At What Cost? Is Technical Education Worth the Investment?

Shaun M. Dougherty () and Mary M. Smith ()
Additional contact information
Shaun M. Dougherty: Lynch School of Education and Human Development Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Mary M. Smith: Peabody College of Education and Human Development Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37203

Education Finance and Policy, 2025, vol. 20, issue 1, 85-109

Abstract: Career and technical education (CTE) has existed in the United States for over a century, and only in recent years have there been opportunities to assess the causal impact of participating in these programs while in high school. To date, no work has assessed whether the relative costs of these programs meet or exceed the benefits as described in recent evaluations. In this paper, we use available cost data to compare average costs per pupil in standalone high school CTE programs in Connecticut and Massachusetts to the most likely counterfactual schools. Under a variety of conservative assumptions about the monetary value of known educational and social benefits, we find that programs in Massachusetts offer clear positive returns on investment, whereas programs in Connecticut offer smaller, though mostly non-negative expected returns. We also consider the potential cost effectiveness of CTE programs offered in other contexts to address questions of generalizability.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00418
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:20:y:2025:i:1:p:85-109

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().