Post on 23-May-2020
Running head: INEQUALITIES GRANTMAKING 1
Disrupting or preserving privilege?:
The design and causal effects of frames in inequalities grantmaking in U.S. higher education
Heather McCambly
Jeannette Colyvas
Northwestern University
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Abstract
Many of today’s public and private grantmaking organizations seek to influence social through
public campaigns to reduce persistent social inequities. Yet, we know little about the material effects of
funder’s ideological stances on their social investment strategies. We examine a federal grantmaking
agency—the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE)—and its efforts to cultivate
field-level innovation to improve outcomes for minoritized students. We combine 20 years of archival
document analysis with a Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference method of causal inference to trace the
processes of ideological and policy change and to estimate their effects on delivery of grant dollars. Our
findings demonstrate how FIPSE’s adoption of a race and class justice policy frame had significant causal
consequences on the types of colleges and universities to which it awarded grant dollars. And yet, key
grantmaking mechanisms changed simultaneously, leaving intact structures of benefits and burdens that
perpetuate stratification. Instead of diminishing sources of institutional persistence that reproduce
inequalities, this frame change shifted the modes that reproduced the status quo.
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Many of today’s public and private grantmaking organizations seek to influence social policy
through expensive public campaigns, often directed at reducing persistent social inequities (Reckhow &
Snyder, 2014; Tompkins-Stange, 2016). These actors are custodians of multiple types of influence—
normative influences (setting priorities, defining terms for the field), coercive influences (awarding or
withholding financial resources), and mimetic influences (providing peer models of best practices)
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Grantmakers can leverage these resources to support the persistence of the
status quo or to support change (Colyvas & Jonsson, 2011). Grantmakers, who have long been
concerned with education as a mode for social change, are expanding their investments in higher
education (Kelly & James, 2015). In the context of social policy, grantmakers’ influence can be
particularly salient in the ways it legitimizes or challenges ideas in the field about how greater social
equality should be achieved, measured, and who deserves it (Reckhow & Tompkins-Stange, 2018).
Indeed, changing policy discourses has itself become a strategy for diminishing inequality. And yet, the
question remains: does adopting changed discourses translate to meaningful disruptions to sources of
social inequality?
This issue is especially relevant in U.S. higher education. While higher education is widely
viewed as one of the critical sites for advancing equal opportunity, as in most domains, such egalitarian
aims often produce myth and ceremony rather than meaningful achievement (Berrey, 2011; Bromley &
Powell, 2012; Meyer, 1977; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Indeed, in this paper we argue that organizations
dedicated to the social good can simultaneously intervene to change and inadvertently support
consistent, patterned inequality. In the midst of this contradiction, many grantmaking organizations
have converged around urgent calls to “move the needle” on “equity.” And yet, these major federal and
philanthropic investments struggle to undo colleges’ predominantly stratifying effects along lines of race
and class (see, e.g., Bastedo & Jaquette, 2011; Cox, 2016). Ideas about what it would mean to “move
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the needle” or to institutionalize changes in educational “equity” are highly contested as actors operate
from varied political and cultural stances about how people and resources should mobilize in relation to
target populations and ideal solutions. While there are many who claim that adopting specific
definitions—or as we refer to them, frames—of equity are key to turning the tide on reforms that
typically serve to reproduce inequality (see, e.g., Witham, Malcom-Piqueux, Dowd, & Bensimon, 2015),
empirical work that causally tests if these framings have material effects on intervention designs are
rare if nonexistent, particularly in higher education.1
We address this gap by examining frame variation within a longitudinal study of a federal
grantmaking agency focused exclusively on improving college environments and outcomes—the Fund
for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). This study takes as its starting point the
natural experiment afforded by an Obama-era change to FIPSE, which offers a rare opportunity to
examine the impact of elites’ actions in the grantmaking context. First, we ask, how does FIPSE’s
approach, as a combination of policy frames and promoted strategies, shift over time in alignment with
core field-level diversity ideologies, such as color blindness, multiculturalism, and racial and class justice
(RQ1)? Second, we ask, does this approach have a causal effect on FIPSE’s allocation of resources (i.e.
funding and legitimacy) in terms of the types of organizations that benefit from FIPSE funding (RQ2)?
We use archival analysis to address FIPSE’s changing frames and policy designs. We then use a
Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference statistical analysis to test the material effects of these frames on
grants distribution.
By examining grantmaking practices intended to cause institutional change, and the policy
frames through which actors mobilize change strategies, we expose the relationship between
legitimized structures and beliefs in higher education and the persistent direction of benefits to
1 In this study, the idea of intervention “designs” is measured by the variation in organizational types that receive
grant funding, which acts as a proxy for the type of environment and the target population for which innovations are developed.
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organizations that will preserve rather than disrupt inequality. These findings demonstrate how FIPSE’s
adoption of a race and class justice policy frame had significant causal consequences on the types of
colleges and universities to which it awarded grant dollars. And yet, FIPSE simultaneously changed key
grantmaking mechanisms, leaving intact structures of benefits and burdens likely to perpetuate
stratification. Instead of diminishing sources of institutional persistence that reproduce educational
inequalities along lines of race and class, this frame change shifted the modes that reproduced the
status quo.
We begin by describing the theoretical and empirical anchors for our work that synthesizes
domain-specific literature on the role of grantmakers in an organizational field with literature on modes
of institutional change and persistence. Using this literature, we identify two sets of hypotheses that
predict frame changes and effects. We then discuss our methodology involving a longitudinal, mixed-
methods study of FIPSE leveraging multiple sources of data—archival and administrative datasets—to
specify both descriptive and causal processes and make causal inferences (Brady & Collier, 2004; Collier,
2011). Next, we report our findings, by first delineating how the agency’s frame and promoted
strategies changed over time, hinging around the racial and economic characteristics of its target
beneficiaries. We then use this analysis to identify a critical shift that we exploit as a natural experiment
to understand the effect of frames and strategies on resource distribution in a grantmaking setting. We
conclude with a discussion of the key contradictions demonstrative of the persistent processes
underpinning inequality even as espoused intentions change. This account contributes to institutional
theory and the domain of elite interference in inequality by calling attention to the powerful
connections between the promotion of marginalized concerns and the taken-for-granted components in
a field that protect institutional arrangements over time.
Elite Organizations, Inequality, and Higher Education
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Although sociologists have long been interested in studying elite mobilization, there is limited
research concerned with educational inequality that explicates how elites working to ameliorate social
problems do so within existing frameworks of acceptable paths toward justice (Brandtner, Bromley, &
Tompkins-Stange, 2016; Quinn, Tompkins-Stange, & Meyerson, 2014; Wooten, 2016). Even less is
known about how elites’ orientations towards issues of race and inequality affect the outcomes of their
mobilization (Kelley & Evans, 1993; Skrentny, 2006). Given their primary role as organizations that wield
resources and a public platform to bolster legitimacy, grantmaking organizations can be understood as
elite actors embedded in a broader organizational field of higher education—that is “a community of
organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more
frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field” (R. Scott, 1995, p. 96).
We use neo-institutional theory as a lens for understanding how such actors in a field draw on
and contribute to the constant reenactment of a common set of beliefs and structures, which are
referred to in this literature as “institutions.” To define institutionalization, we draw on Jepperson
(1991) (see also, Colyvas & Anderson, under review; Colyvas & Jonsson, 2011) who argues that a “social
order or pattern” is institutionalized if it is “chronically reproduced” by “self-activating social processes”
(p. 145).. Institutions reproduce themselves by determining the rules, norms, and standards taken for
granted in a field (Jepperson, 1991; Zucker, 1987). They are durable because they provide a set of
common meanings that facilitate or discourage patterns of action (Kim, Colyvas, & Kim, 2016).
It is common to imagine institutions as some immutable, externalized set of policies. Instead,
institutions inhabit or live in the cognitive and cultural constraints taken for granted by the actors in the
field (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000), and they are reproduced via embedded modes of incentive or reward
for enacting these taken-for-granted practices. For example, institutional scholarship identifies
legitimacy as a core feature of institutionalized structures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). This idea is linked
to the notion of taken-for-grantedness—the observation that institutions can construct and constrain
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the courses of action seen as possible or legitimate (Colyvas & Powell, 2006; W. R. Scott, 2013).
Grantmakers looking to create change in an organizational field face the daunting task of simultaneously
being inhabited by and challenging the extant institutional arrangements.
While grantmakers often interrogate the success or failure of individual programs meant to
benefit people of color and the poor, the process by which grantmakers themselves shape and select
such programs goes unexamined. For example, the majority of grant resources fund and legitimize
inequality work at better resourced and more prestigious organizations (Kelly & James, 2015), but these
organizations serve only a fraction of the minoritized2 populations in the U.S. However, these
organizations possess key markers of legitimacy (e.g., research, rankings, resources) in the field of higher
education (Bastedo & Bowman, 2010; Colyvas, 2012; Espeland & Sauder, 2007). By awarding preference
to these types, grantmakers enact a form of institutionalized inequality whereby organizations that
serve the greatest proportion of minoritized students are also the most poorly resourced (DiMaggio &
Powell, 1983; Powell & Colyvas, 2008). This disconnect is one example of the many ways policies
ostensibly targeting minoritized populations can still benefit dominant groups (Dumas & Anyon, 2006;
Philip, Bang, & Jackson, 2018; Schneider & Sidney, 2009).
From an organizational perspective, relatively prestigious universities are a homogenous slice of
the larger field, particularly in terms of the demographics they serve (e.g., age, race, class), the resources
at their disposal (e.g., endowment), and their prestige (e.g., U.S. News and World Reports rankings,
Carnegie Classifications). This concentration of grant resources to a homogenous group in a diverse
population of colleges and universities has its drawbacks. First, U.S. higher education is a field where
non-elites colleges already mimic elite colleges in efforts to gain legitimacy and maintain accreditation
(DiMaggio, 1997; DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Newman & Cannon, 1971). The
2 We refer in this paper to populations traditionally called “underserved” or “at-risk” (e.g., people of color,
low-SES populations) as “minoritized.” The term minoritized underscores minoritization as a socially constructed
act carried by social structures and interactions (see Conchas, Gottfried, Hinga, & Oseguera, 2017).
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processes that institutionalize racial and class-based stratification in higher education are radically
different in a community college—an organizational type that serves more minoritized students than
any other sector—than at elite or even middle-tier universities. A wealth of literature points to the need
to develop and validate educational innovations in ecologically relevant contexts (Gutiérrez & Jurow,
2016; Lee, 2009; Lee, Spencer, & Harpalani, 2003; Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, Lee, & Sawyer, 2006;
Orellana & Bowman, 2003). In other words, existing research tells us that an educational intervention
designed in the context of an elite, wealthy, and predominantly White institution will not translate or
scale to a poor or predominantly minority serving institution.
Moreover, institutional theorists posit that while experimentation, like that afforded by grant-
funded programs, may be an important part of institutional change, not all actors are equally likely to
experiment in ways that will disrupt the status quo (Clemens & Cook, 1999; Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001).
