State Higher Education Funding during COVID-19: Exploring State-Level Characteristics Influencing Financing Decisions.

Building on research examining state financing for higher education, our qualitative comparative case study investigates state policymakers' decisions for funding public higher education during the COVID-19 crisis in California and Texas. These states were purposively selected based on the size of their postsecondary sector, state partisanship, and higher education funding responses during the pandemic. Moreover, these states represent two of the largest public postsecondary enrollments nationally and serve a racially and ethnically diverse student population. Guiding our study is the Hearn and Ness (2018) framework investigating the ecology of state higher education policymaking, which offers four contextual categories that influence state policy decisions: socioeconomic context, organizational and policy context, politicoinstitutional context, and external context. This framework suggests underlying factors influencing the state funding process, while also providing an opportunity to expand on this theory through the unique COVID-19 context. We used deductive and inductive techniques to analyze 28 interviews with a range of actors, including state elected officials, state government staff, and higher education officials. We also examined 69 documents (state budgets, news articles, and state executive orders) to triangulate and verify our interview data. Two areas served as key events that ultimately influenced higher education funding decisions in California and Texas: (1) the preference of certain higher education institutions and (2) the availability and application of federal dollars. Furthermore, the organizational and policy context and the politico-institutional context, as defined by the Hearn and Ness framework, provided additional state-level factors that resulted in distinct responses. This study offers practical and theoretical contributions to higher education policy and practice, including highlighting the decision-making and prioritization processes of state policymakers when facing an unprecedented pandemic and crisis, and discussing common and unique factors influencing higher education policymaking in two different state contexts.

Accountability or Equity: Combining Topic Models and Qualitative Analysis to Examine Public Rhetoric about Performance-Based Funding.

Examining rhetoric is important to understanding educational policymaking. This study focuses on rhetoric on one educational policy, performance-based funding (PBF) for higher education. In contrast to previous research on PBF, we analyze rhetoric in both states that implemented the policy and those that opted out. We employ a sequential mixed-methods design combining topic modeling with qualitative analysis of newspapers. Findings indicate that rhetoric in states that implemented PBF aligned closely with neoliberalism. Rhetoric from non-implementer states focused on higher education agents and policy processes, and was more likely to highlight equity than rhetoric from implementer states. This study sheds light on policy innovation and diffusion by contrasting rhetoric around PBF between states that implemented the policy and those that held out.