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Regional public universities educate approximately 70 percent of college students at four-year public universities and an even larger share of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They aim to provide opportunity for education and social mobility, in part by locating near potential students. In this paper, we use the historical assignment of normal schools and insane asylums (normal schools grew into regional universities while asylums remain small) and data from Opportunity Insights to identify the effects of regional universities on the social mobility of nearby children. Children in counties given a normal school get more education and have better economic and social outcomes, especially lower-income children. For several key outcomes, we show this effect is a causal effect on children, and not only selection on which children live near universities.

Increasing budget constraints and emphasis on fielding capability faster have led the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal entities to pursue the benefits of Agile software development���reduced cycle times, flexibility to adapt to changing conditions and user needs��� that software development practitioners have achieved in the commercial market. This report is written by the National Defense Industrial Association���s System Engineering Agile Working Group to provide information on request-for-proposal (RFP) patterns and techniques for successful Agile contracting that can and have been used for contracts seeking to employ Agile methods. This report is intended to support the writers of RFPs in bringing Agile concepts into programs at the earliest possible time, providing examples of the kinds of language that will affect the foundations of contracts on which programs rely.

We use a novel identification strategy to investigate whether regional universities make their local economies more resilient to adverse economic shocks. Our strategy is based on state governments assigning normal schools (to train teachers) and insane asylums to counties between 1830 and 1930. Normal schools later became much larger regional universities while asylum properties mostly continue as small state-owned psychiatric health facilities. Because site selection criteria were similar for these two types of institutions, comparing counties assigned a normal school versus an insane asylum identifies the effect of a regional university. We find that having a regional university roughly offset the negative effects of exposure to manufacturing declines, and we attribute a significant share of this resilience to the resilience of regional public university spending.