Experimentation that leads to change is likely to come from groups that are marginalized by or do not
benefit from the current institutional arrangements (Clemens & Cook, 1999; Leblebici, Salancik, Copay,
& King, 1991). Conversely, groups or organizations that largely benefit from existing institutional
arrangements will be the least likely to challenge these arrangements (Phillips & Zuckerman, 2001). In
short, organizations marginal to the political system, or organizations with lower legitimacy, are denied
the benefits of current institutional configurations and thus have fewer costs and greater incentives to
experiment with alternative models as a way to gain access to capital (Clemens & Cook, 1999; Lounsbury
& Crumley, 2007; Schneiberg, 2005; Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008). Applying these predictions to the
postsecondary field suggests that prestigious universities are less likely to innovate in ways disruptive to
existing configurations as they benefit from them in terms of rankings, status, and reputation. In
contrast, a community college with little prestige or resources derived from reputation has more to gain
from experimentation that could lead to new measures of success. However, it is unclear under what
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conditions grantmakers, many of whom are socialized in the field itself, are led to invest in the least
legitimate organizational types.
Policy Frames as a Strategy for Disruption
Even under the auspices of addressing “equity” some policy frames authorize actors to award
resources to the most “qualified” recipient (meritocratic distribution), while others push actors to
award resources based on need (compensatory redistribution) (Berrey, 2015; Espinoza, 2007; Jencks,
1988). As such, adopted definitions of equality at the societal and organizational levels are important
variables in social reform.
Policy problems are not “social fact awaiting discovery” (Coburn, 2006, p. 343); they are social
constructs reflective of the intellectual work and frames of elite groups (Harper, 2012; Kim et al., 2016;
Miksch, 2008; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, & Krysan, 1997). The interdisciplinary literature on frames
provides analytical leverage. Grantmaking organizations and the individuals within them, develop
strategies in the context of a particular problem frame. Organizations engage in problem framing, or the
assignment of meaning to relevant events and conditions in ways that mobilize people, resources, and
policies, to support their vision and their promoted responses to a social condition (Benford & Snow,
2000; Pedriana, 2006; Snow & Benford, 1988; Snow, Benford, McCammon, Hewitt, & Fitzgerald, 2014).
Frames operate to cognitively and culturally focus actions on or exclude from vision specific social
problems and limit policy responses to a set of taken-for-granted understandings (Béland, 2009; Béland
& Cox, 2010; Benford & Snow, 2000; Gray, Purdy, & Ansari, 2014; Hand, Penuel, & Gutiérrez, 2013;
Snow et al., 2014; Surel, 2000).
We can operationalize these concepts more precisely pulling from the cultural sociology and
social psychology literature on cultural frames and diversity ideologies, which we argue amount to
frames for interpreting and responding to inequality. In both literatures there are two empirically
examined ideological frames: color blindness and diversity or multiculturalism. Color blindness is “the
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belief that racial group membership should not be taken into account, or even noticed—as a strategy for
managing diversity and intergroup relations” (Apfelbaum, Norton, & Sommers, 2012, p. 205) and is the
most common stance taken by Whites (Apfelbaum et al., 2012; Rattan & Ambady, 2013; Stephens,
Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012). The color-blind approach is the de facto ideology
driving discourse and policymaking in most domains (Apfelbaum et al., 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2013). Color-
blind ideological frames are associated with a range of socially harmful outcomes including insensitivity
to blatant acts of discrimination and the distribution of resources and benefits to Whites (Plaut, Thomas,
& Goren, 2009; Purdie-Vaughns, Steele, Davies, Ditlmann, & Crosby, 2008; Rattan & Ambady, 2013). The
color-blind frame also effectively props up resistance to investments in race-based policies to ameliorate
inequality, like busing or affirmative action (Feagin, 2006; Schuman et al., 1997; Sears & Henry, 2005).
In contrast, multiculturalism is “an approach to diversity in which group differences are openly
discussed, considered… even highlighted” (Apfelbaum et al., 2012, p. 207) and in some instances
considered as things to celebrate (Berrey, 2015; Rattan & Ambady, 2013). Multiculturalism affords some
social benefits including contributions to less hostile environments for people of color and improving
assessments of discrimination (Apfelbaum et al., 2012; Todd, Hanko, Galinsky, & Mussweiler, 2011). This
perspective can be linked to feelings of exclusion, threat, or alienation among White individuals that can
negatively affect their likelihood to value or devote resources to diversity-focused initiatives (Norton &
Sommers, 2011; Rattan & Ambady, 2013). While the multicultural frame, historically, is seen as a
product of the civil rights movement, this frame normalizes the celebration of diversity, but has not
been shown in the literature to support preferences for structural solutions to patterned social
inequality (Berrey, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Hirschman, Berrey, & Rose-Greenland, 2016).
Color-blind and multicultural ideological frames have defined the U.S. social policy field in
relation to diversity in the last half century, and assessed on their outcomes they are comparable in
their maintenance of meritocratic rather than a redistributive investments. Both positions advocate for
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things like the equality of opportunity in education as the absence of discrimination (color blindness)
and in some cases that we should do so because everyone, including Whites, benefit from diversity
(multiculturalism) (Berrey, 2015; Hartmann, 2015). However, this is not the same as an ideology driven
by a moral or political conviction about the need to proactively eliminate inequalities (Bensimon &
Bishop, 2012; Hartmann, 2015; Hild & Voorhoeve, 2004; Warikoo & Novais, 2015). This may explain how
policies targeting minoritized populations are often still used to benefit dominant groups (Berrey, 2015;
Harper, 2012; Hartmann, 2015; Philip & Azevedo, 2017; Schneider & Sidney, 2009; Umbricht, Fernandez,
& Ortagus, 2015; Yosso, Parker, Solorzano, & Lynn, 2004).
In the current policy discourse, we identify a third, emergent ideological frame, often referred to
as “equity,” or “social justice,” which we will refer to as a race and class justice frame (Berrey, 2015;
Philip & Azevedo, 2017). The racial and class justice frame takes a structural approach that “foregrounds
the unequal power relationships between racial groups in society... [the] normative consequence of this
frame is that individuals should actively resist the racial ideologies and injustices that they perceive.”
(Warikoo & Novais, 2015, p. 861). This perspective, held by few Whites, is not limited to establishing
freedom from active discriminations and the benefits to the dominant group of multiculturalism. This
frame invokes a responsibility among those in power to identify historical traditions of oppression and
to offer proactive solutions that have causal effects on inequality (Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Hild & Voorhoeve,
2004; Warikoo & Novais, 2015; Yosso et al., 2004). However, many argue that such a framing is
threatening to the privileges of the dominant group and will only get taken up when justified in terms of
the benefits it offers to dominant classes, a phenomenon known as interest convergence (Bell, 1980;
Philip et al., 2018; Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018; Yosso et al., 2004).
While this literature speaks to frames’ effects on political preferences or discriminatory
practices, it does not speak systematically to how we know issues of race and class affect policy frames
in particular ways (Brown, 2013). Policy design theory (Schneider & Ingram, 1993) provides a final layer
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to our predictions by directing attention to “how constructions of groups, problems and knowledge then
manifest themselves and become institutionalized into policy designs, which subsequently reinforce and
disseminate these constructions” (Schneider & Sidney, 2009, p. 106). While groups associated with
positive constructions (e.g., White, middle class parents) tend to receive policies with high levels of
discretion and strong provisions, groups associated with negative constructions (e.g., poor people of
color) receive policy designs that distribute burdens, have lesser benefits, and carry “low levels of
discretion [and] long implementation chains (some of which flow to advantaged groups)” (Schneider &
Sidney, 2009, p. 107). This theory demonstrates that conceptions or beliefs about the target population
of a given policy is likely to activate other frame elements in patterned ways. In other words, the valence
and power of the target beneficiaries will relate to particular policy designs in terms of the magnitude of
benefits, levels of freedom, creativity, and surveillance directed to beneficiaries.
Based on this combination of literature on framing, policy design and the effects of diversity
ideologies, in the context of this study we predict the following:
Hypothesis 1a: When a color-blind or multicultural ideology is used in FIPSE’s policy frame: 1)
The organization’s priorities will emphasize taken-for-granted values in the field (e.g., learning,
technological advances, organizational improvement), and 2) Grants distribution will feature high levels
of freedom for creativity, lower surveillance, and shorter implementation chains. In other words, if the
contradiction between the liberal aims of U.S. higher education and the patterned inequalities in the
field is not directly challenged, the existing value system will be upheld and highlighted for
preservation—to be more of what the institution already is.
Hypothesis 1b: When a racial and class justice ideology is used in FIPSE’s policy frame: 1) The
organization’s priorities will explicitly justify its work in terms of interest convergent goals, i.e., the
expected macro-level benefits to the dominant group of addressing the needs of minoritized groups
(e.g., reduced crime or unemployment), and 2) grants distribution will feature low levels of freedom for
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creativity, higher surveillance, and longer implementation chains. In other words, if the contradiction
between liberal aims of the institution and patterned inequalities in the field is directly challenged, the
frame will need to justify this threat to the existing value system by pulling from some other value
system acceptable to dominant actors.
Hypothesis 2a: When a color-blind or multicultural frame is used in FIPSE’s policy frame, grant
funds will be disproportionately directed toward more prestigious and well-resourced colleges that
serve a larger proportion of non-minoritized students. These organizations possess key markers of
legitimacy in the field and will thus be rewarded as worthy of investment, but they are the least likely to
experiment in ways that challenge institutional arrangements.
Hypothesis 2b: When a racial and class justice ideology is used in FIPSE’s policy frame, it will
favor the distribution of resources to less-prestigious and resourced colleges that serve a larger
proportion of minoritized populations. The preference in the frame for minoritized groups will push
funding to organizational types that serve these communities but who would otherwise lack legitimacy.
These types are also the most likely to experiment in ways that challenge institutional arrangements.
Methods & Setting
This analysis focuses on FIPSE’s operations and its funded recipients (1995-2015) using a mixed-
method, longitudinal approach. FIPSE’s charge, per its original legislative mandate, was to disrupt
postsecondary educational inequalities by investing in projects that create “innovative reform and
expand education opportunities to underrepresented groups” (Higher Education Act of 1965, as
amended, 2008). Legislative documents and in-depth interviews have also demonstrated that FIPSE had
a uniquely flexible statutory authority to behave like a private foundation and allow the agency to
respond to innovative avenues for educational change, thus allowing this case to lend insights across
multiple grantmaking domains. FIPSE’s organizational features and level of political autonomy remained
steady from its founding through the very early 2000s. Under the Bush administration, Congress
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introduced an influx of non-competitive, earmarked grants into FIPSE’s annual budget allocation. This
Congressional interference reduced FIPSE’s political autonomy and the scope of its competitive
program.
