Disrupting or preserving privilege? Analyzing the design and causal effects of frames in inequalities grantmaking

• In Event: 3511 - Race, Higher Education and Myths of Affirmative Action

Abstract

Many public and private grantmaking organizations seek to influence social policy through expensive public campaigns to reduce racial and class inequalities. However, we know little about the material effects of these organizations’ ideological stances on their use of resources. This mixed-methods analysis examines the history of a federal grantmaking agency, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), and its efforts to cultivate field-level innovation to improve outcomes for underserved students. We combine 20 years of archival document analysis with a triple difference method of statistical causal inference to trace both the processes of ideological and policy change and to estimate their causal effects on who has access to grant dollars. We demonstrate that when the agency’s inequality goals are broadly framed, White-serving, wealthier, and more prestigious institutions receive statistically significant preference in terms of the agency’s grant awards for innovation. This contradictory preference diminishes only when the agency reframed its work around an economically justified priority for serving minoritized students. However, the resulting causal increase in dollars to minority-serving institutions (MSIs) is only achieved through funding a subset of relatively prestigious MSIs. In this condition, non-prestigious colleges (the ostensive target of the change), receive even fewer dollars than in the prior eras. Archival analysis suggests that the mechanism underlying this contradiction is the concurrent emergence of elaborate evaluation requirements and restriction to prescriptive strategies, which were beyond the capacity of non-prestigious institutions. Institutional theory predicts that marginalized organizational types would be the most generative sites for field-level change, and yet this shift disadvantages these very colleges, which also serve the largest share of poor students and students of color. These results leave intact modes of reproduction that favor more elite and well-resourced organizations that already benefit from the field’s current and inherently unequal institutional arrangements.

Authors

• Heather McCambly, Northwestern University

• Jeannette Anastasia Colyvas, Northwestern University