Rising Tuition and Supply Constraints: Explaining Canada – U.S. Differences in University Enrollment Rates

This paper exploits differences across the Canadian provinces and U.S. states in the evolution of cohort size, tuition levels and provincial/state appropriations per-college-age person from 1973 to 1999, to investigate cross-country differences in university/4-year college public enrollment rates. For the entire period, the elasticity of enrollment rates with respect to tuition levels is found to be the same in both countries at about-0.15. Provincial/state appropriations per-college-age person are also found to have played a determining role, especially in the 1970s when real tuition plummeted and in the 1990s when these sources of funding flattered