Information provision and preferences toward tuition introduction in public universities: evidence from a survey experiment in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

Public higher education is chronically under-funded in developing countries, making private investment necessary for human capital development. We investigate if information provision mobilizes support for private investment in public higher education by employing an online RCT in Afghanistan. We find that information cues impact respondents’ support for how education should be financed. Respondents that received information about the current amount of funding devoted to different levels of education (including tuition amounts for private tertiary programs), became more partial to prioritizing public funding for primary and secondary education over tertiary education but also became more supportive of tuition introduction in public universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Afghanistan
• information provision
• higher education
• tuition fees

Acknowledgements

We thank Todd Pugatch and Paul Thompson for comments on a previous draft. We also thank all the survey participants, and those organizations, which helped us in the participant’s recruitment process. All errors lie solely with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset used in this paper is collected by the study team via an online survey platform and will be available online after publication. The authors are willing to assist and make the survey instrument and dataset available.

Statement on IRB approvals

Oregon State University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained prior to starting the study project, and the permission was granted under IRB number: IRB-2019-0424.

Notes

1 2018 marked the first time that private IHEs accounted for more than half of the tertiary education students (NSIA 2019, 55).

2 The research team collected information about the average cost per semester and number of credits for first year students in private IHE from their official websites and telephone calls to obtain an estimate of average tuition fee per semester in private IHE across the country.

3 We are thankful for their assistance in this process. As commitment to these organizations, we are not allowed to disclose their identity unless if they consent.

4 Control Group (Total=2653–289 (emails bounced)) & Treatment Group (Total = 2695–317 (emails bounced)). Initial N = 5348–606 (bounced emails) = 4742.

5 The Afghanistan Flash Survey – Wave 1 (2020) was carried out by the Asia Foundation-Kabul by telephonic interview using random digit dialing to obtain a random sample of the population.

6 This is the treatment effect size that shows how much an individual preference has changed due to the information intervention relative to the control group mean. We computed the effect size as: (information effects /control group mean) *100.

7 As with the computation of the previous treatment effect, we computed this effect size as: [information effects /control group mean] *100.

8 This exam is the nationwide public universities entrance exam.