TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ludwig,Jens
AU  - Phillips,Deborah A.
TI  - The Benefits and Costs of Head Start
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12973
PY  - 2007
Y2  - March 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12973
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12973.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jens Ludwig
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/834-0811
Fax: 773/834-1582
E-Mail: jludwig@uchicago.edu

Deborah A. Phillips
37th and O Streets, NW
Georgetown University Department of Psychology
Washington, DC 20057
E-Mail: deborah.dap4@gmail.com
AB  - In this essay we review what is known about Head Start and argue that the program is likely to generate benefits to participants and society as a whole that are large enough to justify the program's costs.  Our conclusions differ importantly from those offered in some previous reviews because we use a more appropriate standard to judge the success of Head Start (namely, benefit-cost analysis), draw on new accumulating evidence for Head Start's long-term effects on early cohorts of program participants, and discuss why common interpretations of a recent randomized experimental evaluation of Head Start's short-term impacts may be overly pessimistic.  While in principle there could be more beneficial ways of deploying Head Start resources, the benefits of such changes remain uncertain and there is some downside risk.
ER  -