ERIC Number: ED611986
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Feb
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Abstractor: As Provided
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Estimating Students' Valuation for College Experiences. Working Paper 28511
Aucejo, Esteban M.; French, Jacob F.; Zafar, Basit
National Bureau of Economic Research
The college experience involves much more than credit hours and degrees. Students likely derive utility from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities. Quantitative measures of the value of these individual components have been hard to come by. Leveraging the COVID-19 shock, we elicit students' intended likelihood of enrolling in higher education under different costs and possible states of the world. These states, which would have been unimaginable in the absence of the pandemic, vary in terms of class formats and restrictions to campus social life. We show how such data can be used to recover college student's willingness-to-pay (WTP) for college-related activities in the absence of COVID-19, without parametric assumptions on the underlying heterogeneity in WTP. We find that the WTP for in-person instruction (relative to a remote format) represents around 4.2% of the average annual net cost of attending university, while the WTP for on-campus social activities is 8.1% of the average annual net costs. We also find large heterogeneity in WTP, which varies systematically across socioeconomic groups. Our analysis shows that economically-disadvantaged students derive substantially lower value from university social life, but this is primarily due to time and resource constraints.
Descriptors: College Students, Student Experience, COVID-19, Pandemics, Probability, Enrollment, Paying for College, Student Costs, Economically Disadvantaged, Social Life, Conventional Instruction, Distance Education
National Bureau of Economic Research. 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-5398. Tel: 617-588-0343; Web site: http://www.nber.org
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
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Language: English
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Authoring Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research
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