26 Chapter 3: Methodology Economic impact analaysis SUNY WCC provides its Business program’s students with the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need to become productive citizens and add to the overall output of the region. In this section, we describe the methodology in calculating the alumni impact, which measures the income added to the region as former students of the program expand the regional economy’s stock of human capital. Economic impact measures When estimating the alumni impact, we measure a net impact, not a gross impact. Gross impact represents an upper-bound estimate in terms of capturing all activity stemming from the alumni; however, a net impact reflects a truer measure since it demonstrates what would not have been generated in the regional economy if not for these selected programs at SUNY WCC. Economic impact analyses use different types of impacts to estimate the results. The impact focused on in this study assesses the change in income. This measure is similar to the commonly used gross regional product (GRP). Income may be further broken out into the labor income impact, also known as earnings, which assesses the change in employee compensation; and the non-labor income impact, which assesses the change in business profits. Together, labor income and non-labor income sum to total income. Another way to state the impact is in terms of jobs, a measure of the number of full- and part-time jobs that would be required to support the change in income. Finally, a frequently used measure is the sales impact, which comprises the change in business sales revenue in the economy as a result of increased economic activity. It is important to bear in mind, however, that much of this sales revenue leaves the regional economy through intermediary transactions and costs.18 All of these measures – added labor and non-labor income, total income, jobs, and sales – are used to estimate the economic impact results presented in this chapter. The analysis breaks out the impact measures into different components, each based on the economic effect that caused the impact. The following is a list of each type of effect presented in this analysis: 18 See Appendix 5 for an example of the intermediary costs included in the sales impact but not in the income impact. Economic impact Economic impact measures Alumni impact analysis
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