The Liberal Arts Ledger
I write The Liberal Arts Ledger — an economics professor trying to understand how small, selective liberal arts colleges finance and run themselves.
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Posts
The Earnings Test: How safe is your program? Simulations, specific numbers, and a dataset to check your own program (June 18, 2026)
Dear Theater Major: Your program failed the Earnings Test (but we don’t know what that means) How the Do No Harm metric in the OBBB works for small programs, and why the smallest and wealthiest ones will avoid it altogether (June 17, 2026)
Five Books to Teach the Macroeconomy in 2026 And the assignment that gets students to read 300 pages in 3 weeks (June 4, 2026)
A series following my Economics of Higher Education course, Day by Day
My syllabus for EC350: The Economics of Higher Education (April 2, 2025)
Day 1: Introduction to the Economics of Higher Education (April 21, 2025)
Day 2: The History of Higher Education in the US (April 22, 2025)
Day 3: Why does college cost so much? (April 26, 2025)
Day 4: How much is a college degree worth? (April 30, 2025)
Day 5: Formal education is a stupid waste of time and money (May 2, 2025)
Day 6: Peer effects (May 11, 2025)
Day 7: Admissions and Enrollment (May 16, 2025)
Day 8: Finance (May 19, 2025)
Day 9: The Demographic Cliff (May 21, 2025)
Day 11: Fundraising (May 23, 2025)
Day 12: Financial Aid (and a bit about what’s in that Big Beautiful Bill) (May 26, 2025)
Day 13: Athletics (May 28, 2025)
Day 14: Grades, graduation rates, and actual learning (May 30, 2025)
Day 15: The Consulting Project (June 4, 2025)
Day 16: The College Budget Project (June 5, 2025)
Day 17: The Policy Memo (June 6, 2025)
Day 18: What I learned about the Economics of Higher Education (June 12, 2025)
Inside Econ-Bus-Ball Trends in student interest in Economics and Business at liberal arts colleges (November 4, 2024)
Why the increase in adjuncts and leftie administrators might be related (September 20, 2024)
It’s time for a game of Would You Rather (September 6, 2024)
Why the staff and faculty are so cranky There are lots more of them, but they’re not getting raises (August 29, 2024)
Waiting for Baumol Has the fraction of money spent on wages increased at liberal arts colleges overall, and in instruction specifically? Well let’s see. (August 21, 2024)
Why college is so expensive Part 2: It’s the lazy rivers right? I knew it was the lazy rivers Expenditures by category from 2001-2022 (August 14, 2024)
An Economic Parable of Rising Tuition Prices (August 7, 2024)
How can liberal arts colleges afford to spend more than they charge? And if they have giant endowments, why do they have to charge tuition at all? (July 31, 2024)
Why college is so expensive Ok, I can’t really answer that fully, and definitely not in the first post. So let’s start with: how have prices and expenditures at liberal arts colleges changed over the last 20 years? (July 27, 2024)