The course is about the resources — public and private — that support schools, colleges, and universities: how the resources are raised, how they are allocated, how they are budgeted for, how they are economically justified, and how they are accounted for. The course is also about the connections: connections between investments in education and the larger economy, between the organization of systems and the way funding is allocated and accounted for, between forms of budgets and the efficiency with which funding is deployed, and between funding and educational quality. Although the ideas of classical economists – Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Becker, Rostow – about the formation of human capital will be discussed, the course does not require a background in economic theory.