Jarrett B. Warshaw

Private master's comprehensive institutions (PMCIs) in the United States navigate pressures to expand college access and equity while striving for prestige in the academic hierarchy. To strive for prestige entails competing for world‐class status of greater selectivity, research intensity and resources, but such a pathway to excellence may, because of market‐competition, deepen institutional and student stratification in the sector. In this study, we examine how organisational characteristics associated with striving influence low‐income student enrolment at PMCIs over time. Our panel analysis revealed selected factors constraining the enrolment of low‐income students at the average PMCI. But the magnitude of these statistical relationships was rather modest and did not suggest dramatically worsening institutional and student inequality in the sector. These findings support a flexible theory of organisational fields, illuminating more equity‐centred behaviours at the typical PMCI than what prior literature indicates. We discuss implications for research and policy emphasising equity's connection to institutional excellence.

An executive search firm is a third-party agent who is paid to recruit and hire leaders. This chapter reviewed the literature on executive search firms in the selection of college and university presidents. A number of potential benefits and challenges of the use of search firms are explored and discussed. The authors utilize neo-institutional theory to frame past research and illuminate potential issues with the significant increase in the use of these third-party agents. They then outline implications for practice and offer directions for future research to guide inquiry in this topic.

The ascendance of market-based pressures in higher education has prompted core organizational shifts in public research universities in the US. Since the 1980s, neoliberal observers have increasingly viewed these social institutions as entities generating economic returns from investments by attracting students and securing research and development (R&D) funding. PRUs’ evolving strategic and managerial orientations, as well as formal structures and processes, have thus come to reflect corporatized theories of action (i.e., logics). In this chapter, we highlight three critical organizational shifts along these lines: (1) restructuring academic labor, (2) adopting strategic enrollment management and market-relevant curricula, and (3) redesigning organizational structures and funding streams. Each change is vital to contemporary economic imperatives, yet each further stratifies professors, students, disciplines and fields, and institutions. We apply sociological theories attending to the origins, nature, and outcomes of each shift and to their collective implications for PRUs’ organizational character in terms of their integrity and trustworthiness. This chapter shows the ways in which PRUs are highly constrained in holding together the enterprise as a whole and in prioritizing public values and purposes over narrow self-interests. We observe some comparable patterns in US and UK higher education and discuss sociological implications that apply to the broader Anglo-American context.

US public research universities face increasing pressures to compete in higher education, but receive fewer resources from their states than in previous eras. Prior research suggests that these institutions adopt market-driven mentalities and practices to generate revenues while eschewing their public missions. We posit that US public research universities may employ competition and profit-seeking (market mechanisms) to resource the campus as a whole and serve the broader society. As such, these institutions could potentially bend some industry-oriented principles and behaviors to bolster social goals, as reflected in their newer resource-centered organizational discourses and strategies. In this study, we apply theory of institutional logics to illuminate these discourses and strategies. The logics perspective focuses on underlying theories of action that shape organizational structures and processes. It informs, here, a qualitative document analysis of materials and longitudinal numeric data spanning 2000 to 2014 from three sampled universities. Findings suggest that the study universities amplify over time their appeals to the public good to justify market efforts. They also indicate a complex interplay among multiple logics. These blended, hybridized logics offer strategies and behaviors to reconcile conflicting organizational imperatives. We discuss prospects for research on the managerial tools used as instruments of good.

Much of the research and discussion of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) focuses on four-year institutions, impeding the significance of their two-year counterparts. Using extant literature and data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), this paper elucidates Historically Black Community Colleges (HBCCs). By providing nuanced perspectives on this group of community colleges, we situate these institutions in their unique context. The paper provides a historical background of HBCCs, a review of relevant literature, and a descriptive profile of HBCCs’ organizational characteristics. Finally, we discuss topical and theoretical recommendations for future research. This paper is a call for further research situated in the distinctive context of HBCCs, and carries both scholarly and practical significance for HBCCs, as well as other HBCUs, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and community colleges.