Unintended Impacts of Performance Funding on Community Colleges and Universities in Three States

Abstract

This paper identifies and analyzes the types and numbers of unintended impacts— actual or potential—of state performance funding policies on higher education institutions. These impacts—which were not intended by the framers of the performance funding policy—were ones mentioned in the course of telephone interviews with over two hundred college personnel at nine community colleges and nine public universities in three states: Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee. The respondents were senior administrators, middle-level administrators, academic deans, and department chairs at these institutions. This paper discusses each type of these reported impacts, making a distinction between impacts that we judge as actually occurring and ones that were stated as possibilities. The unintended impacts most frequently mentioned by interviewees were restrictions in admissions to college and a weakening of academic standards. Besides describing overall patterns, the paper also analyzes how interviewee responses varied by state, by type of institution (community college or university), by college capacity to respond to the demands of performance funding, and by position the interviewee held in the institution. The paper closes by providing policy recommendations to address these unintended impacts.