Do DEEP institutions spend more or differently than their peers?

Abstract

In September 2004 the NSSE Institute requested the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) to undertake an expenditure analysis for twenty institutions selected as study sites for the Documenting Effective Educational Practices (DEEP) project. DEEP institutions were selected for study because they performed at higher than expected levels on both NSSE benchmarks and student retention, after taking a range of different institutional factors into account. Using publicly-available data on institutional expenditures drawn from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), NCHEMS was asked to examine how DEEP institutions spent their money by category in terms of the proportions of expenditures devoted to various institutional functions and the absolute dollar amounts spent per FTE students in these categories.