Student Success as a Public Management Tool: Gauging the Impact of Student Success as a Funding Metric

Performance funding has been employed within primary education, where there is more overt control, but is now moving to higher education where there is less oversight on the curriculum. To increase productivity at two-year institutions in Texas, the state’s Legislature employed the approach to incentivize performance. Using student success rates as the metric, the Legislature has created an incentive and disincentive program that has affected the level of education in the State of Texas at these institutions. By increasing the understanding of how performance funding at two-year institutions the knowledge of how legislative and political power can impact these relationships within institutions and between institutions members and students will increase. A survey of 655 faculty members and administrators at two-year institutions in the State of Texas was conducted to gain an understanding of how these factors are perceived. Results show that performance funding is seen negatively across the board, but there are higher levels of acceptance and impact by the administrator group than the faculty group. Using regression analysis and cross tabulations, there is evidence of a strong correlation that the public management relationship between faculty and administrators is negatively affected as well as there is a negative effect on the academic environment. The implications of these findings are that there is an artificially skewed view of academia at these institutions and a shift in how the student is viewed and how the relationship within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and students