In an ominously steady progression over the past decades, education in general, higher education in particular, and even honors education have increasingly been contextualized in the realm of the marketplace. Cost/benefit analyses of colleges and universities are examined; institutions in terms of their price to consumers (students and their…

Community colleges are under pressure to increase completion rates, prepare students for the workplace, and contain costs. Colleges need to know the financial implications of what are often perceived as routine decisions: course scheduling, program offerings, and the provision of support services. This chapter presents a methodology for estimating…

Public school critics often point to rising expenditures and relatively flat test scores to justify their school reform agendas. The claims are flawed because their analyses fail to account for the difference in data types between dollars (ratio) and test scores (interval). A cost-benefit analysis using dollars as a common metric for both costs…

Very little of the professional development literature identifies its costs. Many say good professional development is expensive, but what is meant by expensive, and if so, expensive relative to what? This article shows that effective professional development is not expensive relative to overall spending and that its key elements and their costs…

The value of a program can be understood as referring not only to outcomes, but also to how those outcomes compare to the types and amounts of resources expended to produce the outcomes. Major potential mistakes and biases in assessing the worth of resources consumed, as well as the value of outcomes produced, are explored. Most of these occur…

In December 2010, the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) staff surveyed public universities in other states to learn how they have dealt with cuts in state funding. All of the institutions CPEC surveyed have increased tuition and or fees at least once in the last two fiscal years, and many project additional increases. All have…

Two significant challenges hamper analyses of collective choice of educational vouchers. One is the multi-dimensional choice set arising from the interdependence of the voucher, public education spending, and taxation. The other is that household preferences between public and private schooling vary with the policy chosen. Even absent a voucher,…

A misplaced obsession with the size of federal budget deficits remains the single biggest obstacle to enacting new measures to create jobs on a scale commensurate with the crisis in the American labor market. Even assuming that budget scoring rules can't be changed, at the very least policy makers should be aware of the true impact a given piece…

Almost 7 million young Americans (age 16-24) are insufficiently attached to school or work. Based on conservative estimates, we can generate over $1 billion just by helping a mere 0.1 percent earn a high school credential and complete their first year of college through Back on Track Designs. This brief lays out the cost of setting up these GED-…

To improve the employment rates and earnings of Americans workers, we need to create more-coherent and more-effective education and workforce development systems, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on disadvantaged youth and adults, and with education and training more clearly targeted towards firms and sectors that provide good-paying…

Economies of scale are often cited in the higher education literature as being one of the drivers for the deployment of e-learning. They are variously used to support the notions that higher education is becoming more global, that national policy towards e-learning should promote scale efficiencies, that larger institutions will be better able to…

H.R. 3221 would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965, which authorizes most federal postsecondary education programs. It would prohibit new federally guaranteed loans from being made under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program and would increase direct spending for the Federal Pell Grant Program and other programs. The elimination of…

In this article, we discuss the development of online courses in higher education in terms of the in- structional quality and economic costs. In our conceptual analysis, we point out problems in developing online courses with sufficient quality due to limited funds being made available for online course development. Moreover, economic costs exist…

Expands on an earlier article which states that economies of scale cannot exist unless the production function exhibits increasing returns to scale. Argues that this is correct only to the extent that the firm faces constant input prices as output expands. Concludes that the assumption that product and input markets are competitive may be…

This paper provides a summary of four projects currently funded through Australia's National Center for Vocational Education Research (NCVER), including what they propose to achieve and their preliminary findings to date. After an introduction, an overview of preliminary findings from the four projects is presented. The following barriers to…