Abstract
Over the past few decades, public universities have faced significant declines in state funding per student. We investigate whether these declines affected the educational and research outcomes of these schools. Declining funding induced public universities to shift toward tuition as their primary source of revenue. Selective research universities enrolled more out-of-state and international students who pay full fare and increased in-state tuitions, moderating impacts on expenditures. Public universities outside the research sector had fewer options to replace stagnating state appropriations, requiring diminished expenditures and increased in-state tuitions. We find suggestive evidence that cuts have negatively affected research, and more definitive evidence that they adversely affected degree attainment at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Bound, John, Breno Braga, Gaurav Khanna, and Sarah Turner. 2019. “Public Universities: The Supply Side of Building a Skilled Workforce.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(5): 43–66. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.5.03. We thank Seynabou Diop, Max Huppertz, and Jennifer Mayo for excellent research assistance, Alexandra Tammaro for editorial assistance, and Harry Holzer, Sandy Baum, Michael McPherson, participants in the Russell Sage Foundation conference, and two reviewers for insightful comments. Direct correspondence to: John Bound at jbound{at}umich.edu, University of Michigan, Department of Economics, 611 Tappan Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109; Breno Braga at bbraga{at}urban.org; Gaurav Khanna at gakhanna{at}ucsd.edu; and Sarah Turner at sturner{at}virginia.edu.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.