Morton Owen Schapiro

Keeping College Affordable. Government and Educational Opportunity.

As Congress debates the reauthorization of the basic federal student aid legislation, and as governors and state legislators cope with increasingly severe budgetary problems of their own, the issues of preserving college opportunity and sharing the burden of college costs are particularly critical and timely. This book assesses the role of government subsidies for higher education --especially but not exclusively federal student aid --in keeping college affordable for Americans of all economic and social backgrounds. The authors examine the effects of student aid policies of the last twenty years. They address several vital questions, including: Has federal student aid encouraged the enrollment and broadened the educational choices of disadvantaged students? Has it made higher education institutions more secure and educationally more effective --or has it raised costs and prices as schools try to capture additional aid? Has federal student aid made the distribution of higher educations benefits, and the sharing of costs, fairer? And what are the likely trends in patterns of college affordability?Drawing on their analysis, the authors highlight some of the principal dimensions of policy choice on which the debate has focused, as well as some that have been relatively neglected. Building upon their conclusion that student aid works, they propose reforms that would bolster the role of income-tested aid in the overall student financing picture. McPherson and Schapiro recommend a number of incremental reforms that could improve the effectiveness of existing federal aid programs and present a proposal to replace a substantial fraction of state-operating subsidies to colleges and universities with expanded federal aid.

Socioeconomic ramifications of changing cohort size: an analysis of U.S. postwar suicide rates by age and sex

This paper presents a relative cohort size model of suicide. The model states that as relative cohort size (the ratio of younger to older workers) rises, income and income aspirations diverge for the young. One possible extreme reaction to this disequilibrium is suicide. The model explains the variation in age- and sex-specific suicide rates for the United States over the period 1948 to 1976. It identifies the direct effect of changes in cohort size on suicide rates as well as the indirect effect operating through other demographic variables. The model predicts the suicide rates for males above 45 years of age to rise and those for all other groups to decline. For most groups this is a reversal of recent movements in their suicide rates.

Inheritance Laws Across Colonies: Causes and Consequences

We examine in this paper both the causes and consequences of inheritance laws in the colonies. We argue that the continuation of intestate inheritance laws over the colonial period was due in part to their compatibility with economic efficiency. In the North, multigeniture helped motivate family labor, whereas the passive acceptance of the British inheritance system of primogeniture in the South rested on its promotion of large plantations that could capture economies of scale. In terms of effects, a strong bequest motive in the colonies adopting multigeniture reduced the variability in demographic experiences across colonies with different inheritance systems.

The Microeconomics of College Choice, Careers, and Wages: Measuring the Impact of Higher Education

Understanding the economic payoff to human investments is very important from the standpoint both of individuals and of society. Correctly estimating these impacts necessitates having a well-developed idea of the microeconomic determinants of human behavior. Without this, empirical analyses of such topics as career choice, college choice, or wage determination will be flawed. We begin with a discussion of why these choice models are important--using examples of similar attempts that do not capture sufficient information--and illustrate their usefulness in a variety of contexts. We also describe the results of our attempts to examine college choice using microeconomic models.

Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which contingent faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from contingent faculty in their firstterm courses. This result is driven by the fact that the bottom quarter of tenure track/tenured faculty (as indicted by our measure of teaching effectiveness) has lower “value added” than their contingent counterparts. Differences between contingent and tenure track/tenured faculty are present across a wide variety of subject areas and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s averages and less-qualified students.

Microeconomics of College Choice, Careers, and Wages

Understanding the economic payoff to human capital investments is very important from the standpoint both of individuals and of society. However, this article argues that correctly estimating these impacts necessitates having a well-developed idea of the microeconomic determinants of human behavior. Without this, empirical analyses of such topics as career choice, college choice, or wage determination will be flawed. The authors begin the article with a discussion of why these choice models are important—using examples of similar attempts that do not capture sufficient information—and illustrate their usefulness in a variety of contexts. They also describe the results of their attempts to examine college choice using microeconomic models.

Land Availability and Fertility in the United States, 1760–1870

The decline in US fertility rates beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century is examined within a general model of fertility determination. The ability of land availability measures to explain the variation in components of the crude birth rate is tested using a pooled regression technique. A set of crude birth rate predictions for rural areas of 23 northern states during the period 1760-1870 is produced and compared with other estimates. It is concluded that the availability of land was a critical factor in determining the demand for children and ultimately the fertility rate across states and over time. (authors)

Homicide and fertility rates in the United States: a comment

The negative correlation between annual homicide and fertility rates reported by Lyster (1974) is confirmed by statistical analysis extended to show that the correlation is largely confined to the post-World War 2 and holds for whites and nonwhites in nearly equal degree. Data support the hypothesis that homicide and fertility rates are responding to variations in psychological stress among young adults associated with swings in relative cohort size, the proportion of those ages 15-29 to those ages 30-64. It is suggested that periods of increase in the relative number of young men weakens their labor market position, and the result is to increase psychological stress, to discourage traditional role fulfillment such as family building, and to encourage antisocial behavior, indexed here by homicide rate.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF RELATIVE INCOME AND RELATIVE COHORT SIZE

Abstract A nonlinear three-stage least-squares technique is used to estimate a four-equation model in which age-specific fertility, marriage, divorce, and female labor force participation rates are the dependent variables. In addition to a range of explanatory variables, two proxies for the Easterlin hypothesis are tested within the model, one measuring relative income and the other measuring relative cohort size. Findings indicate that the Easterlin proxies, while not statistically significant in all cases, help to explain time-series movements in various socio-economic variables in the postwar United States.

Chapter 24 US Higher Education Finance

Abstract We review basic facts about higher education finance in the United States and analytical, empirical and policy issues in that realm. Examining trends in higher education finance, we demonstrate growth in the share of revenues provided by government up to about 1980, with a steady decline thereafter. Student financial aid, a feature of growing importance, is awarded to students on the basis both of financial need and academic (and other) merit, with merit influencing not only total amounts of aid received but also the “quality” of aid packages, as indexed by the fraction of aid in the form of grants rather than loans or work. Although nearly two-thirds of American high school graduates now attend some form of post-secondary education, both whether and where they attend are importantly influenced by family background. Among students who score well on aptitude tests in high school, 95% of those from affluent family backgrounds attend college immediately following graduation, while only about 75% of those from low SES backgrounds do. High-income students are also more likely to attend private universities and colleges than are lower-income students, who are particularly likely to attend community colleges. Much more attention has been devoted to examining the demand for higher education than to explaining its supply. We review a number of topics on the supply side, including the state of evidence concerning the pricing and output levels of government financed and of nonprofit institutions as well as concerning the impact of government financial aid policies on institutional pricing and aid decisions. An important analytical and empirical challenge in studying higher education supply is the fact that institutional enrollment levels are regulated by selective admissions as well as by price.