Are Technical High Schools Worth the Investment? A Cost-Benefit Analysis

• In Event: New Evidence on the Effectiveness of Career and Technical Education

Abstract

Interest in career and technical education (CTE) programs at the secondary school level has increased in recent years. Concurrently, there is new evidence about the efficacy and impact of stand-alone technical high schools where all students enrolled in the school participate in some form of CTE (Bonilla 2020; Brunner et al. 2019; Dougherty 2018; Hemelt et al. 2018). Advocates for these programs often reason that they confer positive impacts on student engagement and employment outcomes, and recent evidence bolsters such claims. While most research has focused on examining whether these potential benefits of CTE participation exist, much less research directly addresses what drives the costs of operating CTE programs, relative to traditional comprehensive high schools, and how these cost differences compare to the overall economic benefits they have been shown to produce.

This paper adds to the literature in two ways. First, it estimates whether the impacts of CTE-specific schools are a cost-effective means to improve student outcomes. Second, it explores the cost determinants of technical education to understand the source of any costs differences, which could also shed light on the source of program impacts.

As our data sources, we use impact estimate of specialized technical high schools from Brunner et al. (2019) as well as Dougherty (2018), in combination with education public finance and spending data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, and the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut to support our analyses. Specifically, we first establish what factors explain differences in spending between technical and comprehensive high schools. We then used the net differences in spending as part of a cost-benefit analysis to establish whether the additional expenditures on technical high schools outweigh the benefits associated with the improved educational and workforce outcomes established in these recent studies. A number of simulations are conducted, under varying assumptions, to establish under what conditions these investments in specialized schools might pay off.

We find that there are higher costs of providing an education in the CTHSS schools, but that the established earnings differences, and value of additional high school graduates results in lifetime benefits that likely exceed cost differences. We use estimates from Brunner et al. (2019) as well as known estimates of the economic public benefits to an increase in the high school graduation (Levin & Belfield, 2007) and higher earnings over time (Kreisman & Stange 2020) to conclude that there is a substantial net positive benefit under most reasonable assumptions. Preliminary estimates also suggest that much of the difference in average cost per pupil can be explained by differences in student-teacher ratios, though student composition and funding formulas that weight student characteristics differently also explain a meaningful amount.

Authors

• Shaun Michael Dougherty, Boston College

• Eric J. Brunner, University of Connecticut

• Stephen L. Ross, University of Connecticut

• Mary M. Smith, Vanderbilt University