Resources

Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety on Cost, Harsher Judgments on How Colleges are Run
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A report by John Immerwahr and Jean Johnson, with Amber Ott and Jonathan Rochkind by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, supported by Lumina Foundation for Education. Together with other recent trends, these findings suggest that many Americans are becoming more skeptical about whether colleges and universities are doing all that they can to control costs and keep tuition affordable. It may also indicate that Americans will be increasingly less receptive to the argument that higher education institutions need more money to continue to provide higher quality services. 

This report is a follow-up to the 2007 and 2009 Squeeze Play reports.

The City Dividends: How Cities Gain by Making Small Improvements in Metropolitan Performance
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A report prepared by CEO for Cities, with support from Lumina Foundation for Education. The objective of this report is to provide quantitative estimates of the economic gains that metropolitan areas and cities could achieve by improving their performance in talent, sustainability and opportunity, or what is called City Dividends.

Calculating Cost-Return for Investments in Student Success
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A report prepared by Jobs for the Future and Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability focused on exploring whether first-year programs designed to retain students are a cost-effective investments for colleges and universities.

Paying for College: Distinguishing Between Cost and Price
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A report prepared by Sandy Baum for Making Opportunity Affordable. Paying for College makes a start at advancing the productivity conversation. It outlines a simple framework for understanding concepts in college costs. Developing both clear language to describe the central elements of college finance and adequate data to measure and compare trends are key components of the process. The paper also reviews basic college finance concepts, explains existing evidence about costs, and describes some of the gaps in available data. The goal is to lay the groundwork for constructive efforts to hold down costs without compromising quality or educational opportunities.

Metrics for Improving Cost Accountability
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An Issue Brief prepared by the Delta Cost Project for Making Opportunity Affordable.

One of the barriers to improved cost accountability lies in the metrics of cost analysis. In the hope of advancing the discussion, the Delta Project has developed several recommendations for aggregate measures of costs for policy audiences.

Who Pays for Higher Education? Changing Patterns in Cost, Price, and Subsidies
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An Issue Brief prepared by the Delta Cost Project for Making Opportunity Affordable. To understand why tuitions are increasing at institutions of higher education, policymakers need to look at the relationships between and among cost, price and subsidy. This brief explains how to understand those relationships, what the trend data show at a national level, places to go for more information, and questions to ask.

The Dreaded "P" Word: An Examination of Productivity in Public Postsecondary Education
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A report prepared by Patrick Kelly for Delta Cost Project's White Paper Series, supported by Making Opportunity Affordable. This report expands work previously conducted by NCHEMS to incorporate a more general measure of degree and certificate productivity, gauging the levels of unrestricted resources made available to state public colleges and universities and the corresponding production of degrees and certificates - taking into account the value of these credentials in each state's employment market. Degree and certificate production is a mission held in common by all institutions with distinctions based on levels (e.g. certificate, associate's, bachelor's, master's, etc.) and types (e.g. liberal arts, engineering, computer science, etc.). The report addresses two questions relevant to many policymakers: 1) What is the value to individuals and the state of producing college credentials - by level and type? 2) How welll are our institutions utilizing the public's investment to produce them?

What Does a College Degree Cost? Comparing Approaches to Measuring "Cost Per Degree"
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A report by Nate Johnson for Delta Cost Project's White Paper Series, supported by Making Opportunity Affordable. This paper uses actual spending data from two public university systems to present several ways to talk to about the production cost of bachelor's degree education in different contexts:

  • "Catalog" cost: to provide the 120-128 credits required for most bachelor's degrees;
  • "Transcript" cost: the cost of what typical students actually take, including failed courses and credits beyond the minimum requirements of a degree: and
  • "Full-cost attribution" : the cost of all instruction or system - including courses taken by students who transfer out or do not graduate - divided by the number of degrees awarded.
Squeeze Play 2009: The Public's Views on College Costs Today
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A report by John Immerwahr and Jean Johnson for Public Agenda supported by Making Opportunity Affordable. For increasing numbers of Americans, a crucial facet of the American Dream appears to be at risk. A solid majority consider a college degree an indispensable ticket to the middle class. At the same time, even more people believe college is financially out-of-reach for many qualified students. 

This report is a follow-up to the 2007 "Squeeze Play: How Parents and the Public Look at Higher Education Today"

Trends in College Spending: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does it Go?
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A report prepared by the Delta Cost Project for Making Opportunity Affordable. It's time to get past the technical obstacles that have dominated this topic for too long and do something about cost accountability. Every institution should be able to tell students, boards and legislatures basic facts about where the money comes from, where it goes, and what it buys. Every state policymaker should know how state funds are spent, what they buy, and how their institutions compare to those other states. This work is a starting place for this conversation, the first of a planned series of regular reports containing metrics that every state and every institution should be able to use.