Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since 2011, the US Department of Education has published four annual lists focused on postsecondary institutions in the top 5% of tuition and net price nationally (two focus on current amount and two focus on change). While some research has focused broadly on related federal higher education accountability measures, to my knowledge no work has focused on these four lists (housed on the College Affordability and Transparency Center (CATC) website). For these reasons, I investigate the extent to which inclusion on the CATC lists affects institutions’ and students’ behaviors.

Due to this known assignment mechanism (percentile rank at or above 95), I have conducted a regression discontinuity design analysis for the seven available years of the lists. I estimated the models using local linear regression with a triangular kernel and an optimal MSE bandwidth as the primary specification (with heteroscedasticity-robust nearest neighbor variance estimator). Density tests reveal no significant discontinuities of covariates at the cutoff. Placebo test models that use a false cutoff provide no evidence of other discontinuities along the running variable.

Preliminary results show no consistent effect of institutions being included on the CATC lists. If these findings are replicated in additional sensitivity analyses (e.g., varying bandwidths), future discussions could be warranted on whether these lists still need to be created (due to the burden placed on career staffers to calculate the lists and collect the pricing justification from offending institutions).