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The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) is launching the State Higher Education Finance Network, featuring a regularly occurring webinar series with presentations and discussions surrounding state higher education finance topics. This network and webinars are open to anyone interested or actively working in state higher education finance. The first webinar will be on Tuesday, December 9, 2025, from 2-3 p.m. EST with our featured presentation from Jesse Levin, Principal Research Economist at American Institutes for Research (AIR); Bruce Baker, Professor at the University of Miami, and Chris Brooks, Researcher at AIR.
The session will share a recent application of education cost function modeling to estimate the costs of providing equal educational opportunity in the community college sector and how the results of these types of investigations can inform funding policy. Speakers will provide an overview of the approach and key results from a study using this method to analyze costs across California community colleges. The recommended methods serve to inform the performance of state higher education funding formulas with respect to equity and generate policy discussion regarding the cost of providing students equal access to a community college education. The application of this approach in California is among the first of its kind to provide rigorous empirically-based estimates of the differential costs for high- versus low-need community college students to have an equal opportunity to achieve outcomes. Findings from this type of analysis provide a foundation upon which equity-driven adjustments to the performance-based funding or other models of state funding can be developed.