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Title: Examining the Relationship between Public Policy and Performance in Five States: What We Did

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Publication Year: 2014

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Abstract: Chapter 3 Examining the Relationship between Public Policy and Performance in Five States What We Did With contributions by Awilda Rodriguez How can a state use public policy to improve the performance of higher education to maximize the individual and societal benefits in light of state-­ specific characteristics of their state? To address this overarching question, we conducted case studies of the relationship between public policy and performance in five states. We constructed each case study to address the following two questions: 1. What is the performance of higher education in the selected states, where performance is measured by indicators of preparation, participation, completion, affordability, and equity across groups in these indicators? 2. What is the role of public policy in explaining changes from the early 1990s until 2010 in higher education performance in the selected states? The following chapters address these two questions for each of five states. The final chapter identifies the themes that emerged from our cross-­ state analyses. Why These Five States For our examination of the relationship between public policy and higher education performance we selected Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Texas, and Washington . Although it is impossible for five states to be representative of all 50 U.S. states, collectively these five states include some of the largest and most impor- The Five States 39 tant states in the nation as well as states that vary along many critical dimensions, including their current and recent records of higher education performance and the public policies in place. We used a number of criteria to select these states with the goal of including states that are not only home to large numbers of the U.S. population but also represent diversity on multiple dimensions. For instance, the selected states have high, low, improving, and declining higher education performance. The five states all are home to at least one major urban center but vary in the overall size of their populations and are located in different geographic regions. They vary in the racial/ethnic diversity in their current and projected college-­going population and include states with differing fiscal resources and constraints. The states have different political cultures, with variations in the relative constitutional powers of the governor and legislature. They also diverge in terms the characteristics of their higher education systems, with variations in the distribution of enrollments across different sectors and the characteristics of their higher education governance structures. State Higher Education Performance As in states across the nation, all five of our study states are home to at least some colleges and universities that are performing quite well. Despite the presence of excellent institutions in all U.S. states, however, most have considerable unmet educational need. Our work focuses on understanding how well a state’s higher education system is serving its residents rather than considering only individual institutional rankings or other institutional indicators of performance. We define the state system of higher education not as a formal sector or governance structure (such as the University System of Maryland) but as the collection of public and private not-­ for-­ profit and for-­ profit institutions in the state. Defining the unit of analysis as the state rather than the institution, the five states in our study exhibit a range of past and present higher education performance . Although all five of the selected states must improve the educational attainment of their populations, the degree of improvement required is greater in Georgia and Texas than in Maryland, Illinois, and Washington. In Georgia and Texas, the current educational attainment of the adult population is below the national average. Table 1 (pp. 18–19) shows that the share of adults age 25 to 64 who hold at least an associate degree ranges from a high of 44% in Maryland, 42% in Washington, and 41% in Illinois to just 36% in Georgia and 33% in Texas.1 Of even greater concern than the low overall rates of educational attainment is 40 The Attainment Agenda the fact that in several of our study states educational attainment is lower among the younger generation than among the older generation. Nationwide, similar shares of adults age 25 to 34 and adults age 45 to 64 have attained at least an associate ’s degree: 38% and 37%, respectively. But table 1 shows that a smaller share of younger (age 25 to 34) adults than of older (age 45 to 64) adults has attained at least an associate degree in Georgia (34% versus 36%), Texas (31% versus 34...

Url: https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1120149

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Authors: Perna, Laura W.; Finney, Joni E.; Callan, Patrick M.

Editors: Perna, Laura W.; Finney, Joni E.

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Volume Title: The Attainment Agenda: State Policy Leadership in Higher Education

Publisher: JHU Press

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

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