To better understand the challenges and opportunities facing community colleges that want to expand apprenticeship opportunities to their students, New America conducted a year-long study. We created an advisory committee to guide this work and spoke to apprenticeship, workforce development, and community college leaders about the community…

The unstable funding of higher education exacerbated by current damaging environmental contexts has created a need to rethink current approaches and opportunities regarding the financing of higher education. States and campuses must strategically leverage the current significant federal investments to meet their postsecondary objectives including…

This second brief of a three-part series explores the systemic underfunding of HBCUs in Maryland, and their attempts to correct these challenges, first through the courts and then through legislation. Maryland was one of the first states to reach such a monumental agreement in the sustainability of HBCUs. The first brief explored the national…

Using generalized difference-in-difference and synthetic control modeling, this study estimates the influence of the community-college baccalaureate (CCB) on institutional finance over time and by intensity. Leveraging data spanning 19 years (1999-2017), I find no impact on overall revenue but suggestive evidence of upfront costs and slight…

In this paper, we employ Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to consider institutions' shifting goals, priorities, and constraints, and to explore the nature of change at colleges and universities in the United States. By exploiting annual changes in institutional budget decisions over a 29-year period, we seek to understand the extent to which…

More than resource allocations, evaluations of funding applications have become central instances for status bestowal in academia. Much attention in past literature has been devoted to grasping the status consequences of prominent funding evaluations. But little attention has been paid to understanding how the status-bestowing momentum of such…

In "The Tyranny of Merit," Michael Sandel argues that the American society is not meritocratic, that belief that it is causes various social harms, and that some of those harms -- in particular, the costs to social solidarity -- would be caused even if society actually were meritocratic. He also explores the way that the structure of…

This study provided Radford University with an opportunity to better understand the motivating behaviors of faculty and staff while distinguishing the strategies that influence their interest in giving or choosing not to give. In this study, I used a mixed-methods approach for data collection to answer my research questions and to inform the…

Although the community college's original intent was to fulfill a mission dedicated to offering a low-cost, high-quality education to its community, fulfilling its mission is has become more difficult based on ever-increasing financial stresses being placed upon it by various constituent groups. As such, a growing piece of the community college…

The changing financing model for public institutions of higher education has brought into focus the importance of alumni fundraising and the factors that increase the likelihood of giving. Recognizing these dynamics, higher education leaders are increasingly implementing what are known as high-impact practices into the student experience with the…

Performance funding has been a popular form of funding colleges and universities for several decades. Often the purpose is to make universities more efficient (Miao, 2012). Missouri has had two separate models of performance funding in play, a decade apart. In this research both performance funding models are examined, including a 10- year period…

The last 25 years have seen a dramatic shift in tuition fee policy in England. This paper uses Critical Discourse Analysis to understand the motivations behind policy setting, comparing the pivotal reviews undertaken by Dearing, Browne and Augar. It concludes that four themes may have influenced tuition fee policy making: national politics and…

Contemporary vocational education and training (VET), both initial and higher, is strongly market oriented, and governments shape systems with significant roles for employers. The study presented in this article aims at examining how employers are positioned in the practice of VET provision in such a system. Specifically, it recognises and…

The largest system of higher education in the nation, the California Community Colleges (CCC) has disappeared more than one million students in the past 15 years, a 35% decrease in its student body since 2008 despite California's population increase. This dramatic shrinking of the CCC system was not an accident. It was manufactured by a vast…

This paper examined how performance-based funding (PBF) policies shape institutional performance and student outcomes for public four-year or above historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). By conducting a systematic review of the literature, the findings expanded on two main areas, as underscored by the pieces reviewed: (a) how the…