Replication files for: Who should pay for higher education?

Abstract

This replication package refers to a paper entitled 'Who should pay for higher education?' which has not yet been published. The reference will be added as soon as the paper is published. The debate over free versus tuition-based higher education centers on their significant social, economic, and political consequences, particularly regarding social mobility and economic inequality. However little is known about public preferences for higher education finance, especially when the potential choice set of policy options is broadened and when equity considerations become more salient. We conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of the German population (N=6208) to study this. We find that making respondents aware of the inequalities of the free system, makes respondents more supportive of all tuition fee systems. Regardless of experimental variation, respondents are more supportive of alternative tuition fee policies that depend on the students' downstream income, or on their parental income. This support increases with the experimental information treatments. The published Stata syntax file (do-file) and the dataset (a partial version of the 2020 Inequality barometer published under https://doi.org/10.7802/2740) can be used to replicate the results in the article.