Opinion on University Tuition

Tuition fees are one of the most controversial educational issues in Germany in recent years. We use a series of experiments in the representative opinion survey of the ifo Education Survey to investigate what determines public opinion on tuition. A plurality against regular tuition turns into a plurality favoring them when respondents are informed about the earnings difference between people with and without a university degree. In addition, more than 60 percent of respondents favor income-contingent tuition that is due only after graduation and only when the annual income of the former students exceeds a certain threshold. Such a reform model of downstream tuition would ensure that tuition is payable if and only if university attendance actually led to a relatively high income. Thus, also people from poor backgrounds can afford to go to university. 

Here you can learn more about my research on this topic.

The academic papers on the topic are: 

Income Contingency and the Electorate’s Support for Tuition (with P. Lergetporer). Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, forthcoming [tweet] 

Earnings Information and Public Preferences for University Tuition: Evidence from Representative Experiments (with P. Lergetporer). Journal of Public Economics 226: 104968, 2023 [tweet]

Non-technical contributions: 

Public Opinion on Education Policy in Germany (with P. Lergetporer and K. Werner). In:  M.R. West, L. Woessmann (eds.), Public Opinion and the Political Economy of Education Policy around the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 205-243, 2021

Section 4.3 in: Public Opinion and the Political Economy of Educational Reforms: A Survey (with M. Busemeyer and P. Lergetporer). European Journal of Political Economy 53: 161-185, 2018 

My GESIS Lecture on "The Political Economy of Education Policy: Results from the ifo Education Survey" (tuition topic starts at minute 30):

Additional material is available in German.