In this Inside IES Research guest blog for CTE Month, two members of the CTE Research Network’s Cost Analysis Working Group, David Stern, Ph.D., a Network advisor and an emeritus professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley, and Eric Brunner, Ph.D., a co-PI of one of the Network research teams and a professor of economics & public policy at the University of Connecticut, discuss how costs associated with CTE may differ from those of standard education and how to measure those costs.

Cost analysis is a critical part of education research because it communicates what resources are needed for a particular program or intervention. Just telling education leaders how promising a program or practice can be does not tell the whole story; practitioners and policymakers need to know how much a program or practice will cost so they can prioritize limited resources.