Dominant explanations of state higher education policy tend to emphasize economic models that foreground the business cycle or political approaches that cast ideology as fairly fixed. We instead foreground changing social context to conceptualize state appropriations as predicted not only by these classic explanations, but also by the interplay of racial representation and political party control. Drawing on the racial backlash hypothesis and quantitative analyses, we show that party control of state government and racial representation in higher education jointly explain state appropriations. Unified Republican governments spent more than Democratic or divided governments when White students were overrepresented. Republicans spent less otherwise. These results suggest that partisan attitudes toward racial representation in higher education may shape state government support for colleges and universities.