Setting the agenda for state decentralization of higher education: Analyzing the explanatory power of alternative agenda models.

Abstract

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a historic trend toward decentralization of authority from the state to the campus level. Although a modest literature describes the enactment of decentralization legislation, nothing is known about how higher education decentralization first becomes an issue to which policymakers pay serious attention. In other words, no research has focused on the agenda-setting stage of policymaking in states that have decentralized their higher education systems. The purpose of this study was to investigate how higher education decentralization achieves the decision agenda of state government. The dissertation employed three competing conceptualizations of agenda formation (Rational-Comprehensive model, Incremental model, and Revised Garbage Can model) as a framework to analyze the emergence of the decentralization issue in three states: Arkansas, Hawaii and Illinois. The comparative case study utilized an eclectic mix of data, including sixty-one interviews with principal policy actors, collected during site visits to the sample states. Detailed case studies of each state were developed. Patterns in the data were matched with rival theoretical propositions derived from the competing conceptual models and operationalized in a seven-fold analytical framework. Comparisons along each analytical dimension were then made across states to identify points of commonality and divergence at the aggregate level. Among the study's counterintuitive findings are the following: (1) As Kingdon's (1984) Revised Garbage Can model suggests, the decentralization issue emerged rapidly and unpredictably when separate streams of problems, politics and solutions converged; (2) economic or political crisis in each state's macro-system created historic windows of opportunity for old decentralization solutions to become coupled with new problems bearing little relevance to higher education; (3) agenda formation was characterized by a seemingly inverted sequence of problem-identification and solution-generation, whereby decentralization solutions were developed in advance of the problem for which proponents claimed they were the answer; (4) decentralization achieved the agenda when elected officials came to view the issue as an answer to electoral crisis. The study findings invite reformulation of prevailing conceptualizations of higher education policymaking, point to the political instrumentality of higher education, and generate a grounded theoretical framework for use in subsequent investigation of agenda phenomena.