Cheslock John J, Shamekhi Yahya
Pennsylvania State University, 404B Rackley Building, University Park, PA 16802, U.S.A.
Pennsylvania State University, 400 Rackley Building, University Park, PA 16802, U.S.A.
Econ Educ Rev. 2020 Oct;78:102035. doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2020.102035. Epub 2020 Aug 14.
The level of financial inequality among U.S. higher education institutions has important implications for students and society, yet few scholars have examined this topic using established methods for measuring inequality. This paper updates and extends previous work while introducing decompositions that shed light into key trends that we observed for the 2004-2017 period: increasing inequality in total expenditures and decreasing inequality in per-student expenditures. The results of our decomposition highlight how these opposing trends related to rising differences in enrollments and an increasingly positive correlation between an institution's enrollment level and its expenditures per student. Our decomposition results also show that both between-group differences and within-group differences contributed to the observed trends. Further examination of within-group differences reveals that inequality patterns differed meaningfully by institutional type, with doctoral universities and private baccalaureate colleges possessing higher levels of inequality and a more positive correlation between per-student expenditures and enrollments than master's institutions and public associate's colleges.
美国高等教育机构之间的财政不平等程度对学生和社会有着重要影响，但很少有学者使用既定的不平等衡量方法来研究这一主题。本文在更新和扩展先前工作的同时，引入了分解分析，以揭示我们在2004 - 2017年期间观察到的关键趋势：总支出不平等加剧，而人均支出不平等减少。我们的分解分析结果突出了这些相反趋势如何与入学人数差异的增加以及机构入学水平与其人均支出之间日益增强的正相关关系相关联。我们的分解分析结果还表明，组间差异和组内差异都促成了观察到的趋势。对组内差异的进一步研究表明，不平等模式因机构类型而有显著差异，博士大学和私立学士学位学院的不平等程度更高，且人均支出与入学人数之间的正相关性比硕士机构和公立社区学院更强。
