IEI Seminar: Henry Levin on “Challenges to Doing Cost-Effectiveness Studies in Education”

About IEI: The International Education Initiative (IEI) is a cross-campus collaboration between FSI and the GSE.  The purpose of IEI is to promote greater collaboration around research and policy analysis in international education at Stanford.  The initiative includes a speaker series as well as a series of workshops targeted at graduate students and young researchers.

About the Topic: Cost-effectiveness analysis is being used increasingly in education to compare the efficiency of different approaches to gaining educational results. This presentation will provide a brief introduction to the purpose and method of cost-effectiveness analysis in education. It will also provide illustrations of recent work. The main focus will be to address a range of challenges that arise in carrying out these studies. These will include the problem of using retrospective data, issues of outcomes that are not strictly comparable, and multi-site results.

About the Speaker: Henry M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, a nonpartisan entity. He is also the David Jacks Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Economics at Stanford University where he served from 1968-99 after working as an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He is a specialist in the economics of education and human resources and has published 16 books and almost 300 articles on these and related subjects. At present Levin is doing research on educational reform, educational vouchers, cost-effectiveness analysis, financing educational equity, and educational privatization.

Sponsored by:

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Graduate School of Education, Rural Education Action Program, Center for Education Policy Analysis

Followed by wine and cheese.

Open to the public.