One of the most popular state policy trends in higher education has been the re-emergence of performance funding. Many states adopted this strategy during the New Accountability movement of the 1990s, but a lack of financial and political support in the early 2000s resulted in many states abandoning these initiatives . Performance funding policies regained popularity in the mid-2000s, due in large part to efforts of many influential organizations, especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, National Governors Association, Complete College America, and National Conference of State Legislatures. These organizations led a national effort to draw attention to issues related to college completion and often advocated for policies that incentivized completion by linking state appropriations to institutional outputs (e.g., number of degrees awarded, student retention, transfer rates) instead of funding colleges according to the number of students enrolled (McKeown-Moak, 2013).Concerned that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of degree completion and that colleges are not producing enough graduates to keep pace with changes in the labor market, state policymakers view performance funding as a way to align colleges with broader state policy goals. By funding colleges according to their outputs, rather than inputs, state policymakers believe that these incentives will motivate colleges to increase degree productivity. While there is no question that advocates of performance funding policies have been very 560224E PAXXX10.

Today, 35 states use performance-based funding models tying appropriations directly to educational outcomes. Financial incentives should induce colleges to improve performance, but there are several well-documented reasons why this is unlikely to occur. We examine how two of the most robust performance funding states—Tennessee and Ohio—responded to the policy. Using a difference-in-differences design, findings point to null and negative effects where colleges responded by producing fewer associate’s degrees or not increasing bachelor’s degree productivity. The only positive and robust effects were found among Tennessee community colleges that responded by producing significantly more certificates. Findings are consistent with performance management literature, where policy impacts are often muted or limited to a narrow range of outcomes.

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U.S. immigration policy has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. Previous research has focused on how temporal variation in federal policy has altered the migratory behavior of immigrants. The effect of spatial variation in enforcement remains untested. Relying on the criminological distinction between general and specific deterrence, we argue that high rates of enforcement are unlikely to encourage undocumented immigrants to self‐deport. We also examine the effects cultural and economic immigration policies adopted by the states. Previous research suggests that migrants will choose to remain in states with favorable environments, but this claim has not been directly tested. We draw on data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) to address these gaps. MMP data are supplemented with government data on federal enforcement obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and measures of state policy. Our findings suggest that higher rates of enforcement and the establishment of negative policy environments do not encourage undocumented immigrants to leave the United States at a higher rate than their documented counterparts do. Rather, high enforcement contexts exaggerate the differences between documented and undocumented migrant behavior, with undocumented migrants staying longer. Liberal state policies have no discernible effect.

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.