Third-sector Organizations and the Ideological Origins of Higher Education Reform

• In Event: Higher Education Policy Influencers: The Impact of National, State, and Third-Sector Agendas on Postsecondary Education

Abstract

Since the nation’s founding, successive waves of reform movements have washed over US colleges and universities (Loss 2011, Dorn 2017, Ris 2022). These movements are just as much political as they are educational, and they are not inspired by necessity or popular demand.
Instead, they originate in ideas. Higher education reform has weak ties to the traditional sources of sociopolitical change, i.e., the state and the market. The US federal government has extremely limited oversight of institutions and state governments usually regulate public institutions indirectly, through appointed or elected regents. Meanwhile, market forces, while a useful concept for understanding the evolution of colleges and universities (Labaree 2017), do not act directly upon the sector, mainly because higher education has no rival in terms of preparing and credentialing human capital. We can also discount the possibility that higher education reform movements are internally motivated; the sector is notoriously intransigent (Bok 2018).
Drawing on case studies of reform movements, this paper shows how third-sector organizations--traditional philanthropic foundations (e.g., Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie), lobbying groups (e.g., American Council on Education), and latter-day philanthropic agencies (e.g., Lumina, Complete College America) have infused higher education policy with ideas that power reform movements. Some organizations have construed colleges and universities as problems to be solved. Others have taken the opposite position – that postsecondary institutions are underused resources that can themselves solve urgent societal problems. Yet others construe higher education as an inefficient morass requiring discipline so that it might meet return-on-investment expectations.
In all of these iterations, third-sector organizations have curated ideas exogenous to the state, the market, and the higher education sector, and have inserted them into the policy formation process. Ideology is not destiny, however. This paper advances a cyclical theoretical model of higher education reform: from the pragmatistic power of ideas, to the coercive power of policy, to the opacity and potential subversion of implementation, to an equilibrium in which reform’ means and ends are no longer objects of dispute. That equilibrium is not an end, however; it induces an ideological vacuum into which third-sector organizations can once again tender new reform movements.

Author

• Ethan W. Ris, University of Nevada - Reno