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published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This dissertation disputes conventional interpretations of the comparative political economy literature on higher education. In particular, I challenge the common assumption that access to higher education is structured by income. Instead, based on insights from the relevant psychology, sociology and economics literature, I argue that a child's probability of entering higher education is predominantly a function of her abilities, and that her abilities are strongly related to her parents' level of education. I develop a theory of the distributive politics of higher education solidly grounded in this relationship. The result of this model is the counter intuitive hypothesis that the initial expansions of higher education benefit the children of more highly educated parents. Moreover, more highly educated families are the net beneficiaries of free higher education and generous subsidies. Extensive survey evidence from Britain, Australia, Canada and Sweden of higher education policy preferences confirms this picture of the politics of higher education as a zero-sum distributive game between highly and lesser educated families. In order to analyse the consequences of these preference patterns for higher education policy, I develop a theoretical and empirical measure of voting power for multi-party systems. Voting power measures how many votes a party stands to gain from converting and mobilising voters by distributing resources from one group to another. Using data from 15 EU countries, I show that parliaments and cabinets, on average, stand to win more votes from pleasing highly educated voters than from targeting less educated voters. Furthermore, the conversion imperative is much stronger than the mobilisation imperative. Statistical analyses show that variations in the voting power of highly educated individuals over the government help to explain variations in higher education policy across countries and within countries over time. All in all, the theoretical and empirical analyses presented in this dissertation represent a significant contribution towards understanding the specific distributive politics of higher education, and the political economy of redistribution more generally.

This DPhil thesis consists of three related but independent chapters discussing the question of admission and access to higher education. Chapter 1 explores the extent to which the underrepresentation of students from certain population groups at highly selective universities, can be explained by poor information and high non-monetary application costs, and how the universities' admission policies may affect outcomes. This chapter takes a positive approach and proposes a theoretical model to explore the implications of implementing alternative admission policies. Motivated by the results that arise from this exploration, Chapter 2 proceeds with a normative approach, proposing a general framework to study the optimal selection policy from a pool of applicants, taking into account that the pool of applicants is endogenous. This, it is argued, allows a characterisation of the optimal form of discrimination in university admissions. Chapter 3 studies the relationship between tuition fees and academic selectivity, by developing a different, although somewhat related model of monopolistic competition, where universities compete for students by simultaneously selecting prices and admission standards.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of education and market design. The first two chapters are united in their attention on school choice issues. Chapter 1 considers a specific application, whereas chapter 2 focuses on a matching mechanism widely used in multiple applications. Both chapters 1 and 3 explore equity concerns in education but through very different lenses (affirmative action vs. educational investment) and very different settings (the United States vs. Vietnam). Chapter 1 addresses the diversity issue that is especially prevalent in elite schools that select students based on exams. Whereas previous studies only consider the direct impact on elite schools, I quantify the effects of two widely-discussed affirmative action plans on both elite and regular schools in New York City. I find that the two plans have quite different effects. First, there is a trade-off between improving diversity and maintaining student quality in elite schools as measured by state test scores in middle school. Despite taking into account the socioeconomic status of students' neighborhoods, the Chicago plan gives rise mostly to reshuffling within elite schools. Thus, both the overall racial composition and quality of incoming students are largely preserved as in the status quo. In contrast, the Top 7% plan, which would accept into the elite sector students in the top 7% by academic performance of each public middle school, causes considerable flows of students between the elite and regular sectors. The elite sector experiences a substantial increase in the proportions of Black and Hispanic students, along with a decrease in average student quality. Analyzing the difference between the outcomes of these two policies provides some insight into how the two objectives—diversity and peer quality in elite schools—might be better balanced in general. The second difference between the plans arises because they transform the distribution of diversity across schools in different ways. The Chicago plan reduces the differences among schools within the elite sector, while the Top 7% plan reduces the gap in diversity between the two sectors even as it increases within-sector dispersion. Both plans result in considerable changes in school assignments in the regular school sector, thus affecting the average student quality in these schools. Chapter 2, joint work with Guillaume Haeringer and Silvio Ravaioli, uses a lab experiment to study learning dynamics when participants receive feedback in centralized matching mechanisms. Our design allows for two types of learning: to coordinate within the same environment as well as to understand the underlying mechanisms. We provide additional evidence to previous work that the majority of the deviations from truth-telling, the dominant strategy in the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, are those that do not affect payoffs. Furthermore, by explicitly analyzing learning, we can confirm that at least some of the participants learn about the optimality of truth-telling, and their departures from it happen primarily when they face the same environment being repeated. Finally, we find that when learning to coordinate, agents tend to retain their previous strategy when the payoff from this strategy is high. This is suggestive evidence of reinforcement learning. Chapter 3 documents the pattern of educational investments for high school students across different demographics and their effects on performance on the college entrance exam and in college. Survey data from Vietnam shows that high school students from higher-income households have higher education expenditure and participation in extra classes (both at the extensive and intensive margin). Minority and rural students invest less than their non-minority and urban counterparts even after controlling for income. Out of these investments, only extra classes during the school year education expenditure other than that on extra classes are effective in increasing college entrance exam scores. In terms of college performance, a higher entrance exam score leads to a slightly higher grade point average at graduation, controlling for academic department fixed effects and investments in high school. Neither education expenditure or participation in extra classes in high school show any significant effects on college performance, except that already captured in the entrance exam scores. I record multiple gender differences. Female high school students tend to receive more investments. Even though they perform slightly worse on the entrance exam than their male peers with the same investments, they perform better in college, given the same entrance exam scores.