This study took, as its starting point, the highly public shock to the agency’s policy frame
introduced by the Obama administration, called “First in the World” (FITW). In 2013, the Obama
Administration announced FITW as a comprehensive reframing of this federal program. FITW was
intended to reposition the fund to focus more squarely on “at-risk” student success and on moving the
U.S. back into a position as “first in the world” for producing college graduates and a first-rate workforce
with projects that boost “postsecondary access, affordability and completion for underrepresented,
underprepared or low-income students at institutions across the country” (U.S. Department of
Education, 2014). This shift ended both the practice of congressional earmarking and the decades-long
Comprehensive Program, FIPSE’s continuous flagship program.
FITW acts as a natural experiment relevant to framing and institutional theories because the
treatment was largely limited to the implementation of a new policy frame. FIPSE is an apt setting for
this study for three key reasons. First, this agency’s value proposition focused on creating heterogeneity
in institutional forms within the field over time; meaning, FIPSE sought to disrupt the trend among non-
elite colleges and universities to mimic elites regardless of actual benefit to students.3 Second, FIPSE’s
work spans multiple eras of postsecondary improvement including the era preceding court suppressions
on affirmative action policies, the rapid and drastic expansion of college access that occurred in the
1990s, and the emergence of the college completion agenda that came to the fore in the 2000s. Third,
from its founding in 1973 through its shuttering in 2018, FIPSE’s legislative mandate was to disrupt
inequalities in postsecondary education through investments in innovation. This constant allows us to
3 This intention is well-documented in FIPSE’s archival materials, including Newman & Cannon's (1971)
Report on higher education, which is considered FIPSE’s founding document.
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more precisely test and analyze the effects of variation in frames over time. Table 1 provides summary
statistics of FIPSE’s grantmaking history from 1995-2015. This table illustrates the overall growth in
FIPSE’s grantmaking portfolio and shifts in its grantmaking strategy as it varied the number and size of
grants over time.
Methods for Tracing the Changing Frames and Policy Designs at FIPSE
In order to trace the mechanisms and the qualitative features of FITW as a framing and
organizational change, we have collected an archive of over 800 documents from across FIPSE’s 45-year
history. Our analysis for this paper focuses attention on the annual grant guidelines (1995–2015) which
includes 92 documents collected from university libraries from across the U.S., the National Library of
Education in Washington, D.C., the Federal Register, and the Grants.gov federal database. We chose this
timeframe to analyze the pre-trend ahead of the Obama-era change, as well as to align with the analysis
of quantitative administrative records. We limited the scope to grant guidelines, omitting congressional
hearings, internal reports, and other types of documents in favor of a focus on documents representing
the contemporary, public-facing communication about FIPSE’s procedures and priorities. These priorities
are also the template against which individual program officers “score” grant applications. As such,
annual guidelines represent both the external cue to the field for what the agency is willing to fund, and
the internal tool used to identify worthy projects. This combination makes a longitudinal set of grant
guidelines an ideal dataset from which to deduce persistence and change in the agency’s policy frame
over time.
We employed a deductive content analysis process (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013)
isolating and longitudinally comparing the key elements of this agency’s espoused frame. Using Benford
& Snow’s (2000) model for frame analysis, we coded for the following frame elements: target
beneficiaries, the identification of social problems (diagnoses), the promoted solutions (prognoses), and
the metrics that signal success. We analyzed the resulting codes for their persistence and change using a
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chronological data matrix (Miles et al., 2013), and then examined to what extent the diagnostic and
prognostic elements amplified or problematized established arrangements within the higher education
field. Our findings illustrate the results of this analysis using exemplars taken from before and after the
FITW change.
Methods for Measuring the Effects of Frame Change
The qualitative analysis of FIPSE’s changing frames reveals that the agency abruptly moved from
espousing a color-blind and multicultural frame in its priorities, to a frame more squarely focused on
racial and economic justice under the Obama administration. In the models that follow, we measure the
effects of this switch in framing and test hypotheses 2a (when a color-blind or multicultural frame is
used in FIPSE’s policy frame, grant funds will be disproportionately directed toward more prestigious
and well-resourced colleges that serve a larger proportion of non-minoritized students) and 2b (when a
racial and class justice ideology is used in FIPSE’s policy frame, it will favor the distribution of resources
to less-prestigious and resourced colleges that serve a larger proportion of minoritized populations). In
order to test these hypotheses, we examine two sub questions. First, prior to the introduction of FITW,
did FIPSE disproportionately allocate its resources to either White-serving and/or elite (i.e., prestigious
and well-resourced) colleges and universities? And second, did the FITW framing change have a causal
effect on grantmaking outcomes such that minority-serving and less-elite institutions receive greater
benefits? In this study, two correlated constructs are used to differentiate various types of colleges and
universities: the populations they serve (whether minoritized based on race or class) and the degree of
prestige and resource capacity they possess as in organizational type.
Identification strategy. A new grantmaking frame could affect funding outcomes by one of two
mechanisms, or a combination of the two mechanisms. The grant guidelines could signal new
preferences to the field, encouraging a new set of organizations to apply for funding. Alternatively, this
frame could prime different reviewer preferences and set in motion different processes for selecting
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preferred projects, thus changing the scores allotted to applications. Outside of qualitative reports from
FIPSE’s agents, which indicate that it was likely a combination of these two mechanisms, the
quantitative data to measure these mechanisms separately is unavailable. In the absence of these data,
we measure the net effect of the FITW framing change.
Making a causal argument about whether a new policy frame has an effect on policy outcomes
is challenging given the many endogenous factors that affect grantmaking organizations. For example,
we could compare the beneficiaries of one grant program to another. However, factors endogenous to
the two programs, like the groups they historically serve based on some founding factor or the
preferences of individual staff, could introduce bias. One could also look at a single grantmaking
program before and after it changed its policy frame. Endogenous to this change could be turnover in
staff, new political preferences in the governing party, or changes in the larger ecology of organizations
applying. A difference in difference design allows us to control for the differences across the two
programs by looking at changes over time. This approach also allows us to control for factors that
change over time besides the policy in question. For example, we can control for broad political
preferences or presidential administration by measuring the difference before and after the policy
change in comparison to a program unaffected by the specific policy change that is also subject to the
same time variant, environmental factors.
To answer these questions, we used a Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference (DDD) strategy that
estimates the causal effect of this policy change on grantmaking outcomes in terms of the distribution of
funds to different organizational types, with FIPSE acting as the test group and another federal agency
that awards grants to colleges and universities, TRIO Student Support Services (SSS), as a comparison.
For the purpose of this analysis, we included grants made to colleges and universities. The comparison
group is meant to measure the changes in applicant behavior and funding decisions that would have
happened over time to FIPSE if FIPSE had not instituted the FITW change. SSS is another federal grant
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program founded in the late 1960s with a similar mission and target population. The policy change in
question—FITW—was not applied to SSS and in general, SSS’s stable policy framing arguably insulates it
from ideological pressures given its relatively constrained mission. However, SSS shares with FIPSE the
same context in terms of trends in funding levels, political administration changes, etc. These are
among the confounding factors we control for using the DDD design.
The intuition behind this strategy is the same as the more widely used difference in difference
(DD) design, which measures the effect before and after a change of a treatment on a group relative to
the changes in an untreated comparison group. We first conduct a DD to measure change in outcomes
before and after the policy change for both grant programs. However, if the comparison group—in this
case SSS—is suspected to share some difficult-to-control determinants, an additional difference can be
introduced, thus controlling for factors that could bias the average treatment effect (Berck & Villas-Boas,
2016). In the models described in this paper, a third variable representing one of nine key institutional
characteristics, is used to control for these factors. For example, one of these institutional characteristics
is a dummy variable for whether a college is a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) (defined by serving 50%
or more students of color in a given year). We use the DDD framework to measure the differential
effects of FITW on MSI v. non-MSI institutions. The intuition is comparable to a study that uses changes
in males’ outcomes in a population as a comparison group for a treatment that should only affect
females. This puts the effects in context not only of a comparison grant program, but the impact on MSIs
relative to the non-MSI population which accounts for changes to those populations that are not caused
by other factors relevant to the mechanisms under study.
Due to SSS data availability, we examine data on pre-FITW trends in the outcomes of interest
among these two agencies from 1995 forward. We begin analysis in 2004 to eliminate the influence of
the introduction of congressional earmarking in FIPSE’s grantmaking portfolio. This earlier policy change
is used as a sensitivity check as described later in the paper. While each of our main analyses focuses on
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one of nine institutional characteristics, described in full in the next section, we will explicate the model
using a generic variable for these characteristics (“CHAR” below) as an example. The model is as follows,
In this equation, the dependent variable Yit is the dollar amount an individual college or
university received in a given year from either of the two grant programs. If it received no funding at all,
it receives a zero. FIPSE takes a value of 1 if the record is part of the FIPSE half of the data set and 0 if it
is in the SSS half of the dataset. CHAR takes a value of 1 if it meets the criteria for the institutional
characteristic. Post takes a value of 1 if the condition “after the policy change” is met, γ are sector fixed
effects to control for time-invariant characteristics by organizational sector (e.g. public v. private, four-
year v. two-year colleges), α are time fixed-effects to account for general inflation and changes in grant
funding availability (e.g. under different administrations), and ε is an error term. The subscript i indicates
the specific institution, and t indexes time measured in five-year windows. We estimate this regression
using clustered standard errors at the organizational level. The coefficient of interest here is β6, which
measures the causal effect of the policy on a FIPSE grantee characteristic relative to the comparison
group and to grantees without this characteristic. The identifying assumption is that these
characteristics would not have changed at differential rates between FIPSE and the SSS program in the
absence of the policy change.
Data. The independent variables in this analysis fall in three categories: institutional
characteristics, treatment period, and grant program (See Tables 2-4 for a list of and original sources of
all variables). Each of the regressions in the findings section focuses on one of nine institutional
characteristics. These characteristics fall into one of two constructs by which we can understand the
variation in the profile of funded organizations. These constructs are student population variables and
organization-level prestige or capacity variables.
Yit= β0+β 1(FIPSEit)+β 2(FIPSEit*Postt)+ β 3 (CHARit) + β 4 (CHARit*Postt) +
β 5 (CHARit*FIPSEit)+ β 6 (CHARit*FIPSEit*Postt) + αt + γi + εit
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Student population variables measure the representation of particular populations, specifically
in terms of race and class at each college or university (see Table 2). These variables were drawn from
the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which collects data annually about
students, staff, faculty, finances, admission and graduation rates, and more from every college or
university eligible to receive federal aid. We downloaded these annual data from the IPEDS database
from 1980 – 2016. Using Stata 15, we cleaned and matched these records by year, using the time-
invariant unique identifier assigned to organizations within the IPEDS system. We used multiple record
matching techniques to link these records to FIPSE and SSS data using institution name, zip code, and
state variables. Where time-invariant data were missing in certain records (e.g., public v. private status),
we imputed using the most recent non-missing record in the dataset. Where time-variant data were
missing, we imputed an average value by sector and year (e.g., the average for other community
colleges in that year).
