Cost-Effectiveness, or Cost?

Dean Dad

Friday's IHE did a story featuring a report by Douglas Harris and Sara Goldrick-Rab that's well worth reading in its entirety. In a nutshell, it measures the 'productivity' of various programs, using what boils down to dollars-per-graduate. Among other things, it suggests that call centers to nudge students into attending class have great bang for the buck, but that Upward Bound and similar programs are wildly expensive for what they achieve.

The goal of the study -- which is entirely to the good -- is to encourage colleges to base resource allocation decisions on actual effectiveness, rather than on what sounds good or what has usually been done. The authors break out two-year and four-year sectors -- thank you -- and actually define their variables. (Notably, the productivity decline over the past forty years has been far more dramatic in the four-year sector than in the two-year sector.) Even better, they acknowledge that most of the research done on various programs are done on those programs in isolation, rather than in comparison with each other. If we're serious about dealing with limited resources, we have to acknowledge that money spent on program A is money not available to be spent on program B. It's not enough to show that a given program helps; it needs to help more than its alternatives would have.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 21, 2010 3:04 AM
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