Search

States have adopted a variety of policies to encourage universities to expand research production, with the hope of supporting economic growth and competitiveness. This paper considers whether a state-level initiative succeeded in influencing university-based research outputs among regional public universities. We test whether the Texas Research Incentive Program increased research production at a set of state universities as measured by total research spending, federally-funded research spending, the number of scholarly publications, and the share of publications published in high impact factor journals. Using a novel dataset and difference-in-differences analytic strategy, we found that TRIP adoption was associated with a 19%-25% increase in research expenditures at emerging research universities in Texas relative to a matched set of comparable universities. However, TRIP did not influence federally-funded research expenditures or journal publication outputs. We also show that federally-funded research expenditures influence publication outputs — both in amount and quality — and that number of full-time faculty influences both federal research expenditures and publication outputs. We discuss contributions to the literature on regional public universities, loose coupling, and research production, as well as implications for policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional practices and conditions at community colleges can improve rates of transfer, as can access to transfer student capital. However, we know little about how institutions attempt to build students' transfer capital, or about students' experiences within community colleges as they accumulate transfer capital. In this paper, we examine how students' institutional experiences, particularly their engagement with student supports at community colleges and transfer destinations, influence their understanding of, and ability to navigate, the transfer process. We view the accumulation of transfer student capital as an interactionist model between the students and their institution, where students' transfer knowledge and success is conditioned by an interaction between their background and institutional conditions. We draw on longitudinal qualitative interview data with transfer-intending community college students over the course of 3 years to understand how students access, receive, and accumulate transfer capital as they work toward their educational goals. By leveraging student experiences, our study can inform community colleges and transfer destinations about practices and policies interpreted as most effective from the perspective of students. Our work also connects to broader conversations about how institutions reproduce, ameliorate, or exacerbate inequalities based on student background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]