Economic Evaluation in Education. Henry M. Levin
href="#u18c520ad-41b0-59c1-93c6-646895329b85">Chapter 11) is on uncertainty and how to perform sensitivity testing. The last two chapters—on checklists and policy issues—are carried over from the second edition, although the policy discussion is newly updated to address current debates and controversies. Each chapter includes a set of discussion questions and exercises. Answers to selected exercises are given in Appendix A. Finally, Appendix B includes a discussion of a new tool—CostOut—for aiding researchers in performing harmonized and rigorous CE studies.
As we look across the past three-plus decades, we hope this new edition reaffirms our fundamental claim: Economic evaluation of education is important and should be taken seriously.
Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
This book benefited greatly from discussions and suggestions over the years about how we might update, expand, and improve the first edition of this book. Over the span of 17 years and 13 printings, we received considerable feedback from scholars, policy analysts, and students that surely improved the content and presentation of the revision. Many researchers, too numerous to mention, have generously shared their work. We want to express our thanks to all of them. We also thank Darrell R. Lewis and Jon S. Eberling for their review of the final manuscript.
Henry M. Levin wishes to dedicate this edition to the memory of his close friend, Professor Jose Luis Moreno Becerra. Moreno was a professor of applied economics at the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands, Spain. He was a graduate student in the Economics of Education at Stanford some two decades ago and returned to Spain, receiving the highest score in the nation in a competition for a prestigious professorship in applied economics. Such a performance gave him the first choice of positions at any Spanish university. He returned to his home in the Canary Islands, and over the years, he became a leading voice of the economics of education throughout Spain. He was a founder and the first president of the Economics of Education Society of Spain, a group with a dynamic agenda and an annual meeting of very high quality. His sudden death in 1999 saddened a wide circle of colleagues and friends, and we cherish our associations with him, both academic and personal. We wish to present this as an homage to Jose Luis for his wife, Tere, and his two children, Ernesto and Elena.
Finally, Patrick J. McEwan wishes to dedicate this edition to the memory of his father. Richard T. McEwan always harbored aspirations of being an academic, but his family was not wealthy and many educational opportunities were unavailable. By working many years at a job that was less than fulfilling, he ensured that both his children would be sufficiently privileged to choose careers that were denied to him. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to share in their accomplishments. If this book succeeds in its goals, then it is partly due to his curiosity, his intellect, and his encouragement.
Acknowledgments to the Third Edition
Since the second edition of this book, much has changed: Methods of economic evaluation have become more sophisticated and detailed, and the attention paid to questions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness (CE) has increased greatly. We hope this new edition clearly expresses these methodological developments. But we especially hope that it captures the sense that economic evaluation of education should be taken seriously.
In revising this book, we have benefited greatly from discussions and interactions with many researchers, policymakers, and professionals. Most recently, with support from the Institute of Education Sciences, we have been privileged to teach economic evaluation to education researchers; their perspectives and contributions have made this a better book. Also, we appreciate the contributions of Meridith Friedman for assembling the references, Viviana Rodriguez Andrade for formatting the book, and all our colleagues at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education (CBCSE) at Teachers College, Columbia University. We want to express our thanks to all these persons. Collectively, they are working to make education systems more effective and more efficient and to provide a better future for new generations of students. As, we hope, are we.
Acknowledgments from Henry M. Levin
In the early 1970s, as a young academic with a few publications on cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis, I was asked by Marcia Guttentag to write a chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Evaluation Research, which SAGE published in 1975. Although I surveyed the field in the old way of searching for library sources and reports and writing to contributors to the field, there was little application to social endeavors. Rather, the literature focused primarily on infrastructural projects; defense; and a few attempts to incorporate regression-focused models on crime, health, and education. To say the least, the field was underdeveloped, and few had attempted to apply it to evaluation. What struck me most was that the measurement of costs was chaotic. Most CE or benefit-cost (BC) studies were vague or silent about methods and sources of costs or even definitions of what was meant by costs. Others simply reported budgetary expenditures without explaining how they had analysed budgets designed for accounting purposes into cost evaluations of specific projects or interventions. Thus, the 1975 effort focused on establishing a general method for determining cost based upon economic concepts and the integration of that model with how costs were financed, two separate analyses. Less attempt was made to elaborate on how to measure effectiveness (experiments were favored) or how benefits were measured.
Although a few evaluators took interest in the topic, many asked for more detail on procedures. So, in 1983, I published the first edition of this book, attempting to assist evaluators to undertake cost analysis, using the ingredients approach. Although the book sold well, we found few new studies in the literature. In the middle 1990s at Stanford, I encountered a wonderful student, Patrick McEwan, who took great interest in the subject. He agreed to be the coauthor of a second edition, which would expand the analysis with special attention to the measurement of effectiveness and benefits. The second edition was published in 2000 (copyright 2001), some 17 years after the first edition, and it received increased attention.
In 1999, I moved to Teachers College, Columbia University, and continued to undertake research on CE and BC analysis in education. In 2000, I was joined by Clive Belfield in our National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, and we decided that with the additional focus we had on CE and BC, we would start the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education (CBCSE) in 2007. Although Clive accepted a position in the Department of Economics of Queens College, City University of New York, we continued to collaborate on cost analysis in educational evaluation. At this time, we were also joined by Brooks Bowden and later by Rob Shand, both PhD students in educational policy and economics of education. Since 2001, there was a flowering of developments in economics and other disciplines on the estimation of effectiveness in education, particularly the use of randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies. At the same time, our second edition was approaching the 17-year length of publication of the first edition.
Given the flow of new ideas and applications and the steady increase in new applications of CE and BC studies in education, we decided as a group to prepare a third edition of the book, which would encompass progress in cost estimation and both measurement and estimation of effectiveness and benefits. We have attempted that in this new edition.
It is my pleasure to thank Clive for coordinating this effort as Patrick took the lead on the second edition. To a large degree, this is a thankless task of process, particularly with multiple authors. But, in both cases, the key coauthors made substantive improvements in presentation and content. In addition, our new additions, Brooks Bowden and Rob Shand, shared insights and content from their own studies and polish that was missing from earlier editions. For an older author, it is nice to know that such competent and strong colleagues will carry on the tradition, perhaps to a fourth edition in 2034.
I also wish to thank Fiona Hollands, who took the lead in enabling us to bring forth our computer platform to assist evaluators in doing their own cost analysis. Although Clive and I began this project with others, the ability to move it along to a user stage and procedures is due to Fiona’s leadership and care. We hope that readers of the third edition will use CostOut to do their