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Institutional Affiliation

Higher Education Policies

In the United States Primarily, the responsibility of education is vested upon individual states. This, however, does not exonerate the federal government from the education sector. The national government plays a supporting role in providing finances as well as funds and assistance in a bid to provide a lifeline whenever states are overwhelmed by the burden of overseeing the education within their jurisdictions. The funds from the feral government come in handy in helping millions of Americans, some of whom financial circumstances have impeded them from seeking education and particularly higher education. It is also judicious to note that the federal government does not only offer monetary support but also other forms of support in ways that will be discussed below.

Environment necessary for the excelling of education is also a burden of the federal government. A common myth is that the environment suitable for study which entails security, classrooms, sanitation and tranquility away from noisy environs of industries and busy towns, is only a necessity of the primary and secondary levels. However, it has since been discovered that the same environment is also needed by the tertiary level. The federal governments after providing these basic needs necessary for the thriving of the education sector in states, the states are then mandated to ensure the growth of the sector (In Inoue, 2019). Deductively, the states play a major role in determining the type of educational prospects it is going to provide for its residents.

The past centuries have experienced investment in the education sector by both the federal government and the state government and notably, the investment spread over the past fifty years is immense (Heller, 2016). These investments can be attributed to the opinion bored by the relevant stakeholders of the service to the public interest that these investments will give. The opinion further digresses from the profit-making point of an investment concept to reveal that the investments will be a stepping stone for the residents whose ambitions and desires have been just aspirations. It is at this juncture that we realize that the investments are in the form of policies. A perfect exemplar of such a policy is the enactment of the Higher Education Amendment Act of 1972 (Rose, 2018). This Act achieved the feat of assuring the public that financial incapability will not be an impediment anymore to those that sought education past high school.

In respect to policies, it is important to realize that there are no two states that are alike in their conception, designing and implementation of their policies. Each state has a unique way that they go about their public policy. This is because, unlike other public policies that target infrastructures development and social engagement, the policies on higher education will need to delve deeper into histories and cultures that relate to it. Deductively, this is to simply say that policies on higher education have a different graphical representation if at all the policies on public issues were to be represented on a graph. The National Center for Public Policy has partnered with Higher Education providers in order to develop a promising set of criterion in a bid to gauge the performance in individual states.

In an engagement on the complexities of the various states in respect to the policies they conceive as regards higher education, a lot of factors have to be considered. It is also pertinent to understand that these policies will emanate from a combination of other policies (In Paulsen, 2017). . The factors to be considered may range from the obligatory duty of a state governor in ensuring that the higher education is a priority when formulating policies to the powers conferred to the legislature to legislate on the same. However, there exist two key categories of determinants. Firstly, there is State System Design which entails the service providers and their individual roles and secondly, the State Fiscal Policy which basically is the amount of operating support and regulations that govern its distribution.

The discourse above has therefore proven that the core role of public policy in relation to higher education is to provide a basis from which higher education will emanate from. Public policies provide all the resources required to propel the provision of higher education. It is through public policies that the institutions offering this education are established and it is through the same policies that the standards of the education being offered by the institutions are determined and set (In Paulsen, 2017). It also seeks to address the questions posited by the entire entity of education. These questions include the objectives of education offered to be they societal or personal. Similarly, it is able to set the guidelines of how these objectives are to be achieved as well as the tools that can be used to measure the levels of success of the implementation of these successes.

This discourse shall discuss the higher education policies in the state of New Jersey. The reason why the state of New Jersey was chosen for the purpose of the study was inspired by a study that was done by a report that was given by the Institute of Education Sciences. The report was conducted to determine the state that had the best overall education rankings. The data used to determine this was a composite that included academic performance, resource availability and the graduations rate in the ration of six to two to two respectively. The computation of these data provided that New Jersey was the state that performed very well with respect to these tests. Therefore by studying the education of New Jersey, one might be able to understand the higher education policies that have influenced the high graduation rate of students.

References

Ackerman, R. L., & DiRamio, D. C. (2009). Creating a veteran-friendly campus: Strategies for transition and success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. There is a significant group of students who leave for service and return?under the best of circumstances, they need accommodation to succeed. Institutions of higher education traditionally have responded to the needs of special student populations by developing programs and offering services. This volume contains information about programmatic initiatives that can help create a welcoming environment for veterans, one that encourages serious, creative involvement.

Cass, D. M. (2014). The strategic student veteran: Successfully transitioning from the military to college academics. This book was previously sold under the title "The Strategic Student: Veteran's Edition" and features updated content. A practical guide of immense value to both students and their supporters. Perceptive and useful from a practical viewpoint. I have no doubt incoming freshmen will benefit from its insights.

