Estimating Students' Valuation for College Experiences

Abstract

The college experience involves much more than credit hours and degrees. Students likely derive utility from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities. Quantitative measures of the value of these individual components have been hard to come by. Leveraging the COVID-19 shock, we elicit students' intended likelihood of enrolling in higher education under different costs and possible states of the world. These states, which would have been unimaginable in the absence of the pandemic, vary in terms of class formats and restrictions to campus social life. We show how such data can be used to recover college student's willingness-to-pay (WTP) for college-related activities in the absence of COVID-19, without parametric assumptions on the underlying heterogeneity in WTP. We find that the WTP for in-person instruction (relative to a remote format) represents around 4.2% of the average annual net cost of attending university, while the WTP for on-campus social activities is 8.1% of the average annual net costs. We also find large heterogeneity in WTP, which varies systematically across socioeconomic groups. Our analysis shows that economically-disadvantaged students derive substantially lower value from university social life, but this is primarily due to time and resource constraints.

The Global COVID-19 Student Survey: First Wave Results

“…For current students and recent graduates, the consequences of the sudden transition to remote instruction (Blask ó et al, 2021) and remote work (Barrero et al, 2021) are likely to persist (and not be understood) for many years. Research from the United States also shows the pandemic altered student expectations for their careers and earnings (e.g., Aucejo et al, 2020), as well as their relative valuations of the college experience (e.g., Aucejo et al, 2021). The economic shutdowns and social-distancing protocols of pandemic life have also had disproportionate effects on women (e.g., Alon et al, 2021;Albanesi and Kim, 2021).…”

On the economic evaluation of online learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: a willingness-to-accept approach

“…Indeed, while we have used a contingent valuation framework to value the loss of well-being resulting from the transition to online learning, Aucejo et al (2021) and Wang et al (2021) used a different approach (choice experiment) to obtain student's WTP for in-person classes versus the online alternative. In particular, Aucejo et al (2021) obtained that the average student was willing to pay $544 for in-class instruction (relative to a remote format) and $1,049 for on-campus social activities, while Wang et al (2021) obtained a value of $1,190. So, considering that, as a result of the pandemic, there is a prevailing sense that universities did not deliver to students what they came to these institutions for in the first place, our research is unique in the respect that no previous study has attempted to value in a WTA framework the loss of well-being resulting from the transition into online learning.…”

“…Another important strand of research has relied on surveys that try to measure the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on students' performance and learning strategies (Gonz alez et al, 2020;Wolfgang et al, 2021) or to capture students' and educators' perceptions about this shifting to online learning by higher education institutions during COVID-19 pandemic (Aristovnik, 2020;Rizun and Strzelecki, 2020;Watermeyer et al, 2021;Zalat et al, 2021). However, to the best of our knowledge, only two papers, Aucejo et al (2021) and Wang et al (2021), have used valuation methods to quantify in monetary terms students' preference for alternative course delivery options and other university education attributes in the setting of COVID-19. Aucejo et al (2021), using a choice experiment, aimed to obtain students' WTP for college-related activities in the absence of COVID-19.…”

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, only two papers, Aucejo et al (2021) and Wang et al (2021), have used valuation methods to quantify in monetary terms students' preference for alternative course delivery options and other university education attributes in the setting of COVID-19. Aucejo et al (2021), using a choice experiment, aimed to obtain students' WTP for college-related activities in the absence of COVID-19. More specifically, they tried to find out the value that students assign to in-person classes (versus remote instruction) and to social activities while in college.…”

Online Teaching and Gender Bias

“…Thus, it is important to consider the ✩ Support from REQ 2021 ('Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia', Ministerio de Universidades and NextGenerationEU) and the projects PID2019-consequences of such an important change in the teaching environment at many different levels. While there has been a rapid expansion in the body of literature on the impact of online teaching in terms of student performance (Rodríguez-Planas, 2022a), mental well-being (Browning et al, 2021;Jaeger et al, 2021;Rodríguez-Planas, 2022b), career and earnings expectations (Aucejo et al, 2020;Jaeger et al, 2021) and evaluations of the college experience (Aucejo et al, 2021), much less attention has been paid to the impact of online instruction on teachers -and, more precisely, to the evaluation of online teaching and the extent to which it may have had a different impact on male and female instructors. 1 The main objective of this study is to learn how online teaching may have affected the gender bias in teaching evaluation in higher education (Boring, 2017;Boring et al, 2016;Mengel et al, 2019).…”