This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

The government has made great strides in redressing past imbalances in education through the National Norms and Standards for School Funding (NNSSF) policy that focuses on equity in school funding. This NNSSF model compels the state to fund public schools according to a poverty quintile system, where poor schools are allocated much more funding…

The Massachusetts community college system is entering a second year with funding for each of its 15 schools determined using a new performance-based formula. Under the new model, 50% of each college's allocation is based on performance on metrics related to enrollment and student success, with added incentives for "at-risk" students…

This article considers the role of higher education in state budgets. It empirically models and tests the balance wheel hypothesis in a robust framework. The balance wheel model posits that in good economic times, higher education is an attractive area for states to fund and tends to be funded at a higher rate than other state budget categories.…

This study examines how five diverse California elementary schools--two underperforming and three high achieving, with statistically significant subgroups of English Learner, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and minority students--have allocated resources to improve student achievement. The applied research contributes new information to the…

Higher education institutions in the United States are entering a new era in budgeting. Therefore, institutions are actively engaging in dialogues about the budgeting tools that will most effectively assist them in achieving institutional goals and objectives within their strategic plans and being accountable for the use of scarce resources, as…

In 1968, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) initiated a 5-year management information systems project to encourage systematic data collection and utilization for the effective allocation of resources at institutions of higher education. This report describes Phase II of the project, a developmental phase scheduled for…

Describes the features of a new student resource-allocation model that analyzes resources for individual students, groups, or categories of students and allows the integration of cost analysis into school-district and building-level planning and evaluation. States that use of the model will assist school-district administrators in making more…

This report describes the major projects undertaken by the Institute for Policy Analysis of the University of Toronto. It includes a list of the publications that are now available and those that will become available during the next few months. The projects are: (1) Program Planning and Budgeting in Universities; (2) Planning and Financing Higher…

This paper describes resource allocation in Australian universities including the broader context of national restructuring and a case study of one university's attempt to restructure resource allocation within the university. The 1987 restructuring of the Australian system from a binary system to a unified national system and the associated…

The study identifies specific financial indicators for higher education, indicates the recommended source of data, and suggests a survey for the Higher Education Panel that could be used to supplement the data. The use of the indicators is explored and it is explained that the indicators allow the grouping of institutions for comparative analysis.…

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…

A summary of a working conference on state funding of public higher education is presented, with attention to costing in higher education, financial planning models for state agencies, dimensions and determinants of tuition policy, measuring the effectiveness of state agencies for higher education, and a review of state-level comparative data in…

This book examines the advantages and disadvantages of various methods of financing education and discusses the basic issues related to increasing efficiency in education. Section 1 offers a short history of educational finance and discusses many of the traditional approaches to financing education. Section 2 presents methods for distributing…

The problem of the efficient allocation of State aid for libraries within a fixed budget constraint was studied. A management science (operations research) approach was utilized. Two basic models were developed: an allocation model to determine the amount of State aid to be received by each library system and a model that predicts library use as a…