Physical Capital and Capital Service Costs in U.S. Colleges and Universities: 1993

Physical capital represents an important input to the production of higher education--the essential services of buildings, equipment, and land--for which we have only highly inadequate measures. This paper has three objectives: to report estimates of the value of the capital stocks used by 3,148 colleges and universities in the US in 1993 (virtually all of them), to give a sense of the distribution of that physical capital and of capital service costs among different kinds of institutions, and to make these estimates available to other students of higher education in the form of FoxPro or Excel files.