College students in prison are ineligible for state-funded financial aid in most states. This is because state policymakers adopted policies that explicitly ban incarcerated students from receiving aid. How and why did state policymakers do this? This study explores this question through qualitative case studies of two states where incarcerated…

Researchers have shown renewed interest during the past decade in the relationships among politics, policy, finance, and governance of higher education at the state level. Little attention, however, has been paid to state higher education executive officers (SHEEOs), the individuals responsible for leading the agencies that oversee higher…

Over the past two decades, state governments have increasingly invested in programs to recruit accomplished scientists from elsewhere to university positions. This event history analysis suggests that an intriguing mix of comparative state disadvantage and leveragable existing research resources is associated with the likelihood of states adopting…

The relationships between state government funding methods and instructional innovation in public higher education are explored in this study. It is argued that stimulating instructional innovation is socially and educationally productive and that fiscal and budgetary strategies available to state-level decision-makers may be used to stimulate…