As recipients of public funding, Extension faculty are accountable to government leaders and stakeholders for reporting program impact. Increasingly, they are being asked to document specific impacts of programs on constituents' lives and compare them to financial investments in a program. The article describes cost-benefit analysis as a technique for comparing program outcomes to inputs to demonstrate accountability. It also illustrates the cost-benefit concept with two specific examples.
O’Neill et al. (Sun,) studied this question.