Willingness To Pay (WTP) for Post-Secondary Education among Under-Represented Groups

Authors:Boris Palameta Jean-Pierre Voyer

We use a high-stakes laboratory experiment to investigate the roles that price sensitivity and loan aversion may play in the under-representation of certain groups in PSE.

This experimental approach — proposed by CIRANO and first reported in a previous paper by Johnson, Montmarquette, and Voyer (2010) — involved subjecting high school students to a series of decisions, some of which involved potentially high-stakes choices between various combinations of grants and loans for full-time PSE and significant but smaller amounts of cash. Our principal research question is to what extent are higher price sensitivity and loan aversion more prevalent and thus likely to act as barriers to PSE participation among under-represented groups?

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Project Details

Published: September 2010
Capability: Experimentation
Policy Area: Post-Secondary Education - Access and Persistence
Population: Students - Women - Youth - Communities and Families
Type: Full report, Appendices, Executive summary, Working paper