A piece in FiveThirtyEight on the rising cost of tuition at U.S. public universities highlighted a 2014 study from the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. In Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges, authors Stephanie Cellini and Claudia Goldin look to state records to track for-profit colleges that are not eligible for federal aid programs and hence missing from many national databases. They find evidence that programs eligible for federal aid have systematically higher tuition rates, and that any quality differences between the types of schools cannot explain the gap.