What does it cost the society if students fail to graduate? Prof. Henry Levin and his colleague, Clive Belfield, Professor of Economics at Queens College, have been working for years to answer this and other similar questions at TC Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education.

 

"Now, backed by a $500,000 grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to undertake a project entitled “Cost-effectiveness analysis of educational alternatives,” the Center is making its methods widely available for other researchers.

The goal of the IES-funded project is to demonstrate how to conduct cost-effectiveness analysis in education and to promote its use among policymakers to improve the productivity of resource allocation decisions. Eight people are working on the project, including Levin, Belfield, Fiona Hollands (Associate Director of CBCSE and 2003 alumna of TC Politics and Education Ph.D. program), Henan Cheng (post-doctoral fellow and alumna of TC), doctoral students Brooks Bowden, Robert Shand, Yilin Pan, and Barbara Hanisch-Cerda, a master’s degree student recently accepted into the doctoral program."