Book excerpt: It has become part of the conventional wisdom in the economics of education that subsidies to higher education have a regressive distributional effect. Given that relatively more children from wealthier families enroll in higher education, many economist assume that these subsidies to higher education have an unwanted distributional impact. This volume presents new empirical evidence for the cross-sectional point of view and provides an analytical framework for the longitudinal perspective. The present volume also analyzes the equity and efficiency effects of widely-discussed funding reforms and proposes a voluntary graduate tax.