中文摘要
量化大学的消费价值——即学生从面授教学和校园社交活动中获得的效用——一直颇具挑战。我们利用新冠疫情冲击，引导学生在不同成本和不同可能情境（这些情境在授课形式，即面授与远程教学，以及校园社交生活限制方面存在差异）下，报告其就读高等教育的意向概率。我们展示了如何利用此类数据，在不对支付意愿（WTP）潜在异质性作参数假设的情况下，恢复学生在没有新冠疫情时对大学相关活动的支付意愿。我们发现，相对于远程教学，学生对面授教学的平均支付意愿约占大学平均年度净就读成本的6.5%，对校园社交活动的平均支付意愿则占平均年度净成本的10.2%。低收入家庭学生和第一代大学生从大学社交生活中获得的价值要低得多，部分原因在于时间和资源约束。我们的结果不仅解释了为何大学持续就读率可能因社会经济背景而异，也对大学成本的设置方式具有启示意义。
Abstract
Quantifying the consumption value of college – the utility students derive from in-person instruction and on-campus social activities – has been challenging. We leverage the COVID-19 shock to elicit students’ intended likelihood of enrolling in higher education under different costs and possible states of the world, that vary in terms of class formats (i.e., in-person vs. remote instruction) and restrictions to campus social life. We show how such data can be used to recover students’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for college-related activities in the absence of COVID-19, without parametric assumptions on the underlying heterogeneity in WTP. We find that the average WTP for in-person instruction (relative to a remote format) represents around 6.5% of the average annual net cost of attending university, while the average WTP for on-campus social activities is 10.2% of the average annual net costs. Lower-income and first-generation derive substantially lower value from university social life, partly due to time and resource constraints. Beyond providing an explanation for why college persistence rates may differ by socioeconomic background, our results have implications for how college costs should be structured.