In my own time: tuition fees, class time and student effort in non-formal (or continuing) education

Abstract

We develop and empirically test a model which examines the impact of changes in class time and tuition fees on student effort in the form of private study. The data come from the European Union’s Adult Education Survey, conducted over the period 2005–2008. We find, in line with theoretical predictions, that the time students devote to private study increases with tuition fees but decreases with class time, other things being equal.

Keywords:

• educational production
• technical substitution
• tuition
• class time
• private study time

JEL classification:

• I21

Notes

1. There is a significant literature on the impact of tuition fees on the decision to participate in education – see, for example, Dynarski (2002), but our focus is rather on the link between tuition fees and effort, conditional on participation.

2. A recent paper by Huxley and Peacey (2013), however, develops an interesting theoretical model that investigates the relationship between time spent in lectures and that spent in tutorials. Their paper also investigates the impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on the higher education sector, and touches on the implications of institutions making such offerings available freely. They do not, however, as we do, investigate the role played by tuition fees in reducing the net return to education and hence impacting on incentives to study.

3. These are (with country abbreviations and numbers of observations in parentheses): Austria (AT, 4675); Belgium (BE, 4850); Bulgaria (BG, 5263); Croatia (HR, 3089); Cyprus (CY, 4810); the Czech Republic (CZ, 9543); Denmark (DK, 3099); Estonia (EE, 16968); Germany (DE, 6407); Greece (GR, 6510); Finland (FI, 4144); France (FR, 15350); Hungary (HU, 7494); Italy (IT, 27848); Lithuania (LT, 3696); Latvia (LV, 2287); the Netherlands (NE, 3326); Norway (NO, 3018); Poland (PL, 24817); Portugal (PT, 9854); Romania (RO, 13909); Slovenia (SI, 4192); Sweden (SE, 3632); Slovakia (SK, 5001); Spain (ES, 6684); and the United Kingdom (UK, 3528). Note that, of the EU countries, Malta has decided not to participate in the survey; meanwhile Iceland (which is not a EU member), Ireland and Luxembourg did not participate at the pilot stage, but intend to take part later. Data for some variables used in our analysis (concerning tuition fees or private study time) are not available in all countries, and this means that the coverage of countries in the data used in the present studies is incomplete – to be specific we use data for 21 countries. The excluded countries are the Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, France and Italy.

4. Dropping these variables instead does not affect our qualitative results. These results are available from the authors upon request.

5. This is defined by three-digit ISCED 1997 codes between 100 and 462. Including dummy variables for each ISCED code yields qualitatively the same results. These results are available from the authors upon request.

6. We include these dummies in preference to weighting the sample. Results obtained from an exercise in which the sample is weighted are qualitatively similar to those reported in this paper. These results are available from the authors upon request.

7. We express this as a proportion, rather than as the absolute number of hours, because the study programmes under consideration are in general part-time, and vary considerably in terms of the total time commitment expected.