Cohort Crowding: How Resources Affect Collegiate Attainment

By J. Bound, Sarah Turner. 2007

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Analyses of college attainment typically focus on factors affecting enrollment demand, including the financial attractiveness of a college education and the availability of financial aid, while implicitly assuming that resources available per student on the supply side of the market are elastically supplied. The higher education market in the United States is dominated by public and non-profit production, and colleges and universities receive considerable subsidies from state, federal, and private sources. Because consumers pay only a fraction of the cost of production, changes in demand are unlikely to be accommodated fully by colleges and universities without commensurate increases in non-tuition revenue. For this reason, public investment in higher education plays a crucial role in determining the degrees produced and the supply of college-educated workers to the labor market. Using data covering the last half of the twentieth century, we find strong evidence that large cohorts within states have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment, reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market. That large cohorts receive lower public subsidies per student in higher education explains this result, indicating that resources have large effects on degree production. Our results suggest that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of college-educated workers entering the labor market.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8552aa707aa02fdbc519c06e08e9d3ada579e700

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Citations in the corpus

Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Community College Student Success (2010, background): “When an increase in enrollment creates a crowding of students vying for scarce college resources, rates of degree completion tend to decline (Bound & Turner, 2007; Kurlaender, Grodsky, & Howell, 2009).”
The Impact of Price Caps and Spending Cuts on U.S. Postsecondary Attainment (2017, unknown): “Bound and Turner (2007) argue that informal capacity constraints caused by “cohort crowding” dilute college quality, while Bound et al. (2010) argue that resources per student and other supply 22Appendix Table A10 shows significantly larger impacts in year t on upper division enrollment compared to…”
Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Tradeoff (2016, unknown): “…Furthermore, this gap grew substantially across cohorts, suggesting that college quality is becoming more important over time. how graduation Bound and Turner (2007) use a different and novel source of variation in school quality derived from population variation to identify the role of…”
Small Differences That Matter: Mistakes in Applying to College (2015, background): “Bound and Turner ð2007Þ find that college slots are partially elastic, suggesting that full crowding out is unlikely.”
The Rug Rat Race (2010, methodology): “The Bound et al. (2009) index of competitiveness by state is constructed by summing the following variables at the state level: PSAT participation rates, AP participation rates, fraction of students reporting 10+ homework hours per week, the fraction applying to 5 or more colleges, and the fraction ”
The Impact of Tuition Increases on Enrollment at Public Colleges and Universities (2011, background): “For example, Bound and Turner (2006) provided evidence that over the past half century, large cohorts of college-age students faced higher net costs and subsequently lower rates of undergraduate degree attainment.”