Above Board: State Politics and Public Higher Education - Dissertation Project 

In my dissertation, I explore the question of how state government influences policy and outcomes at public 4-year higher education institutions through appointed governing boards. I rely on a few other models of governance to build my own framework for understanding the position and behaviors of governing boards. I outline the unique governance structures of public college and university governing boards and draw on existing evidence from related governance structures to build a set of expectations for how state politics may affect boards, how boards make decisions, and how decisions impact institutional outcomes. Across three empirical studies, I describe the demography and partisanship of boards nationwide, qualitatively explore the decision-making of board members, and identify the effect of board partisanship on institutional financial outcomes. 

Portraying Governance: Demographic Misalignment in University Board Representation

In this paper, I introduce a novel dataset that includes individual-level details about members on public 4-year higher education boards nationwide. Using this dataset and the text of bylaws of boards, I show that while boards focus attention on faculty and students in their formal documents, the composition of many boards is starkly misaligned with the demography of these populations. Using multivariate analyses, I show that state politics strongly relate to whether a board aligns well with its target populations.  EdWorking Paper Link: https://edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1212

Civic Stability: The Effects of College Closures on Political Outcomes

A long line of research links college education with vote choice and propensity to engage formally with politics at all. But this literature focuses mostly on the individual experience and how college shapes outcomes for those that go through it. What effects do colleges have on the politics of people in their communities? In this paper, I leverage the increasing trend of permanent postsecondary closures to estimate the effects of a local colleges closing on the behavior and attitudes of those that live in the same geographic region of the closure. Using generalized difference-in-differences and event-study models, I find null effects on closure for all outcomes. I discuss potential reasons for this finding and future directions of this study. 

Co-Authored Work:

Evaluating AdviseTN   - with Taylor Odle (UW-Madison)

AdviseTN is a state-funded college access program that supports full-time college advisors in a portion of high schools that fall below the state average for college-going. We leverage the statewide adoption of AdviseTN across 34 communities to explore overall impacts on college enrollment and pair administrative data with CRM records on student-advisor interactions to uncover mechanisms through which targeted advising strategies appear more or less effective.  

State Spending Priorities and Funding Higher Education During COVID-19 - with Katharine Meyer (The Brookings Institution)

The Governor's Emergency Education Response (GEER) fund allocated money to governors to address the hardest-hit education entities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the funding decisions of governors and how state politics, institutional context, and the broader funding landscape shaped support for higher education at the state level. 

Democracy Work: Understanding Workers’ Contributions to Civil Society - with Katherine Cramer and the Political Behavior and Economic Life Lab (UW-Madison)

We investigate how experience in the workplace matters for how people think about their role with respect to politics, and their connections to other people. Using group and individual interviews of restaurant workers, public school teachers, and medical doctors in 11 municipalities across the United States, we examine perceptions of voice, agency and respect in their workplaces and connections to similar perceptions in the political realm. What we heard opened our eyes to the work that people are doing for democracy in their workplaces. Most of these workers were not highly involved in politics or even civic life, but through their work they are forming relationships and helping their communities respond to public issues and policy changes. This is an important aspect of civil society that takes place in the economy, not separate from it. However, their jobs are often inhibiting them from participating in politics, through both resource constraints and their own reluctance to have political activity interfere with their ability to foster relationships at work.