Organizational prestige and capacity variables measure the classification (highest degree
offered), relative ranking of the institution (US News and World Reports), and existing wealth
(endowment and instructional spending variables) available to the institution to carry out its mission
(see Table 2). Measures for existing wealth—endowment and instructional spending—were drawn from
IPEDS and followed the procedures outlined above. Variables measuring classification were drawn
directly from the Carnegie Classification System, a dataset maintained by Indiana University originally
published in 1973, with rankings and measures updated in 1976, 1987, 1994, 2000, 2005, 2010, and
2015 to reflect changes among colleges and universities. This dataset includes the unique IPEDS
identifier and was easily matched. Given that the Carnegie Classifications have varied over time, we
simplified categories so that measures used in these models have parity over the scope of this study. For
example, in its latest iteration, doctoral institutions are split into multiple levels of research activity. We
grouped these into a single category which reflects its 1994, 2000, and 2005 indices. Variables for
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relative ranking were drawn from longitudinal data drawn from US News and World Reports
documenting the top 50 ranked universities and top 50 ranked liberal arts colleges (total 100 per year)
for every year since 1983. We downloaded these data, which also contained the IPEDS unique identifier
from Dr. Andrew Reiter of Mount Holyoke College’s shared data page.
The dataset is organized by institution and year, with each unique institution-year combination
appearing twice in the dataset. One record documents the FIPSE grant the organization received in
dollars that year (it receives a “0” if no grant was awarded), and the other record documents the SSS
grant the organization received in dollars that year (it receives a “0” if no grant was awarded). A dummy
in both records indicates whether the record occurs before or after the “treatment” period (i.e., the
implementation of FITW) based on the year in which the grant occurred (before or after 2013).
Summary statistics for the organizational variables of interest for all colleges and universities
represented in the IPEDS universe are presented in Table 5. The table breaks out means and standard
deviations for selected variables in the years 2004-2015 for all colleges and universities, as well as for
subpopulations that received either FIPSE or SSS grants in these periods. The first six columns provide
summary statistics for these three populations in the pre-period (prior to FITW). The next six columns
provide summary statistics for these three populations in the post-period (after FITW).
Findings
In the sections that follow we will demonstrate how, after decades of employing a color-blind
and multicultural frame, a policy change abruptly shifted FIPSE’s policy frame to favor racial and class
justice. As FIPSE’s grantmaking frame toward equity shifted, so did elements of its strategy and policy
design in three key ways. First, FIPSE began to promote a restricted set of prescribed and pre-tested
modes of change, rather than their earlier strategy focused on innovative field-driven projects. Second,
FIPSE abruptly shifted to prioritize high levels of accountability and surveillance in the form of
experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation requirements using market-based outcomes (e.g.,
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graduation rates). And third, FIPSE shifted from making many small to fewer, large grants. Using a DDD a
model of causal inference, we find this change had a positive effect on the delivery of grant dollars to
institutions that serve minoritized students (as measured by race and income), which comes after
decades of underservice to these organizational forms. Despite its espoused interests, this shift in
resources did not favor the most marginalized organizational types that serve the majority of the
nation’s poor students and students of color (e.g., minority-serving community colleges, lower ranked
and poorer institutions). Taken together, we find that as the beneficiaries shifted away from non-
minoritized populations, FIPSE eliminated the creativity, freedom, and low-levels of accountability
afforded to grantees. These findings demonstrate how, even as FIPSE used its policy frame as a strategy
for disruption, with causal consequences on resource distribution, the mechanisms that support
inequality changed, thus leaving intact structures of benefits and burdens likely to perpetuate
inequality. In the sections that follow, we will demonstrate these findings in detail, beginning with the
archival analysis establishing the content of this critical policy frame change and then moving into the
causal estimates of the impacts of this frame change derived from our DDD analysis.
An Abrupt Change to an Agency’s Racial and Class Policy Frame
Rather than a gradual change over time or an inconsistent policy approach, FIPSE moved under
the Obama-era change from a fixed frame consisting of both multicultural and color-blind elements, to a
racial and class justice orientation. Figures 1 and 2 visually summarize how this framing stance
corresponds to the broader transformation in the policy’s framing and policy design. The text in the
green boxes of both figures demonstrate how changes in policy frames regarding the target population
correspond to changes in problem diagnoses and promoted solutions. Under the racial and class justice
condition, FIPSE began to exclusively motivate its work in relation to problems of broad, American
economic competitiveness. FIPSE’s promoted solutions also changed from a flexible invitation to
propose multiple types of innovation to a limited menu of educational remediation tactics. Similarly,
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critical elements of the policy design also shifted as demonstrated in the orange boxes of both figures,
favoring increased accountability and surveillance demands, an increased prescriptiveness in terms of
how FIPSE dictated its preferences to the field, and a decrease in the number of potential beneficiaries.
We will explicate these findings in detail using exemplars in the sections that follow.
A consistent colorblind and multicultural frame. Analyzing the published guidelines from the
1990s and 2000s prior to the introduction of FITW, we find that when issues of inequality are addressed,
the agency consistently positions its project in relation to “diversity” or opportunity “gaps.” However,
these concepts are not a central or driving feature in the agency’s argument to the field about the types
of grants and innovations it intends to fund. As demonstrated in Figure 3, which is an excerpt of FIPSE’s
1995 grant guidelines, the motivating theme, rather than inequality or justice, hinges around
“innovation.” Although that term is not explicitly defined, the examples offered in the documents
include foci such as technological change, engaged pedagogy, and new models for measuring learning.
These foci operate without reference to concerns about inequality (despite the agency’s statutorily
established purpose). Instead, this text emphasizes the need to amplify the educational strengths in
which the U.S. was already, purportedly, the world leader. This trend was further confirmed in
interviews with former program officers who, above all in this period, report being concerned with
finding and providing the “venture capital” to the field for “creativity and experimentation... coming
from the field” and indeed, to “make them famous.” This finding supports the prediction put forth by
hypothesis 1a (when a color-blind or multicultural ideology is used in FIPSE’s policy frame, the
organization’s priorities will emphasize taken-for-granted values in the field (e.g., learning, technological
advances, organizational improvement), given the peripheral nature of minoritized identities in FIPSE’s
pre-FITW documents.
In this era, FIPSE enacted a problem frame that is open to but not motivated by promoted
solutions to reduce racial or class inequalities. For example, the 1995 guidelines specify eight invitational
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priorities to the field. According to federal guidelines, an invitational priority signals a general interest to
the field, but it is neither a requirement nor a preference in the funding agency. In fact, in this period,
FIPSE solely published invitational, rather than absolute priorities, in order to be what actors referred to
as “field-driven” in their approach to innovation. Only one of these eight priorities refers at all to a
target population. In this priority, illustrated in Figure 4, labeled “Access, Retention, and Completion”
the importance of educational access and college completion is described. Within this description there
is an emphasis given to “low-income and underrepresented minority students.” This emphasis illustrates
that inequality concerns are not excluded from the agency’s frame. However, this identify-specific
element is positioned as one of multiple, optional priorities, the rest of which focus on color-blind
educational pursuits and systemic values such as learning quality or “technological advancement and
innovation.”
Over ten years (and a presidential administration) later in 2006, this framing is consistent. As
demonstrated in Figure 5, an excerpt from the 2006 guideline text, there is a passing reference—this
time to “increasing diversity”—to the issue of the agency’s target population. This emphasis is part of a
list of social concerns also including “the dramatic rise of information technology and the “renewed
demand for accountability.” As in 1995, this text provides a single reference to an issue that may or may
not be related to race or class embedded in a larger list of invitational priorities. This finding is
consistent with the hybrid color-blind and multicultural frame mobilized in the 1995 text.
This use of “diversity” without a specified policy preference may serve a legitimizing purpose
(Berrey, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 2013). The agency is supposed to attend to these issues based on explicit
references in its founding legislation, but in this text, the problem, as it related to higher education, is
not driven by or centered on reimagining institutional arrangements around issues of race, class, or
identity. This feature is a hallmark of multicultural framing approaches, which are quick to celebrate
diversity but typically do not address structural inequalities (Hartmann, 2015; Warikoo & Novais, 2015).
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FIPSE’s symbolic moves align the agency with larger institutional concerns about inequality and changing
demographics. However, this frame does not obligate the agency to consider their grantmaking as a way
to direct resources to minoritized populations. Furthermore, nowhere in this text is there a
demonstrated emphasis on or guidance relevant to requirements for empirical evidence or evaluation
methods, a fact thrown into relief by the next exemplar.
A new, justice-oriented frame emerges. In the post-2013 documents, a new perspective
emerges that explicitly places minoritized populations at the heart of FIPSE’s prognostic and diagnostic
frame. In this period, after the initiation of “FITW,” named inequalities drive the agency’s argument to
the field. As demonstrated in excerpts from the 2015 and 2014 grant guidelines (Figures 6 and 7,
respectively), FIPSE’s driving concern is motivated not by a general interest in diversity as part of a list of
social issues, but rather by a distinct concern for economic well-being for which college completion is
used as a proxy, and an appeal to international competitiveness embodied in a goal to “lead the world”
in the proportion of citizens with a college degree. Validating hypothesis 1b (when minoritized identities
are central to a policy frame, an organization’s priorities will explicitly justify their work in terms of
expected macro-level benefits to the dominant group of addressing minoritized group needs), this move
appeals to concerns for American competitiveness that ultimately benefit all groups. In summary,
FIPSE’s frame changed abruptly under FITW, moving from a mixture of color-blind and multicultural
framings to an identity-specific racial and economic justice frame.
In the post-FITW texts demonstrated in Figures 7 and 8, FIPSE moves toward service to
minoritized groups by appealing to the ultimate concern of American economic competition. In this text
the agency argues that demographically, the nation will never again achieve the same level of
dominance if the success of minoritized students is not drastically improved. In doing so, specific
organizational forms—those that serve a majority of such students—are called out as particularly
valuable.
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An excerpt from the 2014 grant guidelines, shown in Figure 8, exemplifies how the specificity
and detail of the language regarding inequality changed from the pre-FITW period at multiple places in
the guidelines. Whereas earlier grant guidelines contained only passing references to “underserved
populations,” here, the agency offers greater specificity as it names “low-income, underprepared, and
underrepresented students,” and provides exposition on 1) why these populations matter in the scope
of higher educational processes, and 2) offers specific metrics to which winning projects must attend
that will be measured by a panel of evaluation experts FIPSE contracted to assure that willing proposals
pass muster in terms of evidentiary backing. These metrics are largely focused on market-based
outcomes like the economic value of greater college completion. Post-FITW, FIPSE’s moves to name a
problem, identify its source, and specify a necessary change are a precursor to how this new frame
emerges in the organization of the rest of the text. This new frame conveys to the field that FIPSE is now
motivated by a concern for addressing disproportionate educational success. This is most apparent in
the way FIPSE positions access or success for minoritized groups as an absolute priority, under which all
other priorities are organized. Ensuing priorities are essentially specific intervention strategies meant to
change traditional higher education functions, fulfilling in some way a larger vision of racial or economic
justice. Reiterating this contrast, in the previous era, FIPSE guidelines refrained from providing
restrictive intervention recommendations, opting instead to let the field shape the direction of
innovation from within. Again, this is what informants called a “field driven” response motivated by the
belief that existing leaders in higher education already knew where the field needed to go, they just
needed funding to get off the ground.
