This policy brief estimates the fiscal impacts of expanding New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account (EFA) program under two bills that were introduced in the state Legislature during the 2025 session. The analysis covers the first two years of each plan. The EFA program is currently open to public and private school K-12 students whose family…

In this study, we take stock of fee-free secondary education (FSE) initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa and review their impact on equitable access and achievement, as well as their cost-effectiveness. We begin by discussing the theoretical arguments for and against the abolition of secondary school fees. Second, we examine aggregate statistics on…

When workers hear about a possible promotion, it is common for them to get training, and they can do so through education. However, there is the possibility that the worker needs to receive a salary according to the knowledge acquired in such training. In this study, considering a population of employed workers with incomplete secondary school, we…

This mixed methods dissertation investigates the impact that cost-disaggregating tools like the Delaware Cost Study (DCS) have on the expenditure patterns at large, public research universities. It draws on public budgeting and higher education finance literature to form a theory of action that hypothesizes that expense management at such…

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) launched Canada's first zero textbook cost (ZTC) program in 2018, aiming to alleviate the financial burden of expensive course materials for students. This initiative has since grown to encompass eight credentials and nearly 800 individual courses from which over 24,000 students have benefited from nearly…

The expansion of school "choice" (i.e., voucher) programs, which provide taxpayer-financed subsidies for families enrolling students in private schools, has prompted a debate about their fiscal impact. A recent EdChoice report argues that these subsidies of private school costs save taxpayers money when--as is typically the case--the…

College promise programs, also known as free college initiatives, have the potential to address structural barriers to college access and enrollment in terms of financial, academic, and informational. The current literature indicates that these programs generally increase educational outcomes, but no prior studies have explored the overhead costs…

Knowledge applied to innovation is increasingly recognized as an explanatory factor of economic growth. Innovation derives from applying knowledge to generate new products or processes. National Innovation Systems (NIS) performs as the formal or informal network of people within institutions interacting to produce and apply knowledge to…

Vocational education practitioners must participate in professional development (PD) activities so they may implement contemporary teaching practices to support their students. Long-term, social types of activity are best because they benefit individuals and groups of practitioners and the training organisations for which they work. However,…

In this paper we examine the cost-effectiveness of providing NICE recommended psychological therapy to young people. For each type of mental health problem we show: (1) the assumptions used to derive the impact of treating one person on the number of "additional years of healthy life" (free of the condition) that that person will…

Objective: We developed an Excel-based cost calculator to assess the economic burden of university-based "Neisseria meningitidis" serogroup B (MenB) outbreaks. Participants: Hypothetical university with 6,354 students. Methods: Total societal costs of outbreak were estimated for three MenB pre-matriculation immunization…

With the goal of moving toward an alternative rate model for child care subsidies, the North Carolina Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE) partnered with the American Institutes for Research® (AIR®) to conduct a study to estimate the true cost of high-quality child care and to recommend three new rate models for the state to…

We study a new market design for K-12 school broadband procurement that switched from school-specific bidding to a system that bundled schools into groups. Using an event study approach, we estimate the program reduced internet prices by 37% per Mbps per month while increasing bandwidth by 500%. These benefits occurred by mitigating exposure risk…

The economic evaluation of educational policies and programs employing the ingredients method for cost, cost-effectiveness, or benefit-cost analysis is no exception to the critique that economic models require an untenable number of assumptions. Educational economists must make assumptions due to two sources of uncertainty: model uncertainty, as…

Founded in 2006, Zillow established itself as the leading online real estate marketplace. In 2018, Zillow launched Zillow Offers, a new business that purchased and sold homes. Zillow Offers provided home sellers with a faster purchase process than traditional realtors by gathering data from sellers online and making offers immediately, a process…