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

摘要

Few debates spark as much interest as the controversy over how to increaseaccess to higher education, particularly for racial minority groups. Despite theknowledge accumulated on the benefits of diversity, the higher education communityknows very little about the determinants of minority student enrollment, or whatuniversities can do to affect minority student representation. This dissertation seeks toinvestigate the factors that affect variance in minority student enrollment levels at publicuniversities, with particular attention devoted to the political environment.This analysis of the relationship between political institutions and publicuniversities draws on a number of subliteratures in public administration and politicalscience, including theories of political control, descriptive representation, and publicmanagement. As one of the first major studies of the politics of higher education, theanalysis 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 ofEducation?s Integrated Postsecondary Education Dataset and the Texas HigherEducation Coordinating Board, data on political institutions, including racialrepresentation, and interviews of university administrators. The quantitative analysis uses a combination of methods, including ordinary least squares, hierarchical linearmodeling, and descriptive statistics. Using a framework of governance to link thesesubliteratures together allows for progress toward more general theories about therelationship between political institutions and bureaucracy.Substantively, this analysis also adds to our understanding of what factors affectminority enrollments. Chapter V uncovers the redistributive effect of the Hopwood caseand California?s Proposition 209, and chapter VI builds on this finding, by testing for theeffect of minority representation in state legislatures. Chapter VII then takes a closerlook at the Texas system, investigating the effect of the Grutter decisions onenrollments, particularly at the flagship institutions. Overall, findings point to theimportance of university-specific characteristics -- such as the institution?s level ofselectivity and the values held by the university -- in moderating the influence ofpolitical institutions, particularly of court cases and state-level interventions, on minoritystudent enrollment levels.