Policy design changes beyond the targeted beneficiaries. Critically, the rise of this racial and
class justice frame is coupled with a novel emphasis on evidence and performance metrics and more
restrictive design standards. FIPSE’s post-FITW grant guidelines provide strong mandates regarding
thresholds of evidence for all proposed interventions, and rigorous requirements for evaluation
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planning. Similarly, rather than FIPSE asking the field for its best innovation ideas as in the pre-FITW
guidelines, FIPSE began under the new frame to dictate the best ideas to the field. The agency invited
applicants in these guidelines to test rather than generate strategies. This change in logic aligns with
informants who reported this as a time in which “building evidence” became a primary concern, as did a
more adversarial approach to grantmaking in which you “can’t be friends” with grantees, and you have
“to break some china to create change in higher education.” This approach is deeply different from the
“innovative,” “partnership” and “field-responsive” goals of grantmaking under the earlier FIPSE regime
where specific underserved identities were not emphasized. On one hand, this increase in surveillance
could signal FIPSE’s seriousness about making a difference for minoritized students. On the other hand,
the exponential increase in required surveillance under the FITW framing, also lengthens the
implementation chain of the grants, as predicted by policy design theory. In other words, more highly
trained applicants and expensive processes are required inputs for successful grant proposals than in
previous competitions.
Whereas ostensibly, underserved students were the target of this innovation-focused agency
from its first day of operation, in the fifteen years leading up to FITW, FIPSE did not emphasize the
importance of specific identities in its grant guidelines. FIPSE mobilized a new, identity-specific emphasis
using the neoliberal tactics common to the Obama Administration’s approach to policymaking: the new
FITW frame coupled issues of quantifiable college completion metrics among minoritized students with
broad economic concerns relevant to the prosperity of all Americans and immensely rigorous standards
of evidence and accountability. Indeed, the guidelines inextricably couple service to minoritized
communities with standards for experimental or quasi-experimental evaluation methods.
The Causal Effect of the FITW Frame and Policy Change on Grant Beneficiaries
We exploit the shift in FIPSE’s frame and promoted strategies established in the preceding
archival analysis as a natural experiment demonstrating the effect of frames and strategies on resource
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distribution in a grantmaking setting. We begin by examining the relationship between the FITW framing
change and awards to institutions with a high proportion of minoritized students. These findings are
summarized in Table 6. We operationalize this in five ways, using (1) a dummy variable for whether or
not a college is a minority serving institution (MSI), which means 50% or more of enrolled students are
underrepresented minorities (Model 1); (2) a dummy variable for whether an institution is a historically
minority serving institution (HMSI), i.e., a Historically Black College or University or Tribal college (Model
2); (3) a dummy variable for whether an institution is in the top quintile within its sector (e.g., public
two-year college, private research university) for serving need-based Pell-grant students (Model 3); (4)
continuous measures of grant dollars delivered based on the percentage of Black student enrollment
(Model 4); (5) continuous measures of grant dollars delivered based on the percentage enrollment of
underrepresented minorities enrolled (Model 5); and (6) a continuous variable for the average size of
the need-based Pell grant delivered per student at that institution (Model 6).
The first row of regression Tables 6, 7, and 8 labeled “FIPSE” provides the baseline average grant
size, before the “post-period” or FITW program for institutions that receive a “0” for the tested
characteristic, relative to the SSS grant program that year. The second row labeled “FIPSE Grant*Post-
FITW” represents the average change in grant size after the FITW policy change for institutions that
receive a “0” for the tested characteristics under either grant program. The next row labeled
“Characteristic” represents the average effect of the tested characteristic on SSS (the comparison group)
grant size. The fourth row with results, labeled “Char*Post Period”, represents the change in award size
for SSS grantees after FITW for institutions possessing the key variable. The fifth row with results,
labeled “Char*FIPSE Grant” can be understood as the pre-trend relationship between institutions with
the tested characteristic and FIPSE funding. This row represents the correlated effect on FIPSE grant size
of possessing the key variable in the pre-period over or under the SSS control group. And finally, the
sixth row, labeled “Char*Post*FIPSE Grant,” which is the coefficient of interest, represents the effect of
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the FITW policy on the size of grant awards given to institutions possessing the characteristic compared
to institutions without the characteristic. This increase is estimated relative to the increase in award size
in the SSS program for institutions possessing the characteristic compared to institutions without. We
control for time and sector fixed-effects in all models.
Causal Estimates Based on Student Population-Level Measures. Results reported in Table 6
support the predictions made in hypotheses 2a and 2b regarding changes in student populations
represented at funded colleges. Hypothesis 2a predicts that in periods in which color-blind or
multicultural frames guide the agency’s work and minoritized categories are not specified as necessary
beneficiaries, White-serving institutions will receive greater financial benefits. The pre-trend
demonstrates that prior to FITW, FIPSE was less likely to award funds to institutions that serve higher
proportions of minoritized students on all racial measures, including whether or not an institution was
an MSI (b= -4,668, p<0.01), an HMSI (b= -19,763, p<0.01), or a high-Pell serving institution (b=-6,110,
p<0.01), as well as the proportion of underrepresented minorities enrolled (b = -436.8 p<0.05), the
proportion of Black students enrolled (b = -710.4, p<0.05), and the average Pell grant award per student
as a proxy for service to low-income students (b= -0.304, p<0.01). Interpreting these coefficients, on
average an MSI, in any sector, received an estimated $4,668 less in FIPSE grant funds than a non-MSI in
the years prior to the policy change relative to SSS. Using continuous enrollment measures as an
alternate specification, if a university enrolled 100% Black students, it is predicted to receive an
estimated $710.40 less in FIPSE grant funds.
As predicted by hypothesis 2b in regard to enrolled populations, in response to the FITW
framing change, there is a causal, significant shift in favor of awarding grants to colleges that serve
minoritized populations (underrepresented minority and poor students) as measured by average grant
awards to MSIs (b = 14,942, p<0.01) and average grant award delivered to high-Pell serving institutions
(b=12,003, p<0.1), as well as on a continuous measure of grant dollars delivered based on the
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percentage of Black student enrollment (b= 23,824 p<0.01), enrollment of students of color (b= 12,130
p<0.1), and average Pell grant per student (b= 1.205 p<0.01). The policy has nonsignificant effects on
HMSIs, although the magnitude of the coefficient is similar. Figure 9 illustrates the pre-trends and causal
effects of the FITW change on grant benefits awarded to MSIs and high-Pell serving institutions relative
to their counterparts (i.e., non-MSIs and low-Pell institutions). This figure demonstrates that FIPSE
consistently awarded less funding to MSIs relative to non-MSIs than SSS, and that FIPSE awards to MSIs
and high-Pell institutions were trending downward prior to an abrupt spike following the policy change.
Causal Estimates Based on Organization-Level Measures. The preceding analysis demonstrates
that the primary goal of the new policy frame was achieved—a shift toward awarding grant dollars to
colleges that serve more poor students and students of color. One might wonder if these effects are
merely the result of a radical shift across all beneficiary parameters and are not a response to the
observed frame change. In this section, we demonstrate how, if we measure other organizational
parameters including measures of capacity like endowment and instructional spending or prestige
measures like organizational type or US News and World Reports rankings, FIPSE’s funding pre-trends
are largely undisrupted. On one hand, this offers a falsification test of the main results, demonstrating
that these were not idiosyncratic changes to FIPSE’s investments. On the other hand, these analyses
offer evidence of a critical contradiction: FIPSE’s historic tendency to fund higher prestige, higher
capacity institutions that serve substantially less minoritized students does not change.
In Table 7, we move to examining the relationship between the FITW framing change and
awards to institutions with higher prestige and capacity. We operationalize prestige and capacity in six
ways: (1) a dummy variable for whether an institution has ever been in the US News Top 100 colleges
and universities (Model 7), a group that comprises only 167 institutions out of 8,000 unique institutions
that appear in IPEDS every year; (2) a dummy for whether the institution is classified as a doctoral-
degree granting institution in that year according to Carnegie Classifications (Model 8); (3) a dummy for
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whether the institution is classified as an associate-degree granting institution in that year according to
Carnegie Classifications (Model 9); (4) a dummy for whether the institution is classified as a community
college (a public two-year college) (Model 10); (5) a continuous measure of the endowment wealth
possessed by that institution (Model 11); and (6) a continuous measure of the dollars spent per student
on instructional costs by that institution (Model 12).
Under hypothesis 2a, we predict that prior to FITW, FIPSE would favor higher prestige and
better resourced organizations. The results provide support for this hypothesis showing significant
correlations in favor of funding more prestigious (measured by US News Top 100 scores) (b= 17,856
p<0.01) and research institutions (measured by doctoral granting status) (b= 44,559 p<0.01). Similarly,
pre-trends show a significant, negative relationship between associate-granting colleges (b= -10,772
p<0.01), generally, and community colleges (b= -14,452, p<0.01), specifically, and FIPSE grant dollars.
Continuous measures of institutional capacity including endowment wealth (b= 0.00000450, p<0.01)
and instructional spending (b= 0.00399, p<0.01) also reflect this trend in favor of highly resourced
institutions in the pre-period (these coefficients express the relationship between one dollar of
endowment wealth or per-student instructional spending to one dollar of grant funding).
Figure 11 demonstrates that while the magnitude of relative benefits to higher prestige
institutions varies across time periods, it is consistently net-positive (i.e., above 0) and significantly
higher than the control program in both pre- and post-periods. In contrast, low-prestige associate-
granting institutions, illustrated in Figure 10, are at times at a net-negative (i.e., below 0) relative to their
higher-prestige counterparts and significantly lower than the control program in both pre- and post-
periods. Surprisingly, while resource allocation in favor of minoritized communities did gain traction
under this policy when compared to an entitlement program like SSS, the advantages awarded to
institutions with higher prestige and capacity as measured by doctoral-granting, endowment wealth,
and US News Top 100 status are not significantly changed by FITW. Similarly, the pre-trend showing a
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negative relationship between associate-granting colleges (b= -10,914, p<0.1) or community colleges (b=
-19,473, p<0.05) and FIPSE grant receipt is exacerbated by FITW, which is also visible in Figure 9. The
pre-trends in favor of higher-capacity institutions are also exacerbated as measured by instructional
spending (b= 0.0095 p<0.1).
