Students Fare Better in States With Fewer, Larger Public Colleges, Study Finds

States with fragmented public higher-education systems should “consolidate their resources into fewer, larger universities,” argues a working paper by Cory Koedel, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri at Columbia. The paper says that, several years after graduation, people who attended college in states with a small number of large flagships earned higher wages than people who attended college in states with many small public four-year colleges.