Cognia ™ Student Engagement Survey
Category: Student Well-Being
Higher education governing boards are important bodies with far-reaching powers over the institutions they oversee. Yet little is known about individual board members, how the composition of boards varies across institutions, or whether boards are at all representative of their institutional populations. In this paper, I introduce a novel dataset that includes individual-level details about members on public 4-year higher education boards nationwide. Using this dataset and the text of bylaws of boards, I show that while boards focus attention on faculty and students in their formal documents, the composition of many boards is not representative of these groups. Using multivariate analyses, I show that the partisanship of the state legislature relates to whether a board aligns well with its target populations. I describe the implications of these findings for future research on higher education boards, and our understanding of the relationship between partisanship, politics, and higher education governance.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/26e1-2307
