Chatterji, Aaron K.
[Verfasser:in]
;
Kim, Joowon
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft];
McDevitt, Ryan C.
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]National Bureau of Economic Research
Erschienen:
Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2018
Erschienen in:NBER working paper series ; no. w24818
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.3386/w24818
Identifikator:
Reproduktionsnotiz:
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Mode of access: World Wide Web
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files
Beschreibung:
We explore a new mechanism to understand state funding for public colleges and universities by leveraging data on the educational experiences of state legislators, specifically if and where they received postsecondary education. Using novel, hand-collected data from 2002 through 2014, we provide comprehensive documentation for the first time in the literature on the educational backgrounds of state legislators. We find a statistically significant, positive association between the share of legislators who attended their states' public institutions and state funding for their entire public higher-education system. We also find a similar positive relationship between the share of state legislators who attended particular campuses of the state's public university system and funding for those campuses. This relationship is more pronounced among publicly educated legislators who represent legislative districts close to their alma mater's district, and becomes most consequential when the legislator's district contains his or her alma mater. We discuss the implications of our findings for academic studies on how politics and legislators' personal experiences in influence support for higher education