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.
The academic papers on the topic are:
Income Contingency and the Electorate’s Support for Tuition (with P. Lergetporer). CESifo Working Paper 9520 / IZA Discussion Paper 14991, January 2022 [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