Heller, H. (2016). Capitalist university - the transformations of higher education in the unit. Henry Heller offers here a magisterial account of the modern university that shows exactly how we've reached this point. Taking readers from the early Cold War--when support for universities was support for capitalism--through the countless social, political, and educational changes of the ensuing decades, Heller reveals how American educational institutions have been forced to decide between teaching students to question the dominant order and helping to perpetuate it. And they've had to do so knowing that all the pressure politics and finance was pushing for the latter. Heller covers such key moments as McCarthyism and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as well as contemporary struggles including the attempts at unionization of post-doctorals, the National Adjuncts Walkout Day in 2015, the protests in Missouri related to race, workplace benefits, and leadership, and the firing of Steven Salaita for his pro-Palestinian tweets, which sparked a huge controversy around free speech and academic freedom. The Capitalist University is a thoroughly grounded radical history of an institution whose influence and importance--and failures--reach deep into American political and social life.

In Freeman, S., In Goodchild, L. F., In Hagedorn, L. S., In Wright, D., & Wolf-Wendel, L. (2014). Advancing higher education as a field of study: In quest of doctoral degree guidelines : commemorating 120 years of excellence. While in 1979 the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) defined standards for student affairs master’s level preparation, and while 2010 saw the adoption of guidelines for higher education administration and leadership preparation programs at the master’s degree level, there still are, however, no guidelines that address higher education leadership doctoral programs, despite increasing demands for assessment and evaluation.This book suggests that higher education administration doctoral degree guidelines are a critical next step in advancing their program quality and continuity. It offers a review of the field’s history, the condition of its higher education programs, developments from the student affairs specialization and its guidelines, and a multi-chapter dialogue on the benefits or disadvantages of having guidelines. 

In Hughes-Kirchubel, L., In MacDermid, S., & In Riggs, D. S. (2018). A battle plan for supporting military families: Lessons for the leaders of tomorrow. This unique reference integrates knowledge culled from fifteen years of U.S. deployments to create an action plan for supporting military and veteran families during future conflicts. Its innovative ideas stretch beyond designated governmental agencies (e.g., Department of Defense, VA) to include participation from, and possible collaborations with, the business/corporate, academic, advocacy, and philanthropic sectors. Contributors identify ongoing and emerging issues affecting military and veteran families and recommend specific strategies toward expanding and enhancing current programs and policy. This proactive agenda also outlines new directions for mobilizing the research community, featuring strategies for addressing institutional challenges and improving access to critical data

In Inoue, Y. (2019). Faculty roles and changing expectations in the new age. Faculty Roles and Changing Expectations in the New Age provides a theoretical understanding of the link between ongoing changes in institutions and changes in faculty roles and provides course designs and pedagogical approaches that place faculty in the role of leaders and coaches for learning. While highlighting topics such as online andragogy, language learning, and digital transformation, this publication explores real-life examples and experiences of those involved in optimizing the practices of teaching and learning in the digital age. It is ideally designed for educators, instructors, administrators, faculty, researchers, practitioners, professors, and trainers.

In Paulsen, M. B. (2017). Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research: Published under the Sponsorship of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). Published annually since 1985, the Handbook series provides a compendium of thorough and integrative literature reviews on a diverse array of topics of interest to the higher education scholarly and policy communities. Each chapter provides a comprehensive review of research findings on a selected topic, critiques the research literature in terms of its conceptual and methodological rigor and sets forth an agenda for future research intended to advance knowledge on the chosen topic. The Handbook focuses on a comprehensive set of central areas of study in higher education that encompasses the salient dimensions of scholarly and policy inquiries undertaken in the international higher education community. Each annual volume contains chapters on such diverse topics as research on college students and faculty, organization and administration, curriculum and instruction, policy, diversity issues, economics and finance, history and philosophy, community colleges, advances in research methodology and more. The series is fortunate to have attracted annual contributions from distinguished scholars throughout the world.

Jones, K., McBain, L., & Eagan, M. K. (2017). Student Veteran Data in Higher Education: New Directions for Institutional Research, Number 171. While the Post-9/11 GI Bill created both a surge in student veteran enrollment at colleges and universities across the U.S. and keen interest by various stakeholders in how the billions of Federal dollars are being spent, higher education researchers have not historically focused on military-affiliated students. This special issue provides education and suggestions for institutional researchers to approach studying student veterans.

Loss, C. P. (2012). Between citizens and the state: The politics of American higher education in the 20th century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

Rose, D. (2018). Citizens by degree: Higher education policy and the changing gender dynamics of American citizenship. Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States has seen a striking shift in the gender dynamics of higher educational attainment as women have come to earn college degrees at higher rates than men. Women have also made significant strides in terms of socioeconomic status and political engagement. What explains the progress that American women have made since the 1960s? While many point to the feminist movement as the critical turning point, this book makes the case that women's movement toward first class citizenship has been shaped not only by important societal changes, but also by the actions of lawmakers who used a combination of redistributive and regulatory higher education policies to enhance women's incorporation into their roles as American citizens. Examining the development and impact of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, this book argues that higher education policies represent a crucial-though largely overlooked-factor shaping the progress that women have made. By significantly expanding women's access to college, they helped to pave the way for women to surpass men as the recipients of bachelor's degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically independent, socially integrated, politically engaged members of the American citizenry. In addition to helping to bring into greater focus our understanding of how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. social policy development during the mid-twentieth century, this analysis recognizes federal higher education policy as an indispensible component of the American welfare state