Assessing the Benefits of Postsecondary Education

As competition for public funding to support postsecondary education and training increases, public policy makers are demanding evidence of the benefits of their investments. This paper reports on the development of a model to assess return on investments made by the federal government (societal) in education of deaf and hard of hearing persons at the postsecondary level. It also deals with individual investments of deaf and hard of hearing students and a return or benefit on their personal investment. The model was adapted from work done by Ehrenberg and Smith at Cornell University and from joint research conducted by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and the Social Security Administration