The Government of India launched the National Higher Education Mission (NHEM) in 2013 to address concerns of severe funding shortages, poor governance structures, and weak quality assurance mechanisms in the country’s public state universities. NHEM provided funding incentives to states conditional on the implementation of multiple reforms in the university systems. This study answers important questions about the policy - why and by whom was NHEM formulated, and how well have the policy’s reforms been implemented in Indian states. The study uses a theoretical framework based on Advocacy Coalition Framework and institutional theory. Using qualitative methods, this dissertation examines the policy formulation process for NHEM at the federal level and explores the implementation of NHEM reforms through case studies of four Indian states. The study finds that NHEM was developed when the federal ministry of education saw a window of opportunity to push its reform agenda. However, the policy was created in a short span of time, in a top-down manner, and with insufficient involvement of stakeholders. NHEM was created by borrowing policy problems and solutions from prior government reports and layering them on a pre-existing funding structure. The resulting policy lacked a cohesive design and theory of action. Implementation of the policy’s reforms in states has been limited. The findings of the study suggest that implementation is thwarted by four challenges; the bureaucratic higher education culture in states; the weak political will to decentralize the government’s powers; limited technical capacity; and inadequate financial resources. As a result, states have engaged in a variety of reform responses ranging from avoiding compliance, engaging in proforma implementation of reform requirements to receive federal funds; and reinterpreting reforms in ways that suit their existing cultures and structures.

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce Law, and Management, School of Governance, University of Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Management in Public Policy (MMPP), Johannesburg, South Africa 2019 / The notion of policy networks is an integral instrument of policy-making in democratic states. Significant policy challenges are deemed often too complex to be dealt with only through traditional hierarchal government structures. The notion of policy networks is used to analyse and evaluate policy processes and their outcomes. The knowledge gap that the study is dealing with is on the role and effects the interplay of power, cooperation and conflict has in the policy networks and the policy-making process. The aim of this study was to explore the interplay between power, conflict and cooperation in the free higher education policy network in South Africa. A dialectical approach to analysis of policy networks was applied to inform the conceptual frame used in the study. The methodology followed the interpretivist-constructivist paradigm, which then informed the use of qualitative methods in the study. A snowballing sampling approach was employed to identify the study participants. The study analysed the results by using a thematic analysis approach. Findings in the study confirmed that free higher education policy-making was happening through a complex policy network. This free higher education network was characterised by a dominance of power, along with high levels of conflict and cooperation among actors who tended to share the same interests. The presence of power, conflict and cooperation had an influence on the network’s structure, interactions, context and the policy outcome. The influence of power, conflict and cooperation demonstrated that there is an iterative and dialectical relationship between network structure, interactions, context and policy outcome. / XL2019

Thesis (M.Com. (Development Theory and Policy))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2017 / The South African higher education student protests which began in October 2015 have culminated in the student body voicing increased demands for the implementation of free fee higher education. Key policy stakeholders and commentators have been critical of this demand stating that such a policy would be regressive and ‘destructive’ due to the fact that the rich dominate the student cohort, the net result of which would be the poor funding the higher education of the rich. There is a continued emphasis on the private benefits that higher education provides graduates, therbey necessitating tuition fees. This paper has shown that these arguments, dating back to the 1970s, have weak theoretical foundations. The view that the rich dominate the student cohort is questioned with the finding that only 18% of the households containing students are classified as rich. As the rich provide 97% of personal income tax revenue and 76% of value added tax revenue it would be difficult for the poor to fund the rich. The states ‘chronic underfunding’ of the higher education system comes amid ‘budgetary pressures’ highlighting the continued adherence of the state to fiscal austerity measures. These austerity measures have increasingly shifted the financial burden of higher education onto students. A financial burden that 80% of households are deemed to require financial assistance to meet. In reducing state funding to the higher education system, in real terms, the private benefits of higher education are used to lure students into paying ever increasing tuition fees, even taking on debt in order to do so. / GR2018

The issue of seeking higher education by U.S. citizens has been explored using the human capital theory model. This work extends this analysis by applying the human capital model to the decisions of foreign students to seek higher education in the U.S. The theory suggests that foreign students will see. higher education in the U.S. if the net present value of doing so is greater than the value of remaining in their native country. In addition, the student's choice of field of study will be determined by differences in net present values. We extend the theory to include various non-pecuniary benefits and costs. The model is tested through the use of primary data derived from a cross-sectional survey conducted by the author. This data allows for a calculation of expected net present values for · remaining at home, coming to the U.S. and staying various lengths of time, and becoming a permanent U.S. resident. The findings show that the pecuniary returns from U.S. education are indeed high for engineers, and also for students from India and Taiwan. The non-pecuniary cost associated with U.S. education varies according to a foreign student's country or region of origin. Family and social ties, political stability, and job opportunities in the native country significantly affect a foreign student's planned length of stay in the U.S. upon completion of studies. / Ph. D.

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