The Promise and Paradox of Public Higher Education: Institutional Logics, Organizational Action, and Mission Fulfillment

Abstract

Public higher education has long served as a vehicle for upward mobility in American society. However, public colleges are experiencing difficulties in getting students across the finish line and struggle with persistently low degree completion rates. Integrating and building on key concepts of institutional and organizational theories, my dissertation investigates why public higher education is struggling to fulfill a core component of its mission and deliver on its promise of material value. In Paper 1, I examine why colleges do not adopt or pursue organizational actions known to improve degree completion. Drawing on and extending both institutional and organizational theories, I develop a multi-level theoretical model that accounts for competing institutional logics at the macro-level, embedded organizational attributes at the meso-level, and interactions at the individual-level. In Paper 2, my co-author and I investigate how, in an institutional environment defined by pluralism, actors within a public university system are enabled or hindered from pursuing actions that align with public higher education’s democratic mission with constrained resources. Drawing on unique interview data of actors and students at a large, less-selective, public university system, we introduce the concept of structural filtering to describe the process by which organizational attributes lead actors to perceive certain kinds of organizational conduct as appropriate, resulting in an unequal provision of support. In my final paper, I explore the origins and drivers of the disconnect between the material value higher education promises and the organizational conditions that make delivering on that promise challenging for public colleges. In this historical case study and document analysis of the City University of New York (CUNY), I find that conflicting logics were adopted in response to two distinct institutional environments, which shaped its organizational characteristics in ways that remain embedded today. This has created a value-gap, where CUNY’s egalitarian-shaped characteristics communicate and reinforce its material value. Yet, CUNY’s austerity-shaped characteristics constrain its ability to deliver on its promised and expected value. Together, these papers suggest that organizational conditions and complexity can—and do—obfuscate the democratic missions of public institutions. Moreover, I demonstrate how, if society still wants, expects, or needs higher education to be a vehicle for upward mobility and not stratification, a reinvestment and corresponding organizational transformation is necessary.