What's Happening to Public Higher Education? (review)

What's Happening To Public Higher Education?, edited by Ronald Ehrenburg, is a book of value to all who work or are concerned about the plight of public higher education in the United States. This book is organized in three parts. In part 1, several chapters are devoted to topical discussion of trends in state spending, the utilization of tenure, non-tenure track, as well as adjunct faculty, and the effects of institutional funding cuts on graduation rates in public higher education. The second part of the book includes ten chapters, each covering state-specific issues and trends with regard to public support for higher education, student admissions, enrollment, tuition at public institutions, state financial aid, as well as institution-level retention and college completion rates. The third part of the book includes several short chapters that provide an overview of the "privatization" of public higher education and closing remarks, respectively.

In the first part of the book, using state-level panel data from a wide variety of sources and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression as well as more advanced statistical techniques, Michael Rizzo demonstrates how the education share of a state's general fund and higher education's share of the education budget are influenced by economic, demographic, and financial aspects of higher education policy. Employing dynamic panel modeling, via system-Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) techniques, Rizzo's study is rather unique for the study of higher education in that it simultaneously adjusts for other variables, allows for a dynamic analysis and takes into account possible omitted variable bias as well as endogeneity bias. (The latter type of bias occurs when predictors of independent variables are ignored in statistical models.) Utilizing College Board data and fixed-effects regression techniques, Ronald Ehrenburg and Liang Zang examine how institutional graduation rates of full-time students are influenced by the percent of tenure and tenure-track faculty at 2-year and 4-year public institutions, after taking into account other variables. Similar to that by Ehrenburg and Zang, the chapter by Eric Bettinger and Bridget Long addresses the issue of faculty inputs. Drawing on student-level data drawn from the state of Ohio, utilizing instrumental variable regression, and taking into account other factors, they examine the relationship between college dropout rates and proportion of classes taught by adjunct instructors in the first semester. In the final chapter of part 1 of the book, using data from the State University of New York (SUNY) as well as other sources and OLS regression analysis, Gary Blose, John Porter and Edward Kokkelenberg investigate the relationship between college graduation rates and calculated institutional expenditures on per undergraduate full-time equivalent student (FTES) enrollment, controlling for other variables.

In the second part of the book, the authors provide more descriptions rather than analyses of trends in specific states. In chapter 5, Gerald Kissler and Ellen Switkes describe state economic, demographic, college student enrollment and outcomes, faculty and financial aspects of higher education trends in California. Christopher Cornwell and David Mustard, in chapter 6, provide a similar description of trends in Georgia during the 1990s and into the dawn of the 21st century. In chapter 7, F. King Alexander and Daniel Layzell, show how public funding of higher education in Illinois has "evolved" since 1990. In the chapter that follows, Stephen DesJardins, Allison Bell, and Iria Puyosa provide a description of the context for the governance of higher education and discuss economic, political and social along with recent college student enrollment tuition, faculty salary, state appropriation and financial aid trends in Michigan. In chapter 9, Betsey Brown and Robert Clark describe the organizational structure of the University of North Carolina (UNC) as well as recent trends in the total revenues, tuition, enrollment, financial aid, college completion, faculty, and employee benefit trends in North Carolina. Donald Heller, in chapter 10, provides a similar description of trends since the late 1980s for public institutions in Pennsylvania. In chapter 11, Lisa Dickson discusses...