Increasing minority enrollments in higher education: political institutions, public universities, and policy outcomes

Few debates spark as much interest as the controversy over how to increase access to higher education, particularly for racial minority groups. Despite the knowledge accumulated on the benefits of diversity, the higher education community knows very little about the determinants of minority student enrollment, or what universities can do to affect minority student representation. This dissertation seeks to investigate the factors that affect variance in minority student enrollment levels at public universities, with particular attention devoted to the political environment. This analysis of the relationship between political institutions and public universities draws on a number of subliteratures in public administration and political science, including theories of political control, descriptive representation, and public management. As one of the first major studies of the politics of higher education, the analysis draws on untapped data that allow for better tests of many of these theories. These data include measures of university enrollments, drawn from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Dataset and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, data on political institutions, including racial representation, and interviews of university administrators. The quantitative analysis uses a combination of methods, including ordinary least squares, hierarchical linear modeling, and descriptive statistics. Using a framework of governance to link these subliteratures together allows for progress toward more general theories about the relationship between political institutions and bureaucracy. Substantively, this analysis also adds to our understanding of what factors affect minority enrollments. Chapter V uncovers the redistributive effect of the Hopwood case and California’s Proposition 209, and chapter VI builds on this finding, by testing for the effect of minority representation in state legislatures. Chapter VII then takes a closer look at the Texas system, investigating the effect of the Grutter decisions on enrollments, particularly at the flagship institutions. Overall, findings point to the importance of university-specific characteristics -- such as the institution’s level of selectivity and the values held by the university -- in moderating the influence of political institutions, particularly of court cases and state-level interventions, on minority student enrollment levels

Race, Structure, and State Governments: The Politics of Higher Education Diversity

This paper examines the politics of higher education diversity for both African Americans and Latinos, by investigating how the structure of the bureaucracy affects the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. The key theoretical determinants of minority college enrollments are legislative representation, bureaucratic structure, university-level policies, and restrictions on affirmative action. A hierarchical linear model of 500+ universities over an 11-year period shows that each of these factors affects minority enrollments

Race, Structure, and State Governments: The Politics of Higher Education Diversity

This paper examines the politics of higher education diversity for both African Americans and Latinos, by investigating how the structure of the bureaucracy affects the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. The key theoretical determinants of minority college enrollments are legislative representation, bureaucratic structure, university-level policies, and restrictions on affirmative action. A hierarchical linear model of 500+ universities over an 11-year period shows that each of these factors affects minority enrollments

Intersectionality and equity: Dynamic bureaucratic representation in higher education

Representative bureaucracy scholarship has yet to address two interrelated phenomena: intersectionality and changes in relative disadvantage over time. This manuscript addresses these gaps by assessing representation effects at the intersection of race/ethnicity and sex and in previously, but no longer, disadvantaged client groups. It also argues that if bureaucratic representation is viewed as a quest for equity, then representation will decline as disadvantaged client groups approach equity in policy outcomes. Using panel data for US higher education, this study highlights the importance of intersectional representation in bureaucratic organizations. In three of the four race/ethnic/sex combinations, students perform better in the presence of faculty who match them intersectionally (in the fourth case, race but not sex matters). The empirical results also find that as a formerly disadvantaged client group (women) becomes successful within an organization, the active representation relationship declines. These implications inform future representative bureaucracy scholarship examining intersectional groups

I've Seen Fire and I've Seen Rain: Public Management and Performance After a Natural Disaster

Kenneth J. Meier is the Charles H. Gregory Chair in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He also directs the Project for Equity, Representation and Governance, the Texas Educational Excellence Project, and the Carlos Cantu Hispanic Education and Opportunity Endowment and holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Public Management at the Cardiff University School of Business, Wales, United Kingdom.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Employee turnover and organizational performance: testing a hypothesis from classical public administration

Empirical studies of public employee turnover, particularly using turnover as an independent variable, are rare; and most of the literature assumes turnover to have a negative impact on organizations. This study examines a provocative but little supported hypothesis that has recently emerged in the private sector literature that turnover may provide positive benefits to the organization, at least up to a point. Using data from several hundred public organizations over a nine-year period, we test the proposition that moderate levels of turnover may positively affect organizational performance. We find that while turnover is indeed negatively related to performance for the organization's primary goal, it does have the hypothesized nonlinear relationship for a secondary output that is characterized by greater task difficulty

Serpents in the sand: managerial networking and nonlinear influences on organizational performance

Scholars of public management have consistently found that management matters, but little research has considered how much management matters or whether the link between management and performance may be contingent on various factors. This article further investigates the link between management and performance by examining the functional form of the relationship. Analyses using data from 1000+ public organizations point to some diminishing returns. Results suggest that networking with other organizations might not always result in gains for the organization. Findings also show how managerial quality and differences in organizational staff can affect this relationship