Legislator School Ties and State Funding for Higher Education

This study explores a new mechanism to understand state funding for public colleges and universities by leveraging data on the educational experiences of state legislators, specifically if and where they received postsecondary education. Using novel, hand-collected data from 2002 through 2014, the authors provide comprehensive documentation for the first time in the literature on the educational backgrounds of state legislators.

The authors find a statistically significant, positive association between the share of legislators who attended their states' public institutions and state funding for their entire public higher-education system. They also find a similar positive relationship between the share of state legislators who attended particular campuses of the state's public university system and funding for those campuses. This relationship is more pronounced among publicly educated legislators who represent legislative districts close to their alma mater's district, and becomes most consequential when the legislator's district contains his or her alma mater.