CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 49Higher Education Research StudiesPolitics, Economics, and Education PolicySchool Choice and Performance

THE EFFECT OF TAX-BASED FEDERAL STUDENT AID ON COLLEGE ENROLLMENT

Open access
Turner, Nicholas·2011·National Tax Journal
DOI 10.17310/ntj.2011.3.04
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Tax-based federal student aid—the Hope Tax Credit, Lifetime Learning Tax Credit, and Tuition Deduction—marks a new paradigm for federal aid by offering tax incentives for postsecondary enrollment for the middle class. I exploit policy-induced variation in tax-based aid eligibility to estimate its causal effect on college enrollment. I find that tax-based aid increases full-time enrollment in the first two years of college for 18 to 19 years old by 7 percent. The price sensitivity of enrollment suggests that college enrollment increases 0.3 percentage points per $100 of taxbased aid. The programs do not appear to substantively affect part-time enrollment in the first two years of college.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.17310/ntj.2011.3.04

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Early work examining the introduction of the Hope and Lifetime Learning tax credits generated conflicting findings, with Long (2004) finding no effects on college enrollment and Turner (2011) finding positive effects.

    “Early work examining the introduction of the credits generated conflicting findings, with Long (2004) finding no effects on college enrollment and Turner (2011) finding positive effects.”

    From College Costs, Financial Aid, and Student Decisions (2022) · cites this paper as Turner (2011)

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

2 of the 35 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Cameron, Stephen, and James Heckman. "Can Tuition Policy Combat Rising Wage Inequality?" Financing College Tuition: Government Policies and Educational Priorities. Washington: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1999.
  2. Cameron, Stephen, and Christopher Taber. "Estimation of Educational Borrowing Constraints Using Returns to Schooling." The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 112, 2004.
  3. Carneiro, Pedro, and James Heckman. "The Evidence on Credit Constraints in Post-Secondary Schooling." The Economic Journal, Vol. 112, 2002.
  4. Ellwood, David, and Thomas Kane. "Who is Getting a College Education? Family Background and the Growing Gaps in Enrollment." In Danziger, Sheldon and Waldfogel, Jane, eds. of State In-Kind Tuition Subsidies." The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 86, No. 3, 2004(b).
  5. Zeldes, Stephen. "Consumption and Liquidity Constraints: An Empirical Investigation." Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 97, No. 2, 1989.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Turner, N.
Affiliations
University of California San Diego (US)
Corresponding author
Turner, Nicholas
ORCID
Turner, Nicholas
Venue
National Tax Journal
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
2011-09-01
Volume
64
Issue
3
Pages
839-861
ISSN
  • 0028-0283 (ISSN-L)
  • 1944-7477
DOI
10.17310/ntj.2011.3.04
OpenAlex
W1496598671
Cited by
49
References
35
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 4
FWCI
23.08
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
public-domain
Locations
  • National Tax Journal (publishedVersion, public-domain)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • Sage Foundation
  • Harvard University
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education Research Studies
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Politics, Economics, and Education Policy
  • Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
Keywords
college enrollment, postsecondary education, tax incentives, part-time admission, middle class

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review