Economics and Finances of Higher Education

This project will support new research on the financial challenges facing the U.S. higher education sector, and on the financial implications of many of the evolving trends affecting colleges and universities. These trends include a stagnating number of college-age students, growing student debt burdens, an imperative to deliver more diverse, equitable, and inclusive outcomes, the rise of remote learning, the rise of public-private partnerships in funding research, and low expected safe returns in capital markets. The grant will result in a set of new research papers by leading experts in the economic analysis of education, and in financial economics, on key issues in the analysis of and financial management of colleges and universities. The papers will be broadly disseminated in the NBER working paper series and will be published in a proceedings volume in the NBER series at the University of Chicago Press.