Commonfund's Higher Education Price Index® (HEPI) data show that costs for colleges and universities rose 3.4 percent in FY2024, a decreased rate of inflation compared with 4.0 in FY2023 and 5.2 percent in FY2022. (FY2024 covers the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, and coincides with the budget year of most educational institutions.)…

In this paper, I use Levin and McEwan's (2001) cost feasibility approach and personnel data obtained from the Superintendent of Public Instruction to estimate the cost of providing coaching support to every newly hired principal in Washington State. Based on this descriptive analysis, I estimate that the cost to provide leadership coaching to…

A spate of school shootings in the U.S. has prompted policymakers to address the public's growing perception that our schools are unsafe. As education policymakers continue to press for additional security initiatives, it is important to understand the costs borne by school systems for these programs. Thus far, the scholarly literature is silent…

This article reports that the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI), a widely used measure of colleges' costs, rose by 3.6 percent for the 2008 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. But even as they reported the good news of that moderate increase, experts at the Commonfund Institute who maintain the index noted that broader economic trends could…

Inspired by a white paper produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, this study uses different measures of calculating the cost of a college degree at an upstate community college in New York. Departmental cost per credit hour, direct instructional costs, and full costs are all explained. A…

It is widely believed that administrative expenditures in US higher education are growing too rapidly, particularly in relation to expenditures that are directly related to instruction, and that this so-called "administrative bloat" is a major factor in the rising cost of higher education. We argue that this perception of rapid growth is…

This article reports that nearly half of the nation's largest athletics programs have doubled or tripled their recruitment spending over the past decade, as their pursuit of elite athletes intensifies and becomes more national in scope. Forty-eight percent of NCAA Division I athletics departments at least doubled their recruiting budgets from 1997…

The authors discuss how to use economic techniques to evaluate educational programs and show how to apply basic cost analysis to implementation of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS). A description of cost analysis concepts used for economic program evaluation is provided, emphasizing the suitability of these concepts for evaluating…

Background: This paper considers some economic aspects of a therapy and support service for people with stroke and aphasia. This material was part of a broader evaluation of the service, which is reported elsewhere (van der Gaag et al. 2005, van der Gaag and Mowles 2005). Aims: The purpose of this part of the study was to investigate the…

How do colleges and universities spend their money? To most, it's a black box. The public looks at tuitions, states look at appropriations, trustees look at the endowment, and department managers look at their budgets. How colleges actually spend their money is barely understood by the general public and even many policy makers. In the current…

In this article, the authors present the results of a research study in which they used two national datasets to construct and examine a model that estimates relative faculty instructional costs for specific undergraduate degree programs and also identifies differences in these costs by region and institutional type. They conducted this research…

The Government Printing Office (GPO) pricing of publications sold to the public was reviewed in order to determine whether: (1) the August 1973 price increases embraced the same financial philosophy which had prevailed in the past and (2) the relationship between the pricing structure and the annual appropriation by the Congress had changed. It…

This report contains 121 tables that estimate the costs of production of various commodities on United States farms in 1986. The report first assesses costs and returns on a per-unit basis, such as one acre or one animal, under three sections of a budget: cash receipts, cash expenses, and economic costs. The budgets are based on national…

Higher education has increasingly become critical to the nation's cultural, social, and economic well-being, with 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs in the knowledge economy requiring some postsecondary education. While a college graduate can expect to earn, on average, approximately $1 million more over the course of his or her working life…

An Ontario university non-salary price index is presented that attempts to measure the impact of inflation on non-salary expenditure. Using 1970-71 as the base year (in which the index equals 100), the changes in prices of non-salary expenditures for 1976-77 are shown. The non-salary expenditures covered include books and periodicals, furniture…