As a growing number of colleges and universities have begun to implement tuition discounting policies, higher education researchers have continuously assessed their effectiveness as an enrollment management tool. Because few studies thus far have explored the institutional changes that tuition discounting has brought to public colleges and universities, this study seeks to understand the impact of tuition discounting on student enrollment and composition at public four-year colleges and universities. A multidimensional conceptual framework is employed to understand the use of tuition discounting at colleges and universities. The economic concepts of supply, demand, and the competitive market, the microeconomic theory of nonprofit firm behavior, and price discrimination provide a greater understanding of why colleges and universities have used tuition discounting practices rather than other approaches. The concepts of consumer surplus and cost/benefit analysis supplement the conceptual framework to help explain the effectiveness of tuition discounting practices from a student perspective. Based on this framework, the current dissertation study takes a quantitative research approach using data obtained from publicly available sources, such as the U.S. Department of Education’s NCES and the Institute for College Access and Success IPEDS database (TICAS). Overall, the findings suggest that tuition discounting was not a useful tool in increasing student enrollment at four-year public colleges and universities. However, it has been effective in diversifying student composition by increasing the percentage of some underrepresented minority student groups and low-income students. The findings also indicate that institution and state-level factors can moderate the relationships between tuition discounts and student enrollment outcomes, thereby emphasizing the need for considering such moderating factors. Lastly, the findings suggest that, although public colleges and universities still provide institutional grants based more on students’ financial needs than on their non-financial factors, the shifts from need-based to non-need-based aid may possibly reduce the percentages of underrepresented minority and low-income students at public four-year colleges and universities.