Understanding the Role of Non-federal Funding Match on the Effectiveness of a U.S. Strategy to Strengthen Academic Research Competitiveness Nationwide
NSF EPSCoR is a policy intervention designed more than 40 years ago to help U.S. states increase their academic research competitiveness, measured principally at the time by their shares of federal research funding. This study used a comparative approach to focus on a cohort of eleven U.S. states that have participated in the NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) since the mid-1980s. Even though states have been required to demonstrate commitment to improving their academic research base by providing non-federal funding match to RII awards, there is little to no evidence about how or even whether their investments have contributed to success. This study fills a critical gap in knowledge about the role of non-federal match to NSF EPSCoR. It also addresses the absence of any significant previous attempts to directly understand causality. It does so by employing a realist evaluation framework. Rather than ask if nonfederal funding match worked, this study asks: What about non-federal matching to NSF EPSCoR worked for whom in what context and how? It required defining a clear measure of success outcome by which to judge. It involved collecting, creating, and prioritizing representative measures of state context and mechanisms of change (i.e., resources and reasoning). This was accomplished using surveys developed by the author to gather stakeholder input from EPSCoR practitioners who described how their state responded to the EPSCoR intervention. Survey results were used to also fill yet another knowledge gap - state-specific historical approaches to non-federal match. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) was used to identify conditions that interact and work together (conjunctural causation) to influence the outcome and describe multiple causal pathways (equifinality) to state success. It specifically allowed for testing for necessary and sufficient conditions and combinations of conditions. Only one condition tested here was found to be necessary for success – minimizing budget cuts to higher education during time of recession. No state that significantly cut higher education budgets in the Great Recession increased their research competitiveness as defined here. Providing strong and consistent match (reflecting the nature of match) and match primarily as cash match rather than in-kind (reflecting the source of match) were both highly relevant success factors, particularly in small non-metropolitan states. Other paths included having university leadership that is supportive of the non-federal match. In fact, most of the causal pathways to success involved some measures of financial resource capacity and or supportive leadership – crucial drivers of success in most states. More paths to success are presented in the thesis. This work makes a significant evidence-based contribution to the national discourse. It may be of particular interest to leaders and policy makers at both the state and federal levels with attention to the growth or decline of higher education research. The study also demonstrates that combining realist evaluation with QCA offers a powerful, but currently underutilized, approach to understand this and many other aspects of the effectiveness of EPSCoR and other complex programs in the U.S.
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