REDISTRIBUTION THROUGH POWER, HIGHER EDUCATION, AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF OPPORTUNITY

This dissertation analyzes the political economy of public higher education funding in the United States, and offers a unique conceptual framework to describe the evolution of institutions related to higher education and their distributional effects. This research develops a conceptual framework, referred to as redistribution through power, that provides guidelines to identify and evaluate of the relationship between power and the distributional effects of property rights. The framework of redistribution through power contributes to economic theory by connecting elements from various schools of economic thought to provide a methodological approach that is compatible across perspectives. This framework is used to evaluate the effects of public higher education funding policy in the United States. This dissertation identifies a self-reinforcing relationship between changing beliefs and funding policies that has contributed to the commodification of public higher education through the increased reliance on tuition as a revenue source. The shift toward tuition driven public higher education funding is then linked to income redistributions among students, tax-payers, the student loan industry, and higher education providers. This conceptual approach provides the basis for a new empirical study that contributes to the economics of education literature. This dissertation identifies previously neglected sources of endogeneity and provides new empirical evidence to explain shifts in public higher education funding policies, rising tuition, and their distributional consequences.