IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v13y1978i2p157-186.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Product Mix and Cost Disaggregation: A Reinterpretation of the Economics of Higher Education

Author

Listed:
  • Estelle James

Abstract

This paper attempts to separate undergraduate, graduate, and research costs at the university. Since the proportion of resources allocated to each of these activities varies systematically across time and institutions, this disaggregation alters our cross-sectional and intertemporal picture of productivity, net benefits, and subsidies in higher education. Real undergraduate costs are shown to be much lower than previously assumed and the social rate of return higher; educational "productivity" has been rising through time, contrary to popular belief. Undergraduate education is now a profitable "production" activity at universities, used to subsidize their "consumption" of loss-making graduate education. Community college teaching is more costly and heavily subsidized than university teaching of lower-division students.

Suggested Citation

  • Estelle James, 1978. "Product Mix and Cost Disaggregation: A Reinterpretation of the Economics of Higher Education," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 13(2), pages 157-186.
    • Handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:13:y:1978:i:2:p:157-186
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/145357
    Download Restriction: A subscripton is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:13:y:1978:i:2:p:157-186. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://jhr.uwpress.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.