Going into lockdown forced university teaching online. We heard a lot about how students were unhappy with online learning (e.g. see here and here). Students felt shortchanged by the new learning environment. So, if students prefer studying in person, we would expect them to be willing to pay for in-person classes compared with online study.
A new working paper by Zafar Zafari (University of Maryland), Lee Goldman, Katia Kovrizhkin, and Peter Muennig (all Columbia University), looks at exactly that question. They surveyed 46 Columbia University public health students, and the study had two interesting parts to it. First, they asked students to trade off the risk of becoming infected by coronavirus against attending classes in person. Second, they asked students how much they were willing to pay for online classes, in comparison with face-to-face classes. They found that:
On average, students were willing to accept a 23% (SE = 4%) risk of infection on campus over the semester in exchange for the opportunity to attend class in-person. Of the 46 students, 37 (80%) were willing to accept a >1% chance of infection and 3 (7%) were willing to accept a 100% chance of infection. One student was not willing to attend classes in-person unless the risk was 0%, and 9 (20%) were willing to attend in-person classes if the risk was less than 1%.
With respect to costs, students were willing-to-pay an average of only 48% (SE: 3%) of their tuition if courses were held exclusively online. No student was willing to pay full price for exclusively on-line instruction, and the maximum reported willingness-to-pay for online-only courses was 85% of standard tuition.
In other words, students in this sample are willing to accept a fairly high risk of coronavirus infection in exchange for attending classes in person, and they're willing to pay much less for online studying (and, by extension, willing to pay much more for the opportunity to attend classes in person). Of course, this should not be the last word on this topic. It was a study of just 46 students, and the methods are not what I would have used.
In fact, I wouldn't read much at all into the willingness-to-pay results - they simply asked students what they were willing to pay, which we know will be biased downwards (people will always say they are willing to pay less than they actually are, if only just in case they are later asked to actually pay!). They also anchored the willingness to pay by giving students a value first, then asking them what they would be willing to pay. It should be a surprise that the average result is about half of what they started with. It seems to me that a student, not knowing how much they would actually be willing to pay but knowing for sure that they wouldn't want to pay the full price, is likely to choose half price. And that's what they did.
A contingent valuation approach or a discrete choice experiment, where student respondents were asked to choose across a range of scenarios incorporating different levels of coronavirus risk, tuition costs, and whether studying was online or in person (and maybe other factors such as class size), would lead to much more plausible and defendable results. Hopefully, someone else is doing research along those lines.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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