School voucher programs have become a prominent aspect of the education policy landscape in the United States. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is the only federally funded voucher program in the United States. Since 2004 it has offered publicly funded private school vouchers to nearly four thousand students to attend any of seventy-three different private schools in Washington, DC. An official experimental evaluation of the program, sponsored by the federal government's Institute of Education Sciences, found that the students who were awarded Opportunity Scholarships graduated from high school at a rate 12 percentage points higher than the students in the randomized control group. This article estimates the benefit/cost ratio of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, primarily by considering the increased graduation rate that it induced and the estimated positive economic returns to increased educational attainment. We find a benefit to cost ratio of 2.62, or $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent on the program.

How useful are “corporate brands” in markets? In theory, brands convey reliable information, providing consumers with shortcuts to time-consuming provider searches. We examine the usefulness of a corporate brand when parental school choice is expanded through K–12 tuition scholarships. Specifically, we evaluate whether Catholic schools carry an identifiable education brand (1) preferred even by non-Catholics, (2) for reasons connected to the brand, (3) signaling largely accurate information resulting in an enduring “match” of school characteristics to student needs, and (4) leading to exit from the program when a Catholic school fails to meet consumers' brand expectations. We test these hypotheses using attitudinal and behavioral data from a scholarship program in Washington, DC. The results largely confirm our hypotheses about the Catholic school brand being attractive, familiar, generally accurate, and, when not accurate, an instigator of programmatic attrition—results that speak to enduring policy issues involving school choice.