The Microeconomics of Schooling

This essay is more an attempt to preview than to review a relatively new field we call the Microeconomics of Schooling. Researchers have been working in this area for some time, though like Moliere's character who was so surprised to find he had been speaking prose all his life, they may not know it. The outlines of the field now seem sufficiently clear to us that we felt it was worth trying to set down some of the central assumptions and current knowledge available. Economists have written extensively on the: relationship between school attainment and income (see, e.g., Welch, 1974), but there has been relatively little economic analysis of choice in schools and classrooms. Because the analysis of choice by individuals and groups in firms, households, markets, and other institutions is the subject of microeconom