The Cost of Remedial Education - Mackinac Center

The Cost of Remedial Education:
How Much Michigan Pays When Students Fail to Learn Basic Skills
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
The Cost of Remedial Education:
How Much Michigan Pays When Students
Fail to Learn Basic Skills
by Jay P. Greene, Ph.D.
Executive Summary
More than a third of Michigan students leave high school without possessing basic
skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This forces post-secondary schools and employers
to teach these individuals basic skills.
Providing post-secondary remedial education is just one expense society must
shoulder to make up for the failure of students to learn these minimal competencies. Other
costs—the cost of coping with those who never acquire these skills—include everything
from lost productivity to more expensive criminal justice and social welfare systems.
This study calculates the financial costs incurred by Michigan business and
institutions of higher learning when students leave high school without learning basic skills.
Using five different strategies for determining this cost, we conservatively estimate that the
Michigan economy suffers a total annual loss of between $311 million and $1.15 billion.
The best estimate, the answer from averaging the results from all five calculation strategies,
is $601 million per year. Extrapolating to the entire United States, the lack of basic skills
costs a total of approximately $16.6 billion each year. In addition to these monetary costs,
the human costs are incalculable.
This study
calculates the
financial costs
incurred by
Michigan business
and institutions of
higher learning
when students
leave high school
without learning
basic skills.
Estimates of the Annual Cost of Students'
Lack of Basic Skills in Michigan
Annual Cost (In Millions of Dollars)
$1,600
$1,200
$800
$400
$0
$311
Strategy 1
Estimate
$489 $534 $523
Strategy 2
Estimate
Strategy 3
Estimate
Strategy 4
Estimate
$1,148
Strategy 5
Estimate
$601
Average
Estimate
September 2000 1