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Education Finance and Cost Analysis

AIR’s experts have helped establish the national agenda in education finance, leading the development and use of innovative resource allocation and cost models to address a range of education finance and policy issues from early intervention through postsecondary education. Our nationally recognized researchers apply state-of-the-art methods to conduct large-scale studies of resource allocation in education at the federal, state, and local levels. AIR has worked with state policy makers to provide new funding formulas to states or school districts to ensure sufficient resources are available to meet the educational needs of difficult-to-serve student populations.

Recent Reports

  • The Price of a Science Ph.D.

    A recent report from AIR's Center for STEM Education & Innovation found that financing a Ph.D. in the sciences results in high levels of debt, particularly for underrepresented minorities.

  • College Spending in a Turbulent Decade: Findings From the Delta Cost Project

    A new data brief from the Delta Cost Project at AIR focuses on financial struggles of colleges and universities two years after the onset of the Great Recession. Among other findings, the data show that among nonprofit colleges and universities, community colleges suffered the greatest financial hardships of the decade.

  • Not Your Mother’s College Affordability Crisis

    Rita Kirshstein, director of the Delta Cost Project, discusses college tuition hikes and affordability concerns over the past several decades. Kirshstein explains that that today’s affordability crisis affects many more students and families than earlier ones.

Recent Projects

  • CollegeMeasures.org

    A partnership between AIR and Matrix Knowledge Group, College Measures uses data to drive improvement in higher education, making information about the earnings of graduates from state higher education programs publicly accessible.

  • Delta Cost Project

    AIR in January 2012 became responsible for conducting the analytic work of the Delta Cost Project, a nationally recognized effort for monitoring and identifying revenue and spending trends in public and private higher education.

  • The CALDER Center is Now Located at AIR

    The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) is now based at AIR’s corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C. and is operating as a joint project of AIR and scholars at Duke University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of Missouri, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Washington.