| Sumario: | The economics of higher education has been a topic of interest to the profession and to the society at large for some time, but relatively little work has been done on the actual estimation of a demand function for higher education.[1] The existing literature, moreover, has given scant attention to the nonmarket forces which play a major role in determining undergraduate enrollments. In particular, there has been a lack of attention to the influence of the armed forces in statistical models of the demand for higher education. We have derived and estimated a short-run demand function for higher education which is intended to shed light especially on the effects of the armed forces on U.S. college enrollments. As figure 1 illustrates, the estimated equation predicts annual changes in the number of college enrollments during the 1925-64 period with considerable accuracy. Our results also indicate that discharges and changes in the size of the armed forces have had significant effects since the beginning of World War II. This paper attempts to clarify the conditions under which emigration benefits or harms the remaining population of a country under fairly standard classical market assumptions. In both the comparative static case and the stationary dynamic case, the emigration of labor (or any other factor) is found to cause loss to the remaining population as a whole except where (a) the emigrant groups own a relatively large proportion of the capital stock (comparative static case) or have relatively high wealth-holding propensities (stationary dynamic case) and (b) they leave some or all of their capital behind them in the country. (There is no loss or gain if labor and capital leave the economy in the same proportion; this is a case of theoretical curiosity only, however.) Other things such as increasing returns to scale for the economy or external economies associated with the emigrants could reverse the general conclusion; but these were not discus...
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