The United States cannot meet its higher education goals without changing the way it funds public colleges and universities. Current funding models do not sufficiently advance fully scaled improvements. Instead, today's models create unfunded mandates: Colleges are required to increase completion rates, but they do not receive essential funding…

This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

Numerous observers and critics of higher education, including some policymakers, have suggested that hiring and maintaining faculty on tenure lines is a primary source of inefficiency in colleges and universities. These "disrupters" argue that reducing commitments to tenure will lead to cost savings and more effective adaptations to…

The unification of South Korea and North Korea is a plausible idea yet it requires a comprehensive preparation in advance. As a method to achieve fiscal efficiency in public services, decentralization theory is consistently applied. However, the current literature and political reality argue that decentralization does not always hold its…

GM(1,1) and GM(1,1) rolling models derived from grey system theory were estimated using time-series data from projection studies by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). An out-of-sample forecasting competition between the two grey prediction models and exponential smoothing used by NCES was conducted for education expenditure and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of select technical higher education institutes of national importance in India. This helps to judge the efficiency and effectiveness of an institute to provide valuable insights on performance measurement and effectiveness not only to the respective institute but also to…

Mature higher education markets are drifting headfirst into the perfect storm. The convergence of shifting demographics, increased competition, decreased government funding, and the reality of a global marketplace has become the new normal in Canada, like in many other parts of the world. Most within the academy have come to accept this reality,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess the research efficiency of the Chilean higher education institutions (HEIs). As it has been argued in the literature, universities in Chile are far from being considered research-oriented institutions. Current governmental reforms have put pressures on the efficient use of public resources,…

The University of North Texas at Dallas (UNT-Dallas) was conceived 10 years ago as a public institution along tried-and-true lines--a comprehensive metropolitan university meant to serve a diverse student population and to improve the economic outlook of a part of the city that prosperity has left behind. But that was before management consultants…

This brief summarizes the ways that schools and their teachers can simultaneously reach more students with excellent teaching, expand teachers' career opportunities, and sustainably fund higher pay and other priorities. This is based on Public Impact's school models that use job redesign and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers to…

There are a variety of challenges facing colleges and universities today. With shrinking public funding, many colleges and universities must rethink their operations to ensure that they are operating efficiently. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have an even more daunting task in a downturned economy because they are often…

Across the nation, a surprising number of both critics and advocates of urban schools demonstrate a naivete about the limits and possibilities of funding in relationship to the academic success of urban students. On one hand, critics often argue, without solid evidence or informed analysis, that urban school districts have sufficient funds to…

This brief shows how teachers in a Time-Technology swap school model may earn more, sustainably. In this model, schools use age-appropriate portions of digital learning (as little as about an hour daily per student) to free the time of excellent teachers to teach more students and potentially to collaborate with peers. By teaching more students,…

This study examined student achievement in Michigan public school districts to determine if rural school districts are demonstrating greater financial efficiency by producing higher levels of student achievement than school districts in other geographic locations with similar socioeconomics. Three models were developed using multiple regression…

This paper studies the optimal allocation of resources--in terms of school management, teachers, supporting employees and materials--in secondary schools. We use a flexible budget constrained output distance function model to estimate both technical and allocative efficiency scores for 448 Dutch secondary schools between 2002 and 2007. The results…