For the past several decades, the role of higher education as a public and/or private good in United States (US) society has been a matter of significant discussion and debate in research and policy communities (Kezar, 2004; Kezar et al., 2005; McMahon, 2009; Pasque, 2010). This discussion often focuses on the question of funding higher education:…

Many community college students are hungry, and this problem has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The amply available Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds, created by the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act, have helped institutions address campus hunger during and after the pandemic. The study's guiding research…

Between 1997 and 2019, 16 out of 41 performance-based funding (PBF) states discontinued their PBF policies for public colleges and universities. Adapting policy diffusion theory to PBF discontinuation, we investigate whether policy discontinuation in one state is related to discontinuations in other states, and differentiate between the two policy…

School district leaders are responsible for managing million-dollar budgets, but many have received little or no training in education finance. Marguerite Roza discusses a recent analysis of administrator preparation programs that revealed startling gaps in content, including a tendency to focus on revenue in their finance education, instead of on…

According to the theory of Effectively Maintained Inequality (EMI), economically advantaged individuals not only enter each level of education at higher rates than do their less advantaged peers, but also enjoy qualitative advantages at each level that position them more favorably to continue to the next level. Governments may play a role in…

State fiscal support for higher education has met sluggish growth recently, a trend that has community college leaders working to meet student needs despite a shrinking resource pool. According to an annual report released in January by Grapevine, state financial aid for higher education increased just 1.6 percent between the 2017 and 2018 fiscal…

Background/Context: Endowments of institutions of higher education in the United States have attracted widespread attention in recent decades due to their meteoric rise in value and their precipitous decline during the recent recession. But there has been little research on the beginnings of the significant interest in and importance of…

As college completion becomes a priority, more state legislatures are challenging community colleges to demonstrate progress by tying funding measures to institutional performance. Tom Harnisch, a policy analyst with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, reports that 17 states are currently implementing or considering the…

Greater accountability in public higher education systems is a fact of life in the current political climate. Increasingly, one form this accountability takes is performance funding, which arises from elected officials' need for assurance that taxpayer funds are not only being invested and used properly but are resulting in desired outcomes at…

Last summer, the Chabot College Children's Center Evening Program came close to being shut down due to lack of funding. In order to break the typical mold of annual fundraising ideas (e.g., t-shirts, flower pots, and cookie sales) which give low returns, the Center hosted its first fundraising venture called "International Arts Performance…

Conflicts over East Jerusalem are often thought to reflect larger conflicts in the Middle East. In this article, the authors focus on schooling in East Jerusalem in order to provide a better appreciation of the protracted conflict in the area. This close examination of schooling in East Jerusalem can illuminate reasons for the political paralysis…

As the architect of the oldest and most stable performance-funding program, Tennessee provides a unique opportunity to analyze the impact of changes in performance-funding policies on changes in institutional retention and six-year graduation rates over time. Utilizing spline linear mixed models, this study examines the impact of changes in…

The State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) report is produced annually by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) to broaden understanding of the context and consequences of multiple decisions made every year in each of these areas. No single report can provide definitive answers to such broad and fundamental questions of public…

Change, competition, and its consequences are particularly salient for California's community colleges. At its peak in 2002, California's community college system educated more than 2.5 million students annually. Nevertheless, California's community colleges receive the smallest proportion of the state education budget while enrolling nearly three…

The State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) report is produced annually by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) to broaden understanding of the context and consequences of multiple decisions made every year in each of these areas. No single report can provide definitive answers to such broad and fundamental questions of public…