TY - JOUR
T1 - Institutionalizing Inequity Anew
T2 - Grantmaking and Racialized Postsecondary Organizations
AU - McCambly, Heather
AU - Colyvas, Jeannette A.
N1 - Funding Information:
to receive in a given year. However, one must consider the possibility that all federal programs were changing in the same way due to political or social changes that could be correlated to the pre-post FITW change. To rule this out, we introduce a comparison program, which is the second difference in this model. We use TRiO Student Support Services (SSS), another federal agency that awards grants to colleges and universities, as an untreated comparison case. The comparison group provides us with an estimate of the changes in applicant behavior and funding decisions that would have happened over time, even if FIPSE had not instituted the 2013 FITW change. Table 1 includes a summary of grantmaking by SSS from 1998 through 2015. SSS is another federal grant program with a similar mission (to make grants to postsecondary institutions that fund student support programs that improve postsecondary outcomes), founding circumstances (as federal responses to civil rights era demands), target population (underserved students in postsecondary education), and is located within the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) under the assistant secretary for postsecondary education. The FITW policy change was not applied to SSS. SSS shares with FIPSE the same context in terms of trends in funding levels and political administration changes. Unlike FIPSE, the legislative mandate of SSS was more explicitly equity-conscious, given its focus on delivering supplemental student supports to minoritized students. If FIPSE’s 2013 adoption of an equity-conscious frame impacts its funding patterns, we would thus predict funding to look more like SSS post-FITW than it had done. The core assumptions of parallel pre-trends is not directly testable, but Figures 2–5 provide visual evidence for similar pre-treatment fluctuations.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved (ISSN 0162–5748).
PY - 2022/9/1
Y1 - 2022/9/1
N2 - This article combines theories of racialized organizations with insights on institutionalization to empirically analyze the role of grantmakers in unsettling postsecondary racial inequity. Using longitudinal data on federal grantmaking to institutions of higher education, we examine whether and how grantmaking policies (re)produce or diminish institutionalized racial inequities. To do so, we develop and apply the concept of the frame-enactment bundle—a multi-part unit of analysis—as a mechanism that either supports or challenges the (re)production of racialization. First, we ask how does a federal grantmaking agency’s frame-enactment bundle shift over time? Second, did a 2013 change to the frame-enactment bundle have a causal effect on funding in terms of the types of colleges and universities that benefit? We use archival analysis to trace the agency’s changing frame-enactment bundle over time. We then test the effects of these bundles on grant distribution using a differencein-difference-in-differences critical quantitative analysis. We find the adoption of an equity-conscious frame increased grant funding to minority-serving institutions after years of under-resourcing this organizational type. And yet, the grantmaker’s enactment of that frame created novel and more deeply institutionalized mechanisms for maintaining racialized access to resources and agency. This article exposes the deleterious trade-offs policymakers create when they center inequity in their framing, even as they create new organizational mechanisms of racialization via policy enactment. We mark this as the process of institutionalizing inequity anew.
AB - This article combines theories of racialized organizations with insights on institutionalization to empirically analyze the role of grantmakers in unsettling postsecondary racial inequity. Using longitudinal data on federal grantmaking to institutions of higher education, we examine whether and how grantmaking policies (re)produce or diminish institutionalized racial inequities. To do so, we develop and apply the concept of the frame-enactment bundle—a multi-part unit of analysis—as a mechanism that either supports or challenges the (re)production of racialization. First, we ask how does a federal grantmaking agency’s frame-enactment bundle shift over time? Second, did a 2013 change to the frame-enactment bundle have a causal effect on funding in terms of the types of colleges and universities that benefit? We use archival analysis to trace the agency’s changing frame-enactment bundle over time. We then test the effects of these bundles on grant distribution using a differencein-difference-in-differences critical quantitative analysis. We find the adoption of an equity-conscious frame increased grant funding to minority-serving institutions after years of under-resourcing this organizational type. And yet, the grantmaker’s enactment of that frame created novel and more deeply institutionalized mechanisms for maintaining racialized access to resources and agency. This article exposes the deleterious trade-offs policymakers create when they center inequity in their framing, even as they create new organizational mechanisms of racialization via policy enactment. We mark this as the process of institutionalizing inequity anew.
KW - critical quantitative methods
KW - federal policy
KW - grantmaking
KW - neo-institutional theory
KW - race and racialized organizations
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U2 - 10.1353/rhe.2022.0013
DO - 10.1353/rhe.2022.0013
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85138741193
SN - 0162-5748
VL - 46
SP - 67
EP - 107
JO - Review of Higher Education
JF - Review of Higher Education
IS - 1
ER -