Governance Structures and Institutional Interests in the Enactment of Grant Aid in Three U.S. States

• In Event: 079 - Regular Session. Sociology of Education: Comparative and Historical Approaches

Abstract

New York and California have been among the most generous states in the U.S. in granting need-based aid to college students, yet New York enacted its need-based aid program twenty-six years before California. Why did New York move toward expansive, need-based, entitlement aid so much earlier than California? I use field theory to expand the explanatory power of the political and economic approaches of education researchers and show how differences in California and New York’s fields of educational resource competition constrained relevant interest groups and, along with governance structure and fiscal crises, influenced the timing of aid legislation. A field’s characteristics largely determine how interests can be mobilized, and how effectively, through existing governance structures given the positioning of governing boards within the field of power. New York enacted its aid program much earlier because the independent (i.e., private, not for profit) postsecondary sector in New York exerted powerful influence over state financial aid policy via a centralized, powerful governing authority. In California the field was dominated by the public sector which kept tuition low and made it difficult for independent institutions to make a case for need-based aid at an earlier period. As appropriations decline and public institutions increasingly seek private funding it becomes important to understand what the relationship is between public and independent sectors and how each relates to state governments and their resources.

Author

• Jennifer Marie Nations, University of California-San Diego