This study, based on research by UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning, deals with a prime contemporary problem, that of how to provide better education to more people in the face of tightening budgets, escalating costs, and educational conservatism. The authors contend that the imaginative use of cost analysis can be a powerful tool for facilitating changes and innovations in conventional educational arrangements and for making effective use of scarce educational resources. The aim of the book is to provide those directly responsible for managing education -- i.e., classroom teachers, local administrators and school board members, and State and national educational authorities -- with a clearer understanding of educational cost analysis and the important purposes it can serve. More specifically, the book seeks to explain why cost analysis has become imperative in these changing times, how educational costs behave as they do, how various educational systems and institutions have actually used cost analysis and with what results, how educational analysts can go about applying cost analysis in their own institutions, and how decision makers can profit from the results. (Author/DN)