Higher education.

• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research meeting

Members and guests of the NBER's Project on Higher Education, directed by Charles T. Clotfelter, NBER and Duke University, met in Cambridge on April 30 and May 1. They discussed these papers:

John Bound, NBER and University of Michigan, and Sarah Turner, University of Virginia, "Going to War and Going to College: Did the GI Bill increase Educational Attainment?"

Discussant: Thomas J. Kane, NBER and Harvard University

Judith Li, Harvard University, "Estimating the Effect of Federal Financial Aid on College Tuitions: A Study of Pell Grants"

Discussant: Andrew Dick, University of Rochester

Caroline M. Hoxby, NBER and Harvard University, "Benevolent Colluders? The Effects of Antitrust Action on College Financial Aid and Tuition"

Discussant: Ronald G. Ehrenberg, NBER and Cornell University

George Johnson, University of Michigan, "Trends in the Relative Earnings of Tenure-Track Faculty, 1973-95"

Discussant: John Pencavel, Stanford University

Donna Ginther, Washington University, and Kathy Hayes, Southern Methodist University, "Gender Differences in Salary and Promotion in the Humanities"

Discussant: David Zimmerman, Williams College

The end of World War II brought a flood of veterans to America's colleges and universities. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that military service, combined with the availability of postwar educational benefits, actually led men to increase their investments in higher education. Bound and Turner use the structure of the draft during the war years and the changing manpower requirements in the armed forces to compare the educational attainment of veterans and nonveterans in this era. From surveying census data, the authors find that the net effects of military service and the widely available funding for college through the G.I. Bill led to only a modest gain in postsecondary educational attainment of veterans. For white men, the combination of military service and the availability of veteran's benefits did lead to moderate increases in educational attainment, though.

During the past 15 years, tuition has consistently risen faster than inflation at colleges and universities across the United States. Keeping college affordable is a central goal of current federal policy: the government increased the maximum Pell Grant by $125 to $3,125 for the 19992000 academic year, and passed the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which was designed to provide college students and their families with $40 billion in tuition tax breaks...