Financing undergraduate education: Designing national policies

In this paper, we summarize our recent work analyzing pricing, aid, access, and choice in American higher education, and we draw out implications from those findings for national higher education policy. We find that real increases in net tuition have impaired access and choice principally for students from low-income families. The Clinton administration's education proposals, rather than addressing the needs of this group, focus on providing tax benefits to middle- and upper-middle- income families. We argue that the nation needs a higher education program that provides more assistance to the students for whom the issue of college affordability is the most pressing.