COVID and the Healthy Minds Program for Educators - Economic Returns

We evaluate the Healthy Minds Program (HMP), a four-week app-based meditation intervention, in a randomized controlled trial of Wisconsin teachers conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that teacher wellbeing training is an investment in human capital and should not be viewed as a clinical intervention. Treatment effects are organized across three outcome categories: perseverative thinking, mental health, and HMP skill dimensions of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose (ACIP). Results are reported for the teacher subsample at post-intervention and three-month follow-up, with attention to the durability of effects. Teachers are willing to invest in wellbeing training. We use their willingness-to-pay for reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms to anchor the benefits-cost analysis, following the consumption equivalence welfare framework of Abramson, Boerma, and Tsyvinski (2025). Simulating fiscal returns from reduced teacher attrition, we find the intervention is cost-effective as a teacher quality investment: avoided replacement costs exceed program costs across plausible retention scenarios. Wellbeing training coupled with a performance raise has a revealed break-even intervention cost of $313 per teacher, the point at which quality value exactly covers the combined cost of training and raise. These results establish upper and lower bounds for the economic returns to psychological stock training among teachers, a novel complement to existing human capital interventions that addresses quality and retention simultaneously, without requiring changes to hiring, certification, or compensation structures.