Description: The purpose of this course is to teach important frameworks from economics and other social sciences to aid in our understanding of higher education trends and challenges. Many of the challenges facing higher education in the United States originate from scarce resources. These include limited individual and family resources to pay increasing tuition, accessible information on enrollment and quality, and institutional competition for public funding. This scarcity creates a higher education landscape where access is limited, and individuals and institutions compete for resources for their own desired outcomes. Economic theory and research offers perspectives on how individuals and institutions can make optimal decisions under scarcity. This course will utilize frameworks and theories from economics to better understand the costs, benefits, and incentives institutions and students face. Utilizing economic frameworks such as human capital and signaling theory, opportunity costs, optimization under resource constraints, and information asymmetry, we will understand historical and current higher education issues related to access, finance, quality, and accountability, and interrogate where change might be possible. This course focuses on American institutions and explores how these topics vary across institution types – from local community colleges to national research universities. We will also include international examples where possible. Students will also learn the basic principles of research while discussing and critiquing recent studies and reports.