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The study examines the impact of various types of performance-based funding (PBF) policies on institutional resources across postsecondary institution types. Although 41 states have implemented PBF over time, the design and dosage of PBF policies look very different across PBF-adopting states. We leverage multiple quasi-experimental approaches and find that high-dosage PBF policies had a negative impact on state funding for four-year historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and four-year institutions serving an above-average share of racially minoritized students. We also show that sporadic positive effects of PBF policies on state funding are concentrated primarily among non-minority serving institutions (non-MSIs) and institutions serving below-average shares of racially minoritized or low-income students. Taken together, our findings reveal the unequal impacts of PBF policies and suggest that PBF policy design is an important consideration with critical implications for under-resourced institutions and the underserved students they educate.

As state governments seek to improve the performance of institutions of K-12 and higher education, they often adopt educational policies that have similar names but different characteristics across states and with variations over time within states. Yet quantitative analyses generally examine the absence or presence of an educational policy instead of diving into details such as the dosage or percentage of funding tied to a policy or the specific groups being targeted by the implementation of the policy. The aim of this article is to provide guidance for education policy researchers in constructing and analyzing detailed data that can inform the design of state-level policies, using state performance-based funding policies in public higher education as an example. We also show how to conduct difference-in-differences analyses with continuous treatment variables in order to take advantage of more-nuanced data and better understand the context in which policies are effective (or ineffective).

This study draws upon the first detailed longitudinal dataset on performance-based funding (PBF) to document the evolution and current landscape of PBF in American higher education. We show that while PBF has become increasingly common, states have experimented with adopting, abandoning, and re-adopting PBF over time. We also find a new wave of PBF adoption occurring in the 2010s following the Great Recession. However, PBF remains a relatively weak policy lever with a small share of funds at stake in most states and some states not funding PBF even when it exists in legislation. Equity considerations vary in the student groups they include and less than half of two-year and three-quarters of four-year PBF systems include race when allocating performance funds. Our findings complicate some common characterizations of PBF and offer new insight for researchers examining how PBF policy design shapes student and institutional outcomes.

Reducing barriers to graduate and professional education may reduce racial inequities in high-status professions. In 2020, one-quarter of law schools accepted the GRE in place of the LSAT, reflecting an effort across educational domains to revisit standardized test requirements. We use a generalized difference-in-differences design to investigate the impact of GRE-accepting admissions on diversity and selectivity in legal education. We find some evidence of decreased racial diversity after policies have been in place a couple of years, along with increases in applications and decreases in acceptance rates. Findings indicate GRE-accepting admissions alone are unlikely to expand access to high-status fields.

Most U.S. universities have made explicit commitments to educating economically diverse student bodies; however, the higher education system is highly stratified. In this paper, we seek to understand stratification in the wake of the Great Recession by examining enrollment among students from differing income backgrounds by institutional type. Two theoretical frameworks suggest different conclusions. A Disaster Capitalism framework suggests that in places where the recession was most severe, enrollment by income would become "more" stratified than in places where the downturn was less severe. In contrast, Effectively Maintained Inequality would suggest that enrollments were already effectively stratified by income and would not necessarily be sensitive to exposure to an economic shock. Employing fixed effects modeling and novel data based on the tax records of 30 million Americans, we examine income composition by institutional type from 2004 to 2012. We find that although stratification by institutional type worsened during the recession and subsequent recovery, patterns of economic stratification were "not" more intense for institutions that enrolled students from states hardest hit by the recession. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with an Effectively Maintained Inequality framework. During the recession, the top quintiles continued to enjoy their longstanding disproportionate enrollment in the most selective institutions. For the bottom quintiles, the longstanding marginalization from 4-year college going persisted through the recession. These stratification patterns, however, were not more pronounced in places hardest hit by the recession.

Over the past decade, the federal government has made substantial efforts to simplify the college-going process and help students to evaluate college choices. These low-cost strategies aimed at improving college access and success by helping students to make informed decisions about college warrant assessment. This study examines the impact of a recent effort aimed at simplifying information that colleges provide to students about college costs, loan options, and college outcomes. Results from a quasi-experimental analysis indicate that the "informational intervention" in this study had limited influence on community college students' enrollment and borrowing decisions. I discuss the limitations of this particular intervention and the potential impact that other related policy efforts designed to help students at various points in the college-going process may have.

