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The first edition of this volume was published in 1983 and the second edition in 2001. Unfortunately, over this long period, there was mostly a lot of talk about cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis, but there was not very much action.

In the past decade, there has been a lot more investigation of CE and benefit-cost (BC) analysis. At every level of government, education decisionmakers are being asked to accomplish more with the same or even fewer resources. There is great hope that new educational technologies will improve education and reduce cost, but decades of promises have resulted in few studies incorporating effectiveness and cost and even less conclusive evidence. Philanthropies are more eager to calculate their “return on investment” in social programs. And, in an era of greater accountability, the general public is increasingly scrutinizing how resources are allocated to schools and colleges. Even academic journals have become more accepting of articles applying CE and BC analyses. These pressures and interests have fostered more research and inquiry into the efficiency of educational spending.

With this new attention, it is especially important that cost evaluation be performed to a rigorous standard and that it be expressed in such a way that it can be widely understood by policymakers, education professionals, and the general citizenry. To meet this imperative, these audiences need a thorough and detailed explication of what cost evaluation is and how it should be performed.

To our knowledge, this book remains the only full-length treatment of the subject for education researchers. Some general textbooks for evaluators devote a section to the topic (notably Boardman, Greenberg, Vining, & Weimer, 2011), and two recent books have set out general standards and principles (for health, see Neumann, Sanders, Russell, Siegel, & Ganiat, 2016; for general methodology, see Farrow & Zerbe, 2013). By contrast, this book is focused completely on the rationale and methods of economic evaluation in the field of education. Its primary distinction from other texts is its extensive treatment of how to perform cost analyses.

Since the second edition of this book, there has been considerable methodological development in the evaluation literature. This development in part reflects the intensive use of CE analysis by health researchers, but it also reflects the greater empiricism practiced by education researchers. We hope this new edition clearly expresses these methodological developments so that researchers can apply more advanced methods. As well, we hope this new edition adequately includes this new empirical research so that more is known about what investments are socially efficient.

The volume has undergone substantial modification from earlier editions. As in the second edition, we continued to replace and update many of the examples with recent cost studies from education. We further updated the text with references to methodological and applied research.

We have also added several new chapters. There is a new chapter (Chapter 2) on how to structure an economic analysis so that it is properly integrated with an impact evaluation. Often, getting the right structure for an economic evaluation is one of the most difficult challenges; in Chapter 2, we describe how such an evaluation should be articulated to a theory of change. To more clearly explain cost evaluation, we have expanded to four chapters (Chapters 3–6), with an explicit separation between identifying ingredients (in Chapter 4) and pricing them out (in Chapter 5). This edition includes a separate chapter (Chapter 7) on how to measure effectiveness; perhaps surprisingly, how effectiveness is measured is often the most contentious part of CE analysis. This new Chapter 7 sets out the preferred qualities of an effectiveness measure for the purposes of performing a CE analysis, the reporting that is formally set out in Chapter 8. Following on, this edition has an additional chapter—and much more detail—on estimating benefits (Chapter 9); this makes it easier to explain BC analysis (Chapter 10). The final new chapter (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.