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The Adoption of Prepaid Tuition and Savings Plans in the American States: An Event History Analysis

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Abstract

The past two decades have been a period of far-reaching policy experimentation in state financing of higher education. Between 1986 and 1999, 21 states adopted prepaid college tuition plans. Thirty-one states adopted some form of college savings plan. Both kinds of policies were designed to enhance the affordability of higher education during a time of growing concern about college costs. Using event history analysis, we explore various factors leading to the programs’ adoption, paying particular to the role of policy privatization, electoral competition and timing, and certain system characteristics of higher education. We find that more liberal governments were more likely to adopt prepaid tuition plans, that states with more competitive elections were less likely to adopt any type of prepaid or savings plan, and that states with decentralized governance were more likely to adopt one of these kinds of policies.

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Notes

  1. Within a short period of time following this change in the federal tax code advantaging contributions to the programs, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had created their own version of a prepaid tuition or savings program.

  2. We collected information on the programs from a variety of extant sources, including Roth (1999) and Baird (2006). We then used Lexis–Nexis to search, within each state’s statues, for the year of program adoption and for various other program characteristics to ensure consistency with our operationalized definitions for the policies described elsewhere in the manuscript.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants at the Association for the Study of Higher Education Annual meeting seminar, including James Fairweather, for their comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton PL, Peabody 514, Nashville, TN, 37203, USA

    William R. Doyle & Michael K. McLendon

  2. University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    James C. Hearn

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  1. William R. Doyle
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Correspondence to William R. Doyle.

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Doyle, W.R., McLendon, M.K. & Hearn, J.C. The Adoption of Prepaid Tuition and Savings Plans in the American States: An Event History Analysis. Res High Educ 51, 659–686 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-010-9173-4

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