In this study, we examine how the issue of considering criminal history in college admissions is represented and constructed as a problem in Ban the Box (BTB) policies in Maryland and Louisiana. We draw on Bacchi's "What's the Problem Represented to be?" approach as an analytic tool to interrogate key policy artifacts such as legislative histories and hearings and the language of enacted policy. Using a multiple case study design, we ask: (1) What is the "problem" represented to be in each state's BTB policy?; and (2) What are the potential consequences of this representation of the "problem?" Our findings coalesce with those of policy researchers who emphasize the importance of framing problems within their full context. For instance, we demonstrate how reducing the "problem" to the box ignores real, structural barriers and limits equity-minded policy solutions. Further, while each BTB policy appears similar on the surface, we argue that outcomes will likely vary based on how the issue of considering criminal justice history in college admissions is framed and problematized. We conclude by offering directions for future research and specific recommendations for BTB policy design.

Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria--excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations--that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate--and in some cases, may exacerbate--existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions.

In response to goals of expanding access as well as public pressure to leverage substantial endowment resources toward increasing affordability, numerous elite colleges have enacted policies aimed at improving access and affordability by replacing student loans with grants in financial aid packages. No-loan policies, however, differ in the extent to which they expand affordability: Some policies offer a universal discount by replacing loans with grants for all aid-eligible students, while others offer narrowly targeted discounts to students based on income, Pell Grant eligibility status, or another means-tested threshold. We leveraged newly available Equality of Opportunity Project Mobility Report Card data and a difference-in-differences design using unweighted and weighted comparison groups to examine the relationship between adoption of universal and targeted no-loan policies and economic diversity at elite colleges. We found that colleges offering universal discounts experienced increased enrollment among middle-class students. Our study indicates universal no-loan policies represent one strategy to increase access and affordability for the middle-class in the elite reaches of higher education. The study also, however, raises questions about the policies' effectiveness in addressing access for low-income students and efficiency in targeting aid.

Amidst growing public concern in the United States over college access and affordability, federal policymakers have implemented many low-cost, behaviorally-informed strategies aimed at simplifying the college-going process and reducing informational barriers. Our paper reviews recent U.S. federal policies and interventions that draw on insights from the behavioral sciences to help students navigate various stages of the college-going process and summarizes empirical evidence of these efforts on college outcomes, highlighting variations across interventions and for various student populations. We conclude with up-to-date discussions of policy proposals and opportunities for behavioral science applications in postsecondary education.

Recent policy and research efforts have focused on simplifying the college-going process, improving transparency around college costs, and helping students make informed decisions. In 2012, the Obama administration released the "shopping sheet," a standardized financial aid offer that is intended to provide students with simplified information about costs, loan options, and college outcomes. This paper examines the impact of the shopping sheet (adopted by more than 400 four-year colleges in two years) using: (1) administrative data from a field experiment among admitted and already-enrolled students at a public university, and (2) college-level data from a quasi-experiment among four-year colleges. Findings provide some evidence that information in the shopping sheet relating a college's graduation rate to other colleges led to decreased borrowing at colleges with poor graduation outcomes. Additionally, the shopping sheet decreased borrowing at colleges that enroll high shares of students receiving federal student aid and underrepresented minority students. These findings indicate the shopping sheet may be particularly salient to students who traditionally face higher informational barriers during the college-going process.

Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers often are interested in understanding whether policies expand access for low-income students. In this brief, we highlight the limitations of a commonly available measure of low-income status--whether students receive a federal Pell grant--and compare it to new data on enrollment by income quintile to evaluate a recent policy effort within elite colleges aimed at expanding access. We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges' economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students.

