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. 

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.