Resource dependence and the Fulbright Program: A study of financial contributions by world region

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Equity, inclusion, diversity, and financial options in higher education

Proposal

The Fulbright Program is the United States’ flagship educational exchange program. Since its inception in 1946, the program has funded over 400,000 graduate students and scholars to participate in study, research, and work for U.S. citizens and citizens of partner nations (The Fulbright Program, 2022) The program often describes itself as an alternative to militarization for peacekeeping efforts and as a low-cost option for diplomacy, given that partner nations’ governments and private donors from partner nations contribute significantly to funding the cost of the program. The Fulbright Program espouses values of mutual understanding and exchange. However, previous research has shown that the experiences of students and scholars who participate in these programs are not equitable, and largely depend on the US’ relationship with the participant’s home country (Fu, 2018; Haupt, 2021; Lebovic, 2021).
This study aims to examine how financial contributions are distributed across world regions through the lens of resource dependence theory. This research will contribute to the overall understanding of how power is distributed given the flow of financial resources between the US and the world regions defined by the US Department of State. As such, we pose the following research questions:
Is there a significant difference in the world regions’ government financial contributions to the Fulbright Program, controlling for tertiary enrollment, combined GDP, and the number of grants by world region?
Is there a significant difference between the US government's financial contributions to the Fulbright Program by world region, controlling for tertiary enrollment, combined GDP, and the number of grants by world region?
These questions aim to illuminate statistically significant differences between world regions in how financial resources are distributed; furthermore, by applying resource dependence theory, this analysis will demonstrate various power dynamics among the world regions and the United States.
Theoretical Framework
Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) originated in the 1970s with Pfeffer and Salancik’s (1978) book The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. The theory posits that the allocation of resources is a central source of power within organizations (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Due to resources’ power within an organization and among organizations, RDT assumes that organizations behave in response to the allocation of resources. Such behaviors include taking political action, developing relationships with other organizations, and otherwise altering their environments to gain power (Hillman et al., 2009).
In the field of internationalization of higher education, several studies have applied RDT to understand how universities have responded to external pressures. Whatley and Castiello-Gutiérrez (2021) found that private not-for-profit institutions in the United States were willing to create in-person instructional opportunities during COVID-19 restrictions that would allow international students to remain in the US according to federal policy, whereas public institutions were less likely to make these concessions. The researchers argue that, through the lens of RDT, private institutions in the United States depend more on international students’ tuition fees than their public counterparts. Glass and Lee (2018) examined campus internationalization strategies in the United States context. They found that international affairs staff changed their decisions regarding internationalization plans based on their perception of which human and financial resources were available for internationalization at the institution.
RDT in the context of higher education is useful for explaining organizational behaviors that involve the allocation of resources. In the case of the Fulbright Program, there are various organizations’ actions to consider - the governments of the United States and partner nations, the program itself which is an organization within the United States government, the binational commissions which administer the programs, and private donors who choose to partially fund the program. RDT provides a theoretical framework for these institutions’ rationales for particular behaviors and may demonstrate inequalities in the resource dependence among world regions.
Methods
Our analysis began with a one-way repeated measures ANOVA to determine whether there are any significant differences between world regions and total financial contributions to the Fulbright program. Following the ANOVA, we conducted posthoc pairwise t-tests with a Bonferroni correction in order to see where the relationships were. We used the dataset provided by the US Department of State in the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board’s annual reports from 2007-2017. Our methods will continue with a fixed-effects regression model as we have longitudinal data. This builds upon the basic relationships found in the ANOVA to account for covariates such as tertiary enrollment and combined GDP. A fixed-effects model is useful in this study because the model can control for stable characteristics within individuals in the study (in this case, world regions), to potentially eliminate sources of bias (Allison, 2009). Therefore, a fixed-effects regression model for longitudinal data is applied in this study to examine exposure-outcome associations in the case of the financial contributions of the world regions to the Fulbright Program.
In order to address our second research question, we will continue with the same ANOVA and regression analysis, in terms of US Contributions to partner country Fulbright programs. We will contrast the results between foreign contributions and US contributions, all the while considering the eventual distribution of Fulbright awards by region.
Preliminary Findings
Our repeated measures ANOVA found a statistically significant relationship between World Region and total contributions to the Fulbright Program (F(1.5,15.04) = 213.664 and p=3.5e-11). The posthoc tests found significant differences between almost every region, except for East Asia-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. As we are still collecting data related to US contributions to partner Fulbright programs, we are unable to report on regression results at this time. However, our preliminary findings suggest there is a disparity between regional contributions to the Fulbright program, correlating with the number of awards that are eventually given to each region. Through the lens of RDT, the results demonstrate which world regions are able to invest in the Fulbright Program, strengthening their resource power, and which regions are at a resource disadvantage given the differences in contribution over a period of ten years.

Authors

• Marisa Lally, Boston College

• Shadman Islem, Boston College