Accountability in Higher Education: Exploring Impacts on State Budgets and Institutional Spending Patterns

Some argue that the public sector should employ greater use of objective, quantitative measures of organizational outcomes so that political leaders and the general public are better able to evaluate the performance of public agencies. Critics, however, contend that performance based accountability policies are often limited in their capacity to inuence the budgetary process or eectively impose topdown controls on administrative actors. Despite these concerns, performance based accountability regimes have become increasingly prevalent throughout government. One area where this debate has recently become salient is higher education, where there are several initiatives, at both the state and federal levels, to link institutional funding with student outcomes. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Source (IPEDS), this paper investigates whether these performance funding policies have inuenced state budgets or resource allocation priorities at public colleges and universities. Results indicate that performance funding policies have not had substantial impacts on either state budgets or university spending patterns.

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