Estimating Students' Valuation for College Experiences. Working Paper 28511

Autor/inn/en	Aucejo, Esteban M.; French, Jacob F.; Zafar, Basit
Institution	National Bureau of Economic Research
Titel	Estimating Students' Valuation for College Experiences. Working Paper 28511
Quelle	(2021) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Monographie
Schlagwörter	College Students; Student Experience; COVID-19; Pandemics; Probability; Enrollment; Paying for College; Student Costs; Economically Disadvantaged; Social Life; Conventional Instruction; Distance Education + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Collegestudent; Studienerfahrung; Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung; Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie; Einschulung; Studienfinanzierung; Studienkosten; Soziales Leben; Distance study; Distance learning; Fernunterricht
Abstract	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. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	National Bureau of Economic Research. 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-5398. Tel: 617-588-0343; Web site: http://www.nber.org
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01