Return on Investment for Adult Basic Education: Existing Evidence and Future Directions

Abstract

Amidst diminishing federal investment in Adult Basic Education (ABE), there is growing interest in return on investment (ROI) as an economic rationale to support ABE funding. Against this backdrop, we provide an overview of the ROI concept and methods and the empirical evidence on ABE program impacts to broaden the discourse among practitioners and advocates. We point out that the most crucial building blocks necessary for ROI estimations are missing in the literature. We contextualize the current status of the literature by discussing challenges in ABE program evaluations and limitations in ROI methods. We then further our discussions by offering a recommendation for ROI estimation and alternative approaches to ROI. We conclude by calling for an expanded public discourse, beyond ROI, on the social benefits of funding ABE.

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“…Frontiers in Environmental Science frontiersin.org identifying the economic cost or benefit of activities that may accrue to different stakeholders as the result of a given social outcome (Kim and Belzer, 2021). The financial proxies were drawn from the literature and used in this analysis to create consistent "importance weights" for each of the potential outcomes of project groupings, based upon the social value that stakeholders placed on each of the analyzed outcomes.…”

“…Several caveats should be noted regarding the financial proxies used for this analysis. The selection of financial proxies used in an SROI is an inherently subjective process (Kim and Belzer, 2021). In some cases, there was not a geographically based proxy that perfectly matched an anticipated outcome.…”

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