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This study draws upon the first detailed longitudinal dataset on performance-based funding (PBF) to document the evolution and current landscape of PBF in American higher education. We show that while PBF has become increasingly common, states have experimented with adopting, abandoning, and re-adopting PBF over time. We also find a new wave of PBF adoption occurring in the 2010s following the Great Recession. However, PBF remains a relatively weak policy lever with a small share of funds at stake in most states and some states not funding PBF even when it exists in legislation. Equity considerations vary in the student groups they include and less than half of two-year and three-quarters of four-year PBF systems include race when allocating performance funds. Our findings complicate some common characterizations of PBF and offer new insight for researchers examining how PBF policy design shapes student and institutional outcomes.

Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers often are interested in understanding whether policies expand access for low-income students. In this brief, we highlight the limitations of a commonly available measure of low-income status-whether students receive a federal Pell grant-and compare it to new data on enrollment by income quintile to evaluate a recent policy effort within elite colleges aimed at expanding access. We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges' economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst growing public concern in the United States over college access and affordability, federal policymakers have implemented many low‐cost, behaviorally‐informed strategies aimed at simplifying the college‐going process and reducing informational barriers. Our paper reviews recent U.S. federal policies and interventions that draw on insights from the behavioral sciences to help students navigate various stages of the college‐going process and summarizes empirical evidence of these efforts on college outcomes, highlighting variations across interventions and for various student populations. We conclude with up‐to‐date discussions of policy proposals and opportunities for behavioral science applications in postsecondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research often considers vertical stratification between U.S. higher education institutions. Yet differences also exist within higher education institutions, which we term "organizational segmentation." We understand organizational segmentation as a consequence of the external "prestige economy," which favors research revenues from high-resource science and engineering fields relative to instructional revenues collected by low-resource humanities departments. We use qualitative data from 83 interviews with faculty in high- and low-resource departments to examine how organizational segmentation, academic work, and professionalization are shaped by external and internal resource pressures. We find that deprofessionalization has occurred in different ways for faculty in high- and low-resource academic units. Faculty in high-resource units, like Brint's (1994) "expert" professionals, depend on external research resources and shape their careers accordingly, whereas faculty in low-resource units rely upon teaching revenues distributed by campus administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The test-optional movement in the United States emerged largely in response to criticism of standardized admissions tests as inadequate and potentially biased measures of postsecondary promise. Although anecdotal reports suggest that test-optional policies have improved campus diversity, empirical research has not yet confirmed this claim. Consequently, this study employs quasi-experimental techniques to assess the relationship between test-optional policy implementation and subsequent growth in the proportion of low-income and minority students enrolling at adopting liberal arts colleges. It also examines whether test-optional policies increase institutional standing through greater application numbers and higher reported Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. Results show that, on average, test-optional policies enhance the perceived selectivity, rather than the diversity, of participating institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which discusses the socioeconomic diversity in selective private colleges. Topics include the role of role of selective private colleges in developing the educational and socioeconomic outcomes among students of lower socioeconomic status (SES), the tuition gap between public and private institutions, and the enrollment patterns in U.S. postsecondary education.