ABSTRACT
Nearly a century ago, US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis observed that, in their freedom to create and implement policies independently of their peers, the country’s individual states can serve as separate and independent ‘laboratories of democracy’. The metaphor applies aptly in the case of tertiary education. The fifty US states exhibit remarkable diversity in the ways they organize, govern, and fund higher education. These variations shape state actions affecting colleges and universities. This essay draws on existing research to present a conceptual framework for understanding and investigating the factors driving states’ distinct approaches. The framework highlights four critical classes of influence: a state’s socio-economic context, its organizational and policy context, its politico-institutional context and its external context. Critical in these distinctions is the degree to which individual states rely on the workings of markets and private, non-governmental actors for coordination and direction of their tertiary systems. Although the US as a whole has, by almost any measure, one of the most privatized systems of higher education in the world, this orientation plays out distinctively in each individual state owing to significant intrastate contextual differences. The essay concludes with consideration of the factors driving these variations and their implications in the face of changing international attitudes and expectations for higher education.
