Portraying Governance: The priorities, composition, and representativeness of U.S. public higher education boards

In this paper, I introduce a novel dataset that includes individual-level details about members on public 4-year higher education boards nationwide. Using this dataset and the text of bylaws of boards, I show that while boards focus attention on faculty and students in their formal documents, the composition of many boards is starkly misaligned with the demography of these populations. Using multivariate analyses, I show that state politics strongly relate to whether a board aligns well with its target populations. 

Evaluating AdviseTN   - with Taylor Odle (UW-Madison)

AdviseTN is a state-funded college access program that supports full-time college advisors in a portion of high schools that fall below the state average for college-going. We leverage the statewide adoption of AdviseTN across 34 communities to explore overall impacts on college enrollment and pair administrative data with CRM records on student-advisor interactions to uncover mechanisms through which targeted advising strategies appear more or less effective.  

State Spending Priorities and Funding Higher Education During COVID-19 - with Katharine Meyer (The Brookings Institution)

The Governor's Emergency Education Response (GEER) fund allocated money to governors to address the hardest-hit education entities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the funding decisions of governors and how state politics, institutional context, and the broader funding landscape shaped support for higher education at the state level. 

Above Board: State Politics and Public Higher Education - Dissertation Project 

Abstract to come.