Background/Context: Research on academic capitalism often maps changing conditions in which faculty work occurs without explaining the mechanisms by which change occurs. We use Fligstein and McAdam's theory of fields to posit that the changing conditions in which humanities faculty members work reflect activities in overlapping (the academic profession more generally) and proximate (university administration) fields. We seek to illuminate the ways in which humanities faculty experience heightened administrative authority and strategically respond. Research Questions: We ask: 1) How do faculty members in the humanities understand the changes in their field? 2) How do faculty members in the humanities understand their relationships to members of overlapping (e.g., faculty in other areas) and proximate (e.g., administrators) fields? and 3) How do faculty members in the humanities strategize to improve their positions? Participants: We conducted semistructured interviews with 46 faculty members in humanities fields with various appointments (tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track). Faculty participants were mainly housed in English and history, two of the largest humanities departments at many institutions, but also in philosophy and religion departments. Research Design: Our multiple case study design took place at two public research universities to understand how faculty respond to changing conditions. The research sites, typical of many public research universities, experienced declining direct government support and therefore conditions in which academic capitalist processes occur were present at both. Humanities departments contributed a large portion of student credit-hour production at both research sites, yet such funds were centralized and allocated by university administration. Data Collection and Analysis: Our interview protocol focused on faculty perceptions of resource allocation within the institution, allocation of work within the department, perceptions of the department relative to others, and how faculty structured their time and careers in response to various pressures inside and outside of their university. Semistructured interviews ranged from 25 and 90 minutes and were recorded and transcribed. We analyzed data using a priori and emergent codes which were grouped into broad themes reflecting faculty responses to changing conditions. Results: Three strategic responses emerged among humanities faculty members we interviewed: utilizing lower status faculty members, exploiting weaker units in the field, and forming alliances. Conclusions/Recommendations: Strategies result in the improved status of some individual faculty members but do not arrest the diminishing status of the humanities as a field. Our analysis suggests that field-level analyses entail implications for the study of academic work and processes in the academic capitalism tradition.

Research often considers vertical stratification between U.S. higher education institutions. Yet differences also exist within higher education institutions, which we term "organizational segmentation." We understand organizational segmentation as a consequence of the external "prestige economy," which favors research revenues from high-resource science and engineering fields relative to instructional revenues collected by low-resource humanities departments. We use qualitative data from 83 interviews with faculty in high- and low-resource departments to examine how organizational segmentation, academic work, and professionalization are shaped by external and internal resource pressures. We find that deprofessionalization has occurred in different ways for faculty in high- and low-resource academic units. Faculty in high-resource units, like Brint's (1994) "expert" professionals, depend on external research resources and shape their careers accordingly, whereas faculty in low-resource units rely upon teaching revenues distributed by campus administrators.

The study examines the impact of various types of performance-based funding (PBF) policies on institutional resources across postsecondary institution types. Although 41 states have implemented PBF over time, the design and dosage of PBF policies look very different across PBF-adopting states. We leverage multiple quasi-experimental approaches and find that high-dosage PBF policies had a negative impact on state funding for four-year historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and four-year institutions serving an above-average share of racially minoritized students. We also show that sporadic positive effects of PBF policies on state funding are concentrated primarily among non-minority serving institutions (non-MSIs) and institutions serving below-average shares of racially minoritized or low-income students. Taken together, our findings reveal the unequal impacts of PBF policies and suggest that PBF policy design is an important consideration with critical implications for under-resourced institutions and the underserved students they educate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively few students in selective colleges come from disadvantaged backgrounds, so the rewards of attending such schools go mainly to those already advantaged from birth. There is substantial variation in those colleges' socioeconomic composition, however. Some selective private institutions proportionately enroll five times as many lower-SES students as others. What drives this variation? Longitudinal analyses presented here suggest that, all other factors being equal, private institutions that are historically embedded in elite status maintain less socioeconomic diversity. Conversely, generous financial-aid efforts and test-optional admissions policies appear to contribute to institutions achieving greater SES diversity. The findings suggest several research and policy implications.

Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria—excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations—that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate—and in some cases, may exacerbate—existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to goals of expanding access as well as public pressure to leverage substantial endowment resources toward increasing affordability, numerous elite colleges have enacted policies aimed at improving access and affordability by replacing student loans with grants in financial aid packages. No-loan policies, however, differ in the extent to which they expand affordability: Some policies offer a universal discount by replacing loans with grants for all aid-eligible students, while others offer narrowly targeted discounts to students based on income, Pell Grant eligibility status, or another means-tested threshold. We leveraged newly available Equality of Opportunity Project Mobility Report Card data and a difference-in-differences design using unweighted and weighted comparison groups to examine the relationship between adoption of universal and targeted no-loan policies and economic diversity at elite colleges. We found that colleges offering universal discounts experienced increased enrollment among middle-class students. Our study indicates universal no-loan policies represent one strategy to increase access and affordability for the middle-class in the elite reaches of higher education. The study also, however, raises questions about the policies' effectiveness in addressing access for low-income students and efficiency in targeting aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]