Causal estimates based on interaction of organization- and student-level measures. While the
predicted change in benefits to MSIs using multiple specifications bore out in the data, the predicted
change in the prestige and capacity of organizations did not. Given that non-prestigious, low-
endowment, and low-instructional spending colleges in U.S. postsecondary education serve a
disproportionately high share of low-income and minoritized students (see Table 9), this presents a
contradiction. To better understand this contradiction, we ran the MSI regression again isolating three
types of MSIs by interacting organizations’ MSI status with their degree-granting status (doctoral,
associate-granting, and other). As shown in Table 8, the pre-trend for MSIs of all types was negative and
statistically significant with the largest disadvantage prior to FITW for MSI doctoral-granting universities
(b= - 26,892, p<0.01), followed by MSI associate-granting colleges (b= -9,385, p<0.05, and all other MSIs
(b= -8,138, b<0.01). By disaggregating these organizations into smaller cells, we lose the statistical
power to see significant results in the triple interaction. However, the trends illustrated in Figure 12
demonstrate that while associate-granting MSIs and all other MSIs see either no or limited change,
respectively, MSI-doctoral granting universities increase sharply in the post-period above and beyond
the control program (b= 128,406). This closer analysis reveals the mechanism through which MSIs saw
their increased advantage: via doctoral granting organizational types. This finding and the general
persistence or increase in organizational prestige and capacity among FIPSE grantees in the post-period
creates a puzzle as the bulk of the causal effect in favor of MSIs comes from the organizational category
that, overall, serves the lowest proportion of poor and minoritized students (see Table 9).
Robustness and Limitations
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The results presented in the previous section strongly suggest that FITW led to significant
increases in the delivery of grant funds to institutions serving minoritized students but did not
significantly affect the greater benefits awarded to institutions with higher levels of prestige and
capacity. The estimated increase was robust to controls for total enrollment, organizational sector and
degree-granting level, and region. In this section we present additional checks on the robustness of
these estimates and discussion of the overall limitations and assumptions of the study.
First, we conducted a placebo test using female enrollment as a factor unlikely to be affected by
the policy. We posit that replacing percent students of color enrolled with percent female enrolled rules
out the argument that FIPSE’s grantmaking profile was radically changing in ways unrelated to the intent
of the policy change in question. As expected, we do not find a significant effect of the policy on the
likelihood of grant receipt based on the percent of female students enrolled in an institution.
Next, we test whether the increase in grants to MSIs is due to an external increase in the
number of MSIs identified in the IPEDS system rather than to the policy change. For example, one can
imagine a scenario in which FIPSE has always served the same set of institutions, but it wasn’t until after
the policy change that these institutions began self-reporting as MSIs. To test this, we create a measure
of MSI status that is stable from 2010 through 2015 using the 2010 (pre-period) reported share of
minority students enrolled and re-estimate our main model. Using a stable, pre-period identifier of an
MSI institution does not alter the significance or direction of the results.
Finally, one could argue that these effects were not a result of the policy, but rather an
expression of a general trend toward funding diversity and inclusion programs. To test this, we conduct
the same set of regression analyses in a year in which no policy change occurred (2008). We do not find
a significant effect of the placebo policy change on the types of institutions receiving FIPSE awards
before and after 2008. We also conduct the same regression analyses using 2004 as a cut point, a year in
which the introduction of federal earmarking occurred without a change in frame, which we predict
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would not have the same impact as FITW. These regressions produce only two statistically significant
results on different parameters of interest than demonstrated in the study of the FITW change. This
significant but entirely distinct effect provides further confidence that, in the current paper, we capture
the causal impact specifically of the FITW framing change.
One might also argue that the combination of framing and policy design changes indicated in
the archival analysis call into question the argument that framing played a significant role in this story.
Our analysis relies on the logical assumption that the design elements identified in our archival
analysis—increases to accountability and evidentiary requirements, increases grant size, and restricting
freedom in proposal designs—would not, on their own, have created a causal spike in service to poor
students and students of color. Additionally, our interview work on this case revealed that the role of
congress in influencing grantee selection was also diminished in the post period. While congress was
ostensibly bound by the same frame as FIPSE staff in the pre-period it is reasonable to ask if it was not
the frame, but this process change that led to the causal effect. In order to check this assumption, we
re-ran analyses dropping out grants from the pre-period that were congressionally directed. We found
that the same trends persist, albeit with fewer observations. We focus mainly on the model with all
observations for two reasons. First, it is the most complete representation of the activity of this federal
agency as it shifted from one framing to another and it recognizes the complexity of policy movement,
rarely confined to the most public aspects of the change. And second, the congressionally directed
grants also removed potential grantees from the competitive applicant pool, which would produce a
bias to results that drop these observations.
Our emphasis in this paper has been on the effect of frames on the selection of specific
organizations for grant funding to enable innovators to disrupt inequitable educational processes. While
we demonstrate that FIPSE funded quantifiably different institutions after the framing shift, we have not
analyzed the substantive content of the funded grant projects. Therefore, we cannot speak to the
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possibility that perhaps every grant made to elite colleges in the pre-period was targeted specifically at
minoritized students, and every grant made to more diverse colleges in the post period perhaps was
not. This study focuses on the composition of organizations selected, a variable which we have argued is
material to the ultimate issue of addressing inequality in the field. In future work, we will extend our
analysis of the FITW framing change case study, drawing on already-collected qualitative descriptions of
each of FIPSE’s 4,400 granted programs. These data will allow us to code for the types of interventions
and target populations featured in each funded program. This extension will allow a more in-depth
analysis of how framing changes, like those enacted by FITW, affects grantmaking preferences.
Discussion
In today’s elite grantmaking circles, a few trends lend urgency to the empirical work undertaken
in this paper. First, many practitioners and scholars of higher education policy predict that as major
social problems persist, grantmakers’ efforts to catalyze change will play an increasingly influential role
in shaping intervention projects. Second, grantmakers are paying increasing attention to funding work
that upholds some vision of “equity,” just as FIPSE did in this case. However, there are no clear
boundaries around what “equity” is, who it is for, and how different conceptions of equity provide
varied affordances and constraints for change in a field like education. And third, the contested and
contingent nature of the role that categories like race and class will play in our collective, political future
suggests that the cognitive and cultural possibilities for combining grantmaking and concepts of “equity”
are far from settled. This paper leverages multiple forms of data to uncover causal impacts and to trace
how such changes hinged not only on a changing emphasis in favor of a minoritized target population,
but how this shift occurred in tandem with fundamental alterations to the design of grantmaking
programs. This finding exposes tensions intrinsic to any work intended to diminish inequalities.
By analyzing the intervenor rather than those on whom intervention is targeted, this study takes
a few steps toward unpacking how shifting emphases among elites guide what might be considered
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legitimate political work in education. The mixed-methods findings demonstrate how a policy’s target
population gets coupled with assumptions about what that population does or does not lack, as well as
how closely these outcomes must be monitored. Philip, Bang & Jackson (2018) argue that paths
towards justice that interrupt institutionalized processes of inequality are simultaneously threatening to
dominant group privilege and as such, are less likely to be viewed as legitimate. From this place of
illegitimacy springs a tendency toward interest convergent reasoning (Philip & Azevedo, 2017;
Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018). We speculated that these stances introduce distinct limitations to the type of
work funded and thus advanced in a field.
While the FITW policy change could be interpreted at its face simply as a shift in favor of
investing in benefits to minoritized populations, our analysis of FIPSE’s archives demonstrates that there
are three additional axes on which the FITW change shifted FIPSE’s frame for action. From 1995 until the
administration revamped the program under FITW, FIPSE focused on general themes of improvement,
learning, and pedagogical experimentation to benefit “all students” in a system with a single, optional
priority (that did not carry structural weight) focused on access or diversity themes. The Obama-era
FITW program shifted the agency’s focus in favor of a class and race-conscious frame that mobilized the
needs of minoritized students specifically across all FIPSE priorities. As predicted by the literature, this
move to center minoritized populations in a policy was accompanied by a shift toward interest
convergent goals. Interest convergent reasoning emerged in this case in three ways as FIPSE’s espoused
target population shifted from broad (all students) to narrow (minoritized students). First, FIPSE’s
problem diagnoses shifted from the broad need to spur innovation to bring out the most promising
advancements in pedagogy, technology, and efficiency in higher education to a high-profile emphasis on
the role of higher education completion in international competitiveness and economic vitality that
would benefit all Americans. Specifically, the administration argued that this goal could not be met
without “closing the gap” of minoritized college completion. Indeed, “first in the world” was a reference
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to a competition with other countries to hold the highest population of college degree holders as a
proxy for economic wellbeing. This finding fulfills critical race theory’s primary prediction that any
successful shift to favor minoritized populations will be accompanied by arguments about the benefits
dominant populations can expect from the policy change.
Second, rather than promoting the same solutions as in its pre-period, which broadly targeted
learning, affordability, access to engaging pedagogy, and completion, FIPSE limited its focus in
fulfillment of this interest convergent argument: solely promoting strategies expected to remediate
underperforming students to increase completion. While FIPSE had historically promoted the
advancement of student inquiry, civic knowledge, and other broad learning-based emphases in its open-
ended grant guidelines, the FITW frame shifted emphasis toward a prescriptive set of already defined,
deficit-oriented practices intended to remediate students. This extends the role of interest convergence
and fulfills policy design theory’s prediction that an emphasis on minoritized populations would be
followed by a decrease in the flexibility and creativity enjoyed by beneficiaries.
Third, whereas in the pre-period applicants were expected to pilot new, untested solutions as
part of the drive for innovation, in the post-period, FIPSE appealed to objectivity as a form of legitimacy
requiring rigorous evidence to substantiate proposals and a plan to causally demonstrate projects’
results. Indeed, FIPSE contracted an additional panel of evaluation experts to assure that any winning
proposal could pass muster in terms of its evidentiary backing. This emergent emphasis on rigorous
evaluation (e.g., experimental or quasi-experimental methods) was motivated by the need to build
evidence for practices that would affect market-based outcomes (e.g., college completion, employment
rates). This fulfills policy design theory’s prediction that an emphasis on minoritized populations would
be followed by an increase in the surveillance of and accountability required of beneficiaries.
The econometric analysis of the administrative dataset strongly suggests that the FITW policy
frame had its intended effect in terms of student-level target beneficiaries: at least ostensibly, more
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students of color and poor students stood to benefit from this grant program than in FIPSE’s prior
years. While this may seem almost intuitive, it is critical to put this finding in context. This agency had
always been tasked with this same purpose—to address inequalities through educational improvement
for “underserved” students. And yet, the organizations predominantly serving these populations were at
a disadvantage according to all measures in their likelihood to receive FIPSE funding during FIPSE’s two
decades of operation prior to FITW. This speaks to the material effects of different cognitive and
cultural models of understanding inequality and improvement on policy implementation. Coupled with
results from our qualitative analyses, the quantitative results raise questions about the role of interest
convergence. Specifically, would the emphasis on minoritized populations under FITW have taken hold
if it had not been framed from the perspective of economic wellbeing for all?
