Erik C. Ness

Does State Merit-Based Aid Stem Brain Drain?

In this study, the authors use college enrollment and migration data to test the brain drain hypothesis. Their results suggest that state merit scholarship programs do indeed stanch the migration of “best and brightest” students to other states. In the aggregate and on average, the implementation of state merit aid programs both increases the total 1st-year student enrollment in merit aid states and boosts resident college enrollment in these states significantly. The gross enrollment increase is a function of increased total student enrollment from these states and, perhaps more important, decreased emigration from these states. In addition to these overall effects, variations across states and across types of institutions exist due to scholarship eligibility criteria and award amount across states.

The Politics of Determining Merit Aid Eligibility Criteria: An Analysis of the Policy Process

Using archival sources and interviews with fifty-six participants, this comparative case study examines the criteria determination process in New Mexico, Tennessee, and West Virginia. An enhanced conceptual understanding of policymaking phenomena emerges from case narratives and from the application of three theoretical frameworks— advocacy coalition, multiple streams, and electoral connection .

The Role of Information in the Policy Process: Implications for the Examination of Research Utilization in Higher Education Policy

Connecting research and policy persists as one of higher education’s most pressing challenges. Yet, the extent to which states rely on research evidence to craft policy remains under-studied. This chapter examines research utilization and public policy theory for their conceptual implications on how researchers might examine the role of information in the higher education policymaking process. The review of literature includes education-related studies, but also reviews classic studies drawn from political science, policy analysis, and evaluation. The inventory of how five theories of the policy process incorporate the research utilization literature identifies possible conceptual extensions of these frameworks and holds promise for increasing our understanding of how research influences policy. This chapter also discuss the influence of two types of intermediary organizations—state higher education agencies and regional compacts—on research utilization in the higher education policymaking process.

Interest Groups and State Policy for Higher Education: New Conceptual Understandings and Future Research Directions

An empirical literature recently has arisen attempting to explain policy outcomes for higher education in the 50 states. The studies have examined the policy influences of legislatures, bureaucracies, governors, and other institutional political actors, but few research efforts have sought to account—conceptually or empirically—for the policy impacts of organized interest groups in the arena of state postsecondary education. This chapter helps to remedy the gap. We outline a broad agenda for research that aims to deepen conceptual understanding of the relationship between interest groups and state level higher education policy and to chart future research directions. We organize the chapter around three foci: (1) a review of extant research on state-level interest group activity in the higher education arena; (2) development of a conceptual framework grounded in the literatures of political science and higher education on interest groups and public policymaking with which to guide future inquiry; and, (3) a discussion of possible future research directions in the area, including a number of rarely-used data sources that could enrich the future study of interest groups and higher education in the U.S. states.

The Determinants of State Spending on Higher Education: How Capital Project Funding Differs from General Fund Appropriations.

Our fixed-effects panel data analysis of state spending on higher education fills a near void of studies examining capital expenditures on higher education. In our study, we found that political characteristics (e.g., interest group activity, organizational structure, and formal powers) largely account for differences between general fund and capital appropriations for higher education.

Exploring the ‘How’ in Policy Diffusion: National Intermediary Organizations’ Roles in Facilitating the Spread of Performance-Based Funding Policies in the States

ABSTRACT Numerous studies have examined “whether” and “why” policies diffuse, or the reasons for the adoption in a given government of a policy that exists in another government. This study explored the “how” of policy diffusion by focusing on college completion policies, especially performance funding. In particular, we examined the roles that intermediaries play in state-level college completion policy diffusion. Data are from 3 states and include observations of policy events, documents, and interviews with 56 participants, including state policy actors and intermediary representatives. This analysis, grounded in conceptual models of policy diffusion, revealed that diffusion occurs at various stages of the policy process, not just adoption. The study also demonstrated the coercive roles that intermediaries can play in promoting policies and revealed how intermediaries facilitate, and sometimes limit, policy learning, which is one of the primary mechanisms by which policies diffuse. By focusing on an underexplored conceptual model of policy diffusion, the national interaction model, this analysis shed light on the role played by intermediaries in state-level college completion policymaking.

Ideological Think Tanks in the States: An Inventory of Their Prevalence, Networks, and Higher Education Policy Activity

This study takes an inventory of a particular type of intermediary organization ascendant within the state-level higher education policy: ideological think tanks. Our inventory identifies 99 think tanks: 59 affiliated with the conservative State Policy Network and 40 with the Progressive States Network. The analysis shows that state-level conservative think tanks (CTTs) are more tightly connected to national networks than are progressive think tanks (PTTs). By narrow margins, CTTs are also better funded and have more robust higher education policy activity than PTTs. The two most common policy issues—state funding and costs and affordability—represent higher education issues of equal salience to conservative and progressive organizations but from contrasting ideological perspectives. This inventory of the landscape of ideological think tanks’ activity and their supply of information has implications for future research that might examine policymakers’ demand for and utilization of ideological think tank information and services.