Due to concerns about college completion rates and the rising price of higher education, a growing number of states have sought to identify ways to hold public colleges and universities accountable for their outcomes. Despite the wide reach and considerable support of performance-based funding policies throughout the United States, prior research has shown that PBF adoption does not typically lead to improvements in the completion outcomes being incentivized. Additional work has reported that PBF policies can lead to unintended consequences, such as restricting access to higher education for historically underserved students. Given that PBF policies appear to be a firmly entrenched feature of higher education finance, the conversation surrounding PBF must shift from whether PBF systems will persist to how to design and implement more effective, equitable, and evidence-based PBF policies.