However, the interpretation of the effect of this policy frame on beneficiaries is challenged
when turning to analyses of grant dollars awarded according to organization-level prestige and capacity
variables. From the perspective of service to the most underserved U.S. populations, this finding is non-
intuitive as the very institutions that, on average, serve the most minoritized students do not see
significant benefit (and even some negative effects) from the new policy frame. Coupled with the
positive findings regarding minoritized representation among award recipients, there is causal evidence
that this policy did not simply democratize the distribution of awards by delivering funds to the least
advantaged students at the institutions that primarily serve them (i.e., community colleges), but that
particular types of organizations serving minoritized students (who likely differ from minoritized
students at community colleges in relevant and measurable ways) received preference (i.e., research
universities). This upholds, in critical ways, policy design theory’s predictions that policies benefiting
minoritized populations will indeed redirect funds, but will also exhibit longer implementation chains
that involve more dominant populations (e.g., research staff at research universities), and will be the
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target of higher surveillance in contrast to earlier programs that were subject to very little oversight and
were instead hailed as partners and innovators.
One interpretation of these findings—that more minoritized students were served under the
new frame, but not at the institutions primarily responsible for service to the most underserved
populations—is that only colleges with both this population and a moderate or high level of resource
and research capacity were considered legitimate. The changes in grantmaking patterns also align with
this explanation as FIPSE made fewer grants but in much larger amounts than in previous years to fund
this more intensive research and implementation chain. The FITW frame change did not result in an
unqualified change favoring the provision of funds and legitimacy to marginalized organizations that are
the most likely to disrupt the status quo in the field. In other words, FIPSE continued to preference an
organizational class whose success is largely determined by how it measures up against the most elite
universities in terms of rankings. These rankings are determined by institutionalized metrics that
preserve stratification and the status quo rather than stimulate change (Colyvas, 2012; Espeland &
Sauder, 2007). As such, this organizational class has little to no incentive for upending the field’s
hierarchy and stratifying practices. Instead of diminishing these sources of institutional persistence that
reproduce inequalities, this frame change shifted the mode of reproduction. Under the new condition, a
traditional source of legitimacy among elites in the academy—rigorous social scientific evaluation—
protects the institutional preference for more highly ranked and resourced colleges. This preference also
occurs as FIPSE ceases to provide funds for flexible and entrepreneurial “innovation” projects, instead
funding prescriptive strategies for student-focused remediation.
This contradiction surfaces the limitations that socially constructed categories may carry with
them into the policy design process. In previous eras, when FIPSE selected organizations that were
predominantly White and middle class, as well as prestigious with higher resource capacity, more liberal
conceptions of student learning, pedagogical experimentation, civic engagement, and global knowledge
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predominated FIPSE’s archives and policies. These expansive values did not withstand the justice-
oriented political emphasis on minoritized populations. Instead, in this new era questions of learning,
pedagogy, and innovation were sidelined in favor of measurable outcomes expected to make
quantifiable contributions to the American economy.
Conclusion
The work of elites—whether in government or private philanthropy—to disrupt inequality
through the distribution of resources is often treated as if the agency’s or actors’ logics are not
themselves a variable in the success or failure of the field to adapt to more egalitarian purposes.
Researchers and government officials often strive to deeply interrogate the failure of individual
programs to produce measurable outcomes on the poor or on beneficiaries of color. However, the very
design and selection of such programs, a mere fraction and subset of what might have been proposed or
accepted under different elite framings, goes unexamined. In this analysis, we have scratched the
surface of how variation in an agency’s frames can dramatically affect grantmaking outcomes, while
preserving privilege and legitimacy at the organization level.
In this study, we examine the impacts of a grantmaking frame shift on the organizational type of
the recipient institutions—a proxy for the type of environment and the target population for which
contextualized innovations are developed. This case offers a powerful window into such processes given
that the agency under study was always ostensibly striving to disrupt higher education for the purpose
of offering more equitable outcomes to minoritized populations. However, the subtle shifts in the way
FIPSE framed its purpose ultimately have significant effects on who gets selected to innovate. Moreover,
a deep understanding of the impact of dominant cultural concerns on policy framing offers a lens
through which to interpret the pattern of results. When FIPSE adopted a racial and class justice frame
motivated by service to minoritized students, it did so using an interest convergent argument for
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economic competitiveness. This new frame had a significant, positive effect on the proportion of
minoritized students served by selected grantees.
However, FIPSE coupled its renewed emphasis on racial and class inequality with a predictable
emphasis on prescriptive interventions and an unprecedented level of accountability. This frame
allowed outcomes to shift along one axis of the grantmaking profile—representation of minoritized
students. It also constrained this preference in part to institutions with the resources and prestige that
could support the program’s strict accountability demands. While this is not a normative argument that
such organizations should be excluded from improvement efforts, this case teaches us about how a
change in racial framing intended to diminish inequality can shift burdens and benefits such that
institutionalized inequality is still protected, but by different mechanisms. This result leaves modes of
reproduction that favor more elite and well-resourced organizations that are more likely to benefit from
the field’s current and inherently unequal institutional arrangements intact, thus reducing the
innovative potential that theory predicts could have come from funding creative work at marginalized
organizational types.
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Tables
Table 1: FIPSE’s grantmaking history 1995-2015
Total FIPSE
Grants Awarded
Average Grant Size in
Dollars
Total Funds Distributed in
Dollars
1995 105 171,358 41,830,000 1996 71 179,655 12,760,000 1997 85 198,075 16,840,000 1998 99 210,701 20,860,000 1999 37 294,793 10,910,000 2000 129 285,906 194,800,000 2001 108 335,326 36,220,000 2002 85 352,326 29,950,000 2003 71 330,600 23,470,000 2004 368 371,815 136,800,000 2005 392 349,422 383,100,000 2006 68 393,199 26,740,000 2007 58 350,703 20,340,000 2008 350 290,730 101,800,000 2009 397 277,668 110,200,000 2010 381 360,129 398,600,000 2011 - - - 2012 - - - 2013 - - - 2014 27 2,771,000 74,820,000 2015 36 2,345,000 32,980,000
Note: While the agency continued to oversee its existing grants, FIPSE did not run its primary grant
programs in 2011-2013 as the Obama administration reworked the agency’s grantmaking framework.
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Table 2: Independent variables
Institutional Characteristics
Population variables
Minority Serving Institution (50% or more students of color enrolled by IPEDS estimation), Average
Pell Grant per Student (as a proxy for low-income status), Historically Minority Serving Institution
Status (HBCU or Tribal college), Percent Black Students Enrolled, Percent Latinx Students Enrolled,
Percent Total Students of Color Enrolled
Source(s): Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
Mission & Capacity variables
Mission: Doctoral Granting Institution, Associate-Granting Institution, Public Two-Year Institution, US
News Top 100 Institution
Capacity variables: Per-student instructional spending; institutional endowment
Source(s): Carnegie Classifications; US News & World Reports; IPEDS
Other
FIPSE or SSS: Separate dummy variables for whether the institution is part of the FIPSE or SSS half of
the dataset in a given year
Source(s): U.S. Department of Education
Post: A dummy variable for whether the grant year in question occurred before or after the
implementation of FITW.
Table 3: Control Variables
Control Variables
Organizational sector fixed effects
Source(s): Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
Year fixed effects
Table 4: Dependent Variables
Grant Awards
FIPSE Grant Award (a dollar amount, or 0 if the institution did not receive a grant that year)
Source: U.S. Department of Education, FIPSE database (now defunct).
TRIO SSS Awards (a dollar amount, or 0 if the institution did not receive a grant that year)
Source: U.S. Department of Education
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Table 5: Means and Standard Deviation for Selected Variables
Pre-FITW Post-FITW
All Colleges & Universities FIPSE Grantees SSS Grantees
All Colleges & Universities FIPSE Grantees SSS Grantees
mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd mean sd
MSI 0.218 0.413 0.0889 0.285 0.176 0.381 0.335 0.472 0.302 0.463 0.283 0.451
HMSI 0.0167 0.128 0.0481 0.214 0.0784 0.269 0.0167 0.128 0.0794 0.272 0.0632 0.243 US News Top 100 School 0.0243 0.154 0.0777 0.268 0.0280 0.165 0.0240 0.153 0.111 0.317 0.0260 0.159 Doctoral granting institutions 0.0364 0.187 0.266 0.442 0.141 0.348 0.0404 0.197 0.270 0.447 0.159 0.366 Associate granting institutions 0.197 0.3p97 0.265 0.441 0.490 0.500 0.211 0.408 0.254 0.439 0.494 0.500 Community Colleges (Public Two-Years) 0.159 0.366 0.245 0.430 0.479 0.500 0.141 0.348 0.226 0.422 0.475 0.500 Pell Grant Scaled Per Student 2,274 3,230 1,174 836.4 1,464 931.0 2,511 2,832 1,524 1,070 1,587 766.3 Endowment Scaled Per Student
6.546e+07 5.684e+08
1.982e+08
8.560e+08 7.652e+07 3.014e+08 9.785e+07 7.893e+08
5.348e+08
1.851e+09
1.448e+08
5.666e+08
Instruction Scaled Per Student 13,427 80,506 10,348 23,125 6,567 11,130 15,132 87,118 13,474 25,712 7,958 13,589
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Table 6: Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference Regressions with Year Fixed Effects: Causal Effects of FITW on Grant Awards to Institutions with High Proportions of Minoritized Students
Table 7: Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference Regression with Year and Sector Fixed Effects: Causal Effects of FITW on Grant Awards to Institutions Based on Prestige or Capacity
1: Minority Serving
Institutions (> 50%
minority)
2: Historically
Minority Serving
Institutions
3: High-Pell Serving
Institutions
4: Percent Black
Students Enrolled
5: Percent Students
of Color Enrolled
6: Pell Award Scaled
Per Student
FIPSE 2,464*** 1,718*** 2,584*** 1,531*** 1,557*** 2,066***
(564.3) (463.3) (521.4) (479.1) (484.4) (583.8)
FIPSE*Post-FITW -11,060*** -7,370*** -9,534*** -11,492*** -11,788*** -10,124***
(2,140) (2,007) (1,924) (2,000) (2,390) (2,448)
