| Summary: | This dissertation contains two essays on the United States college market. The first, "Price Discrimination and Public Policy in the U.S. College Market," examines the consequences of allowing colleges to use a student's federal financial aid information when offering the student tuition discounts. I find that colleges use the FAFSA to price discriminate which raises overall tuition revenues. Some of this additional revenue is transferred to other students in the form of lower prices, but most of it is retained by the colleges. If colleges could not use the FAFSA to price discriminate, average prices would fall and students would be better off, but total surplus would also fall as some students are inefficiently priced out of more elite colleges.
The second essay, "Measuring Long Run Trends in Higher Education," examines issues in measuring aggregate trends in college attendance and completion. I find that standard sources of self-reported education, like the U.S. Census and the Current Population Survey, diverge from institutionally reported enrollment and graduation counts in the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). I argue that, when they diverge, the institutionally reported data are more reliable.
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