Monday, December 28, 2009

Net Price Transparency

by Andrew Gillen

How much faith should we put in the ability of the soon to be mandatory net price calculators to temper tuition increases? Perhaps not much.

I still think they're a good idea, but we shouldn't expect too much from it.

1 comment:

Steve said...

I'm not sure if the intent is to hold does tuition inflation. If the government want to do that it could just... do it.

The real benefit will be students being able to assess the real cost of college. Some will find it's more expensive than they thought and might not go. But that is good. Many low income people will find it's much cheaper than they thought and go. This is particularly good in my opinion.

(There is a neat study on demand for education in developing countries where they provided more information on returns to education. Some people found out returns were lower and stopped sending kids, but most realized the benefits were higher than expected and attendance increased. Since the "cost" of education is really benefits - cost, this is isomorphic.)