This study applies resource dependence theory to address the question of how the critical resource dependence relationship emerges in the context of a university's performance agreement. This study focuses on two Nordic universities that have adopted performance agreements while simultaneously using strong performance-based state funding. Resource…

The NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE) for fiscal year 2023 marks the 50th consecutive year that NACUBO has published a Study of the endowments of institutions of higher learning. It would not be an overstatement to say that the Study chronicled five decades of unparalleled change. The investment industry and endowment management have…

Background: The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; 2015) constituted a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and replaced the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. ESSA, although still recognizing the need of standardized testing, diverged from NCLB by transferring a significant amount of power over…

Colleges and universities have increasingly turned to fundraising as an opportunity to meet short- and long-term goals of the institution without increasing tuition and adding to the student loan burden. As a result, there is increased competition among institutions and non-profits to appeal to the motivations of donors to support their…

Background: The Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Grant Program aims to increase the number of highly effective educators by supporting the implementation of evidence-based practices that prepare, develop, or enhance the skills of educators. The three central goals of this program are: (1) Recruit, prepare, and retain effective and…

This quantitative study investigates the issue of teacher shortages, operationalized through emergency permit rates, within the broader context and specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic, while assessing the influence of leadership characteristics. Utilizing a decade of publicly available secondary data (2012-2022), the research sourced…

Performance-based funding models for higher education, which tie state support for institutions to performance on student outcomes, have proliferated in recent decades. Some states now tie most of their higher education appropriations to completion outcomes and include bonus payments for historically underrepresented groups to address equity gaps…

The over-exaggeration of technology's role in education has dominated the landscape of research, often resulting in the negligence of other important issues. This article critiques openness in technology-based education from the perspective of sustainability, put more specifically, cost-effectiveness and accessibility, both of which have direct…

Increasing education funding is a topic of discussion every year at the Minnesota State Legislature. In January, Governor Tim Walz proposed a 4% increase to the basic education formula allowance within the K-12 general education revenue program, the "education formula" that determines the majority of funding school districts receive from…

US colleges and universities have long been the envy of the world. Institutional autonomy has fostered creativity among faculty, students, and staff. But this autonomy means that colleges tend to create their own solutions for every need. As a result, higher education suffers from costly redundancies that drive tuitions ever upward, putting higher…

Educational technology is the focus of increasing financial investment. In this article, we examine how edtech investors imagine and invest in the future of higher education through an empirical case study of a UK investing company. Utilising concepts and methods from economic sociology, we analyse how investment companies engage in…

Purpose: In recent times, universities have been faced with the challenge of implementing neoliberal ideas as a survival tactic. For instance, there is increasing pressure on academics globally to publish because of performance funding and other metrics like global rankings, which consider where and how much academics publish. This study explores…

This study examines the relationship between cost efficiency and privatization at 163 public research institutions in the United States between 2005 and 2015. We employ a spatial autoregressive (SAR) random-effects model and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to estimate the relationship between costs and four privatization variables: auxiliary…

While the effects of governance reforms on research have been widely discussed, little is known about their consequences for teaching at universities. This study examines the issue by considering competitive funding programs for teaching currently being introduced in German universities using interviews to explore why universities introduce…

Global narratives of educational philanthropy tend to emphasise the significant influence donors have in shaping public school policy and practice. In Australia, however, tax laws work to narrow the possibilities for philanthropy to exert influence over public schooling. Indeed, public schools (unlike private schools and Higher Education…