OBJECTIVES : Psychosocial problems lead to costs not only in the health care sector, but also in other sectors including the education sector. As the age of onset of psychosocial problems often coincides with the period of establishing educational trajectories, education costs are particularly relevant in the context of interventions targeting children and adolescents. Little research has been done to facilitate the inclusion of education costs in health economics studies. This, while education costs can constitute a large proportion of the total intervention/disease costs, especially in the psychosocial domain. Therefore, this study aimed to gain insights into the methods used for the inclusion of education costs in health economics studies and to estimate the proportion of the total costs that education costs account for.

METHODS : A systematic search of PubMed, Embase, SSCI, CINAHL, PsycINFO, ERIC, and Econlit was conducted. Economic evaluations of mental health, psychosocial, and educational interventions and cost-of-illness studies of mental-, behavioral- and neurodevelopmental disorders conducted from a societal perspective in the population of children and adolescents were considered eligible.

RESULTS : Of 10,236 identified studies, 51 were included in the analysis. The most common cost items were “special education”, “school absence”, and intervention costs related to the interventions set in the education sector. A variety of measurement and valuation methods was employed to incorporate education costs in the economic analyses. The proportion of the education costs ranged from 1% to 100% with the average of 30%.

CONCLUSIONS : Education costs can make up a large proportion of the total costs of a disease/intervention, particularly in the psychosocial domain. Therefore, including education costs might be important for producing valid results and informing optimal resource allocation decisions. Although varieties of methods are available to facilitate the inclusion of education costs in health economics studies, further research is needed to develop evidence-based methods for producing comparable estimates.