Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the postwar period in most developed countries, the university participation rate has risen steadily to well over 30 percent, although there remain differences between countries. Students from lower income families have lower participation rates than those from higher income families. The article provides an economic analysis of these patterns of participation using a model of the market for undergraduate education. The demand for undergraduate education is analyzed using a human capital model in which households choose whether to apply to university in seeking to maximize the present value of lifetime income. The supply of undergraduate education is analyzed using a model of universities as non-profit, multi-product organizations that seek to maximize the quality of undergraduate education produced and the quality of research published by faculty members. The production of undergraduate education is a customer-input technology in which the quality of the students, through peer effects, influences the quality of education produced. The long-run supply function depends upon government policies to finance universities. The market equilibrium depends upon government policy on tuition and the availability of qualified applicants to universities. For illustrative purposes, data and public policy from the province of Ontario, Canada, are presented and analyzed. The article argues that the economic analysis of participation rates has overemphasized demand side variables; and that more attention should be paid to the supply decisions of universities and to government policies regarding the financing of universities and the setting of tuition levels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".