Athletics are big business on many college campuses, but does this come with a price tag? This issue brief looks at academic and athletic spending in NCAA Division I public universities between 2005 and 2010. Among a host of findings, this brief shows that the athletic departments of most public colleges and universities competing in NCAA Division…

School business officials are best equipped to lead in funding operating and capital needs because they understand the need for a methodical means of funding ongoing costs over time and the benefits of planning for future financial needs rather than letting emergencies dictate spending priorities. A capital-financing plan makes it possible to…

The Race to the Top fund (RTT) is intended to be a major federal investment in state and local education capacity and systemic education reforms aligned with federal policy priorities. In coming years, questions will be asked about the extent to which investments made through the RTT grant program improve educational productivity and…

Museum educators at small museums are sometimes thrust, solo, into building budgets from scratch. In this case study an emerging professional discovers that she has limited funding for an existing program that she was hired to run. She finds that she has to rebuild the budget to discover the program's true costs, and that sustainability depends…

"Teachers Teaching Teachers" ("T3") focuses on coaches' roles in the professional development of teachers. Each issue also explores the challenges and rewards that teacher leaders encounter. This issue includes: (1) Weekend Wisdom: Stimulus Funds Boost Professional Learning and Add Saturday Option (Valerie von Frank); (2) Lessons from a Coach:…

How to compare the costs of activities you are responsible for with the benefits resulting from those activities. (Author)

This study analyzes the equity of community college financing and demonstrates intrastate variations in appropriations to community colleges. The ratio of 90th to 10th percentile values ranges from 2.0 to 2.8 in half of the states analyzed, levels which are considered high in comparison to K-12 finance inequities. In 10 states with high revenue…

Cost benefit analysis may in the future become a valuable tool for management in higher education, provided the benefits of acquiring a body of knowledge can be defined. Since higher education is not subject to the disciplines of the marketplace in the sense that private business is, we need to find other reasons for influencing our decisions on…

The costing procedures in this manual have been selected to give postsecondary educational institutions a way to determine the full cost of resources used in achieving institutional objectives. The procedures have been tested by a limited number of institutions within a wide range of activities, and are being released in a filed review edition at…

Unit cost analysis provides a rationale for distributing capital costs of physical facilities. (Editor)

This cost differential study was designed to use data collected by the Division of Vocational and Technical Education and the Illinois Junior College Board in an effort to analyze differential program costs of selected occupational curricula in six sample community colleges incurred in the fiscal year 1968-69. To be effective, a cost accounting…

This review and synthesis of research focuses on studies of cost-effectiveness of vocational education. This paper represents an overview of the state of the art and includes (1) a review of the current conceptual and empirical problems of conducting a cost-efficiency or cost-effectiveness study of vocational education; (2) a review of the major…

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive study of postdoctoral education at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The purpose of the study was to determine the basic facts about postdoctoral education at UCSD, so that those entrusted with academic, administrative, and legislative responsibilities regarding postdoctoral…

Presented here is a model developed at Santa Barbara City College (California) for assessing vocational and non-vocational program costs. The primary purpose of the project was to compare costs during 1971-72 for these two types of programs. On an institutional average, vocational instructional costs appeared to be higher than non-vocational,…

A system developed at the College of William and Mary that attributes all expenditures to the specific fund-raising programs for which they were incurred is described. It is suggested that this system can be utilized by other colleges and universities to determine the actual costs of operating these programs. (Author/SF)