Charles T. Clotfelter

Since the early 1980s, the rapidly increasing cost of college, together with what many see as inadequate attention to teaching, has elicited a barrage of protest. Buying the Best looks at the realities behind these criticisms--at the economic factors that are in fact driving the institutions that have been described as machines without brakes. In designing his study, Charles Clotfelter examines the escalation in spending in the arts and sciences at four elite institutions: Harvard, Duke, Chicago, and Carleton. He argues that the rise in costs has less to do with increasing faculty salaries or lowered productivity than with a broad-based effort to improve quality, provide new services to students, pay for large investments in new facilities and equipment (including computers), and ensure access for low-income students through increasingly expensive financial aid. In Clotfelter's view, spiraling costs arise from the institutions' lofty ambitions and are made possible by steadily intensifying demand for places in the country's elite colleges and universities. Only if this demand slackens will universities be pressured to make cuts or pursue efficiencies. Buying the Best is the first study to make use of the internal historical records of specific institutions, as opposed to the frequently unreliable aggregate records made available by the federal government for the use of survey researchers. As such, it has the virtue of allowing Clotfelter to draw much more realistic comparative conclusions than have hitherto been reported. While acknowledging the obvious drawbacks of a small sample, Clotfelter notes that the institutions studied are significant for the disproportionate influence they, and comparable elite institutions, exercise upon research and upon the training of future leaders. The book contains a foreword by William G. Bowen, President of the Mellon Foundation, and Harold T. Shapiro, President of Princeton University. "Concern about ever-rising costs runs like a thread through the myriad critiques of higher education that have been published in recent years. . . . One of the great contributions of Clotfelter's work is to dismiss easy explanations for the problems that worry us. With some of the scales removed from their eyes, both those with responsibility for the future of higher education and observers who continue to expect an ever-wider scope of effort from particular colleges and universities, can now adjust their focus. Armed with this original and extremely useful analysis, we can confront more directly (and with less romanticism) the real choices before us as we seek to employ limited resources most effectively in the service of teaching and research."-William G. Bowen, President, Mellon Foundation, Harold T. Shapiro, President, Princeton University, from the foreword Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education

Buying the Best

This book expands on the argument that spectator sports, despite their problems, have become a central function of American universities.

Big-Time Sports in American Universities

Michael Rothschild

In the United States today, there are some 3,400 separately governed colleges and universities, amounting to a higher education industry with expenditures that constitute 2.8% of the gross national product. Yet, the economic issues affecting this industry have been paid relatively little attention. In this collection of eight essays, experts in economics and education bring economic analysis to bear on such underexamined topics as the nature of competition in higher education, higher education's use of resources, and who chooses to purchase what kind of education and why. In higher education, supply refers to such issues as government support for public colleges and universities, the means by which graduate programs allocate financial support to students, and the criteria that universities use for investing endowments. Demand pertains to patterns of student enrollment and to the government, business, and individual market for the service and research activities of higher education. Why are tuitions nearly the same among schools despite differences in prestige? How are institutions with small endowments able to compete successfully with institutions that have huge endowments? How are race and ethnicity reflected in enrollment trends? Where do the best students go? What choices among colleges do young people from low-income backgrounds face? This volume addresses these questions and suggests subjects for further study of the economics of higher education.

Studies of Supply and Demand in Higher Education

Philip J. Cook

Looks at the history of state lotteries, discusses whether lotteries are ethical and assesses their effectiveness as a source of government funding

Charles T. Clotfelter

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