VOX  CEPR Policy Portal

Distance learning technologies are attracting attention as demand for higher education grows around the world, but credible evidence on their effects on students’ outcomes is scarce. This column studies the impact of online live streaming of lectures on student achievement and attendance in a experiment with first-year undergraduate students at the University of Geneva. It finds that students use the live streaming technology only when events make attending class too costly, and that attending lectures via live streaming lowers achievement for low-ability students but increases it for high-ability ones.

Graduates of top universities hold a large share of leadership positions in big firms. At the same time, elite universities are aiming to expand access to middle- and low-income students. Yet, it is unclear whether the benefits of attending top universities accrue to students from poor backgrounds. This column examines new evidence from Chile and finds that admission to highly selective, business-focused degree programmes has very large effects on the rates at which male students from wealthy backgrounds attain top jobs and incomes, but little or no effect for female students and non-wealthy male students.

Feedback has been found to improve exam performance in the context of higher education, but demand for feedback is low among students when obtaining it requires unrewarded effort. This column evaluates how the provision of extrinsic incentives affects students’ effort and performance. Having online learning assessments count towards final grades is found to trigger large participation increases, and better subsequent exam performance. Given the low cost of these interventions, they offer particular promise in higher education.

Growth in higher education has been driven by the view that human capital is essential for economic and social progress. This column uses a comprehensive international dataset covering 78 countries to show that on average, a 10% increase in the number of universities (roughly adding one more university to the average region in the data) increases a region’s income by 0.4%, with additional effects spilling over to other regions within the same country. In the UK context, the benefits of university expansion are likely to far outweigh the costs.

Bad behaviour by peers is well-known to worsen educational outcomes in the short run. This column investigates the long-run effects of peers from families marked by domestic violence. Individual-level US data linking middle and high school test scores, college enrolment, and earnings at ages 24–28 show that students exposed to more disruptive peers experience worse adult outcomes. Policies that mitigate exposure to disruptive peers could pay high dividends.

Colleges in the US charge high sticker prices but routinely offer discounts to individual students. This column presents research showing that colleges use a student’s federal aid form to learn about willingness-to-pay and to engage in substantial price discrimination in a way that amounts to a tax on income, with the primary effect of increasing tuition revenues. Nevertheless, the price discrimination also results in some redistribution to low-income students as well as a modest increase in student–college match quality.

In the upcoming UK Research Excellence Framework, a small panel of academics are tasked with rating thousands of academic submissions, which will result in university departments being ranked and public money being distributed. Given the enormity of the task and the scarcity of the resources devoted to it, this article discusses a straightforward procedure that might help, based on exactly the Bayesian methods that academic economists study and teach when considering the problem of decision-making under uncertainty.

With stagnating wages and lingering unemployment, income inequality is back in the headlines. Is globalisation to blame for this inequality? Is more education a solution? This column argues that focusing on university education misses important effects. It presents evidence that wage effects vary markedly among those with degrees depending on their specific skill sets, and that globalisation can often benefit workers without degrees

Ben Wildavsky of the Kauffman Foundation talks to Romesh Vaitilingam about his book ‘The Great Brain Race: How global universities are reshaping the world’. Among other things, they discuss higher education funding and student finance, the rapidly growing international mobility of students and faculty, and the potential problem of ‘academic protectionism’. The interview was recorded at the London School of Economics in October 2010. [Also read the transcript]