Today Fordham is releasing the latest installment in its Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning working paper series, "The Costs of Online Learning." In this
paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and
online schooling experts to estimate today's average per-pupil cost for a
variety of schooling models, traditional and online, and presents a nuanced
analysis of the important variance in cost between different school designs.
These ranges—from $5,100 to $7,700 for full-time virtual schools, and $7,600 to
$10,200 for the blended version—highlight both the potential for low-cost
online schooling and the need for better data on costs and outcomes in order
for policymakers to reach confident conclusions related to the productivity and
efficiency of these promising new models.
Download "The Costs of Online Learning" to learn more, and check out previous publications in this series, including Bryan and Emily Hassel's "Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction" and Paul T. Hill's "School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era."
