SUNY Albany

Graduate Student, Education Administration and