The Attainment Agenda: State Policy Leadership in Higher Education

2. Understanding the Relationship between Public Policy and Higher Education Performance: Guiding Perspectives

Chapter 2 Understanding the Relationship between Public Policy and Higher Education Performance Guiding Perspectives As in earlier eras, higher education must now play an important role in achieving societal priorities. At this point in our nation’s history, renewed attention to the role of state policy in ensuring that higher education is achieving its public purposes is essential. Clearly, states must do more if they are to have the levels of higher education required to meet workforce needs and improve equity in attainment across groups. Drawing on data collected from case studies of five states, we build on prior studies and other relevant historical literature to propose a comprehensive framework for understanding how state policy may improve overall higher education attainment and close gaps in attainment across groups. The framework that we offer in the final chapter offers a conceptually and theoretically grounded rationale for why public policy should be related to higher education performance within a particular state context. Strong conceptual and theoretical underpinnings are necessary if the findings from our studies of five states are to provide insights into the relationship between public policy and performance in states other than the five we examine or even in our five selected states at other times. With our five-­ state studies and a review of prior research and theory, we seek to develop a conceptual model that accounts for the array of potential policies, including policies pertaining to governance, finance, accountability, and transitions ,usedbystatestoimprovehighereducationperformance.Hereperformance is the culmination of preparation, participation, completion, and affordability, Public Policy and Higher Education Performance   27 and is defined as overall higher education attainment and closing gaps in attainment across groups within a particular state context where the context is defined by demographic, economic, political, historical, and other characteristics. Our goal is broader than identifying a specific policy that will raise higher education attainment or determining the forces that will lead a state to adopt a particular policy. Unlike some other researchers, we do not focus exclusively on the role of system design or governance policy in explaining higher education performance.1 Research that focuses on a particular public policy, although it does make contributions, does not reflect the fact that higher education attainment is the culmination of a longitudinal, multistage process that begins early in a student’s educational career and involves many intermediate outcomes. The most important of these are reflected in the indicators that we use to measure higher education attainment: college preparation, participation, completion, and affordability. The longitudinal and multistage nature of the process means that attention only to the relationship between one public policy and a specific outcome (such as college completion) is unlikely to produce the magnitude of improvement in higher educational attainment that individuals and our nation require. Our examination of how state public policy explains the performance of higher education is informed by, and builds on, three bodies of prior research. Each of these is described in further detail in the subsequent sections of this chapter. First, our understanding of the relationship between public policy and higher education performance is influenced by the work of Lyman Glenny, Robert Berdahl, Burton Clark, Richard Richardson, and others who examined the responsiveness of state structures to the educational needs of an earlier time. When Glenny, Berdahl, and Clark were writing, state needs and priorities focused primarily on expanding higher education to meet growing demand. Although state needs and priorities as well as other contextual dimensions have changed over the past few decades, the perspectives of these authors provide the foundation for understanding the current state role in ensuring that higher education achieves societal purposes. Second, our examination is shaped by macroeconomic theories of the role of the public sector that assume that the lever state governments use to increase the demand for and supply of higher education is public policy.2 The higher education markets that exist today are the product of prior governmental policies related to the structure and design of higher education systems, finance of higher education, movement of students into and through higher education, account- 28   The Attainment Agenda ability of higher education, and other issues. Public policy can correct for past inefficient or ineffective state policy decisions as well as persisting “market failure ” (described more completely below) and can, consequently, shift higher education systems along a continuum from institutional aspirations toward public purposes in a way that responds to the state context. The third...