New Estimates of Economies of Scale and Scope in Higher Education‪.‬

1. Introduction The substantially greater than inflation increases in college tuition during the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s ignited considerable discussion of the costs of higher education by both academics and nonacademics. The general discussion covered such issues as how much tuition has risen, why college costs so much (Ehrenberg 2000), the extent to which tuition fully covers costs (Winston 1998; NACUBO 2002), and what colleges are doing to cut costs (Strosnider 1998). Indeed, concern over rapidly increasing tuition spurred Congress to establish a National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education in 1997; the Commission conducted a review of college costs and issued recommendations for holding costs down.