measuring college-specific labor markets for graduates. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. (link)

Darity, Jr., W. A., & Underwood, M. (2021). Reconsidering the relationship between higher education, earnings, and productivity. Postsecondary Value Commission. (link)

Deterding, N. M., & Pedulla, D. S. (2016). Educational authority in the “open door” marketplace: Labor market consequences of for-profit, nonprofit, and fictional educational credentials. Sociology of Education, 89(3), 155-170. (link)

Ma, J., & Pender, M. (2023). Education pays 2023: The benefits of higher education for individuals and society. The College Board. (link)

Zhang, L., Liu, X., & Hu, Y. (2024). Degrees of return: Estimating internal rates of return for college majors using quantile regression. American Educational Research Journal, 61(3), 577-609. (link)