Characteristic 3,105*** 17,603*** 3,834*** 19.31 -43.95 0.318***
(468.1) (3,286) (507.8) (135.3) (51.58) (0.0396)
Char*Post -5,022*** 12,530** -1,350 -4,195** -1,654 -1.045***
(718.7) (5,039) (1,062) (1,892) (1,475) (0.0939)
Char*FIPSE (Pre-trend) -4,668*** -19,763*** -6,110*** -710.4** -436.8** -0.304***
(743.7) (4,092) (949.7) (313.6) (190.3) (0.0621)
Char*FIPSE*Post-FITW (Causal estimate) 14,942*** 11,656 12,003* 23,824*** 12,130** 1.205***
(5,113) (22,115) (6,830) (8,774) (5,284) (0.272)
Constant 16,979*** 17,350*** 17,051*** 17,610*** 17,416*** 17,642***
(3,753) (3,755) (3,754) (3,749) (3,750) (3,739)
Observations 205,060 205,060 205,060 205,060 205,060 205,060
R Squared 0.024 0.024 0.024 0.024 0.023 0.023
Time and Sector FE YES YES YES YES YES YES
Robust standard errors in parentheses
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
Dependent Variable: Grant Award Amount
Student Population Characteristic
7: US News & World
Reports Top 100
Colleges &
Universities
8: Doctoral Granting
Universities
9: Associate-Degree
Granting Colleges
(public and private)
10: Community
Colleges (public two-
year colleges)
11: Endowment
Scaled Per Student
12: Instruction
Scaled Per Student
FIPSE 1,076** -207.0 3,539*** 3,943*** 1,869*** 1,337***
(462.6) (339.8) (515.5) (549.4) (435.9) (464.4)
FIPSE*Post-FITW -7,623*** -6,719*** -4,695** -5,400*** -8,591*** -7,333***
(1,999) (1,567) (1,982) (1,966) (2,058) (2,027)
Characteristic 2,280 18,625*** 4,252*** -5,376*** -6.80e-07** -0.0103***
(1,690) (2,074) (821.6) (1,745) -0.000000276 (0.00162)
Char*Post -409.7 28,035*** 12,606*** 24,586*** 1.44e-06** -0.00695**
(2,381) (3,242) (1,054) (1,608) (7.25e-07) (0.00292)
Char*FIPSE (Pre-trend) 17,856*** 44,559*** -10,772*** -14,452*** 4.50e-06** 0.00399***
(4,409) (7,671) (1,103) -1,346 (1.89e-06) (0.00122)
Char*FIPSE*Post-FITW (Causal estimate) 22,339 -18,696 -10,914* -19,473** 2.50e-06 0.00950*
(21,298) (31,771) (6,245) (9,221) (4.66e-06) (0.00576)
Constant 27,198*** 24,542*** 26,298*** 32,646*** 12,260*** 17,477***
(981.2) (852.5) (1,142) (1,696) (3,644) (3,755)
Observations 205,060 205,060 205,060 186,987 188,983 204,988
R Squared 0.017 0.027 0.017 0.019 0.021 0.023
Time and Sector FE YES YES YES YES YES YES
Robust standard errors in parentheses
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
Dependent Variable: Grant Award Amount
Organizational Characteristic
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Table 8: Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference Regression with Year and Sector Fixed Effects: Causal Effects of FITW on Grant Awards to Institutions Based on Interaction of MSI and Organization Type
13: Minority-
Serving Doctoral
Universities
14: Minority-
Serving Associate
Granting Colleges
15: Other
Minority Serving
Institutions
FIPSE 25,095*** -7,515*** 1,825***
(3,388) (1,047) (627.9)
FIPSE*Post-FITW -28,452*** -20,675** -8,432***
(7,326) (8,824) (2,012)
Characteristic 1,992 8,105*** 8,840***
(2,528) (2,595) (1,346)
Char*Post 10,494* -1,220 2,395
(5,943) (4,034) (2,231)
Char*FIPSE (Pre-trend) -26,892*** -9,385** -8,138***
(4,571) (4,076) (1,721)
Char*FIPSE*Post-FITW (Causal estimate) 128,406 -796.0 2,968
(82,691) (12,199) (7,432)
Constant 64,376*** 24,132*** 25,501***
(5,072) (1,148) (7,758)
Observations 24,448 35,722 60,997
R Squared 0.024 0.011 0.025
Time and Sector FE YES YES YES
Robust standard errors in parentheses
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
Dependent Variable: Grant Award Amount
Interacted Characteristic
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Table 9: Proportions of Underrepresented Minority (URM) and Total Enrollment in 2005, 2010, and 2015 by Institutional Type
2005 2010 2015
Percent URM
Served within Type
Proportion of URM Students
Enrolled in College Served
by this Type
Proportion of Total Students
Enrolled in College Served
by this Type
Percent URM
Served within Type
Proportion of URM Students
Enrolled in College Served
by this Type
Proportion of Total Students
Enrolled in College Served
by this Type
Percent URM
Served within Type
Proportion of URM Students
Enrolled in College Served
by this Type
Proportion of Total Students
Enrolled in College Served
by this Type
Doctoral Granting Universities 17.50% 14.10% 22.40% 24.20% 15.10% 21.60% 28.10% 19.80% 25.90%
Masters Granting Colleges 24.70% 15.20% 17.10% 29.30% 14.60% 17.30% 32.30% 16.50% 18.80%
US News & World Report’s Top 100 Colleges and Universities 13.10% 2.33% 4.94% 18.20% 2.54% 4.82% 20.10% 2.48% 4.55%
Associate Granting Colleges (public and private) 30.90% 41.50% 37.40% 37.10% 43.80% 40.70% 41.90% 44.20% 38.70%
Community Colleges (Public Two-Year Colleges) 29.70% 38.80% 36.50% 35.70% 38.60% 37.30% 41.00% 38.20% 34.30%
High Endowment Institutions 20.30% 23.50% 32.30% 25.20% 20.10% 27.50% 28.20% 22.50% 29.30%
Low Endowment Institutions 31.50% 24.40% 21.60% 38.20% 39.80% 36.00% 43.10% 39.10% 33.30% High Instructional Spending Institutions 18.80% 11.60% 17.20% 21.80% 14.90% 23.60% 24.20% 14.30% 21.80% Low Instructional Spending Institutions 39.30% 27.40% 19.40% 56.30% 20.80% 12.70% 52.00% 27.80% 19.60%
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Figures
Figure 1: FIPSE’s Frame and Policy Design 1995 – 2010 (Pre-FITW)
Figure 2: FIPSE’s Frame and Policy Design 2013-2015 (post-FITW)
Figure 3: 1995 FIPSE Comprehensive Program Grant Guidelines, page 1
Colorblind/Multicultural Frame Target Population (beneficiary)
Broad: Multiple populations or undefined populations. No priority given to serving any one population.
Diagnostic Emphasis (the problem)
Innovation-driven emphasis on the need to move out of existing models relevant to many higher education issues
Prognostic Emphasis (the solution)
Multiple: Student learning assessment, pedagogical change, technological advancement, new credit assessment structures, access and completion, efficiency and funding structures, global education, STEM
Policy Design
Unrestrictive Design Standards Priorities describe a broad problem and welcome promising solutions, as well as solutions to problems not listed
Low accountability, Surveillance and Evidentiary Standards Applicants are not expected to provide existing evidence that their proposal will work (because it is innovative and potentially untested). They are expected to submit a brief evaluation plan not held to experimental or quasi-experimental standards.
Broad Funding Distribution Plan The agency plans to make many (approximately between 80 and 300) grants of moderate size.
Policy Design
Restrictive Design Standards Application priorities each describe a single, categorical intervention type. Solutions to unlisted problems are not allowed.
High Accountability, Surveillance and Evidentiary Standards Applicants are expected to provide robust, existing evidence from published literature or their own randomized control (RCT) trials that their proposal will work. They are required to submit a rigorous evaluation plan using either an RCT or quasi-experimental model for evaluation. Narrow Funding Distribution Plan The agency plans to make only a few (approximately between 30 and 70) grants of large size.
Racial & Class Justice Frame Target Population (beneficiary)
Narrow: Specific marginalized, minority populations are emphasized frequently and are given funding preference
Diagnostic Emphasis (the problem)
A decline in national standing and economic competitiveness due to lagging college completion which is a detriment of all Americans, and which requires more minorities to graduate college
Prognostic Emphasis (the solution)
Singular: Highly specific tactics targeting student-level remediation
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Figure 4: 1995 FIPSE Comprehensive Program Grant Guidelines, page 4
Figure 5: 2006 FIPSE Comprehensive Program Grant Guidelines, page 7
If you embark upon a funded grant project starting in the fall of 2006, keep in mind that the project may not reach full maturity and achieve significant impact nationally for six to eight years. Changes such as the dramatic rise of information technology, the increasing diversity of postsecondary learners, the renewed demand for accountability, or the rise of competition among postsecondary providers are powerful enough to shape the immediate future of postsecondary education. We urge you to anticipate these dynamic forces of change and to develop bold new project ideas. These projects should aim to reshape the postsecondary education system so that its practices, values, and results are not simply the product of evolutionary drift. FIPSE urges the field to develop education reform proposals in the context of a changing world.
Figure 6: 2015 FIPSE FITW Grant Guidelines, page 27,036 Federal Register, Vol. 80, No. 90
Figure 7: 2014 FIPSE FITW Grant Guidelines, page 28,495 Federal Register, Vol. 79, No. 95
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Figure 8: 2014 FIPSE FITW Grant Guidelines, page 28,496 Federal Register, Vol. 79, No. 95
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Figure 9: The Effect of the First in the World Policy Frame Change on the Grant Benefits Awarded Based
on Student Population Measures
Note: “High-Pell Serving" is a proxy for colleges and universities
that serve a high-proportion of low-income students (who are
thus eligible for the need-based federal Pell grant).
Minority-Serving Institutions
High-Pell Serving Institutions (top quintile)
Gra
nt
Do
llars
Aw
ard
ed t
o H
igh
-Pel
l Ser
vin
g
Rel
ativ
e t
o O
ther
Co
llege
s
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Min
ori
ty-S
ervi
ng
Rel
ativ
e
to W
hit
e-S
ervi
ng
Co
llege
s
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Figure 10: The Effect of the First in the World Policy Frame Change on the Grant Benefits Awarded to
Low-Prestige/Low-Capacity Institutions
Low Endowment Institutions (bottom quintile)
Associate Degree Granting Colleges
Community Colleges (public, two-years) Low Per-Student Instructional Spending Institutions
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Lo
w-E
nd
ow
me
nt
Rel
ativ
e
to O
the
r C
olle
ges
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Ass
oci
ate
Deg
ree
Gra
nti
ng
Rel
ativ
e t
o O
ther
Co
llege
s
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Co
mm
un
ity
Co
llege
s
Rel
ativ
e t
o O
ther
Co
llege
s
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Lo
w In
st. S
pe
nd
ing
Co
llege
s R
elat
ive
to O
ther
Co
llege
s
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Figure 11: The Effect of the First in the World Policy Frame Change on the Grant Benefits Awarded to
High-Prestige/High-Capacity Institutions
High Endowment Institutions (top quintile)
U.S. News & World Reports’ Top 100 Institutions
Doctoral Granting Research Universities
High Per-Student Instructional Spending Institutions
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Hig
h E
nd
ow
men
t R
elat
ive
to O
the
r C
olle
ges
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Do
cto
ral G
ran
tin
g R
elat
ive
to O
the
r C
olle
ges
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
To
p 1
00 R
elat
ive
to O
the
r
Co
llege
s
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
Hig
h In
st. S
pen
din
g
Co
llege
s R
elat
ive
to O
ther
Co
llege
s
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Figure 12: The Effect of the First in the World Policy Frame Change on Minority Serving Institutions
Disaggregated by Doctoral Universities, Associate Granting Colleges, and all Other MSI Type
Minority-Serving Associate Granting Colleges Minority-Serving Doctoral Universities
All Other Minority-Serving Types
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
MSI
Rel
ativ
e to
No
n-M
SI
Inst
itu
tio
ns
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
MSI
Rel
ativ
e to
No
n-M
SI
Inst
itu
tio
ns
Gra
nt
Do
llars
to
MSI
Rel
ativ
e to
No
n-M
SI
Inst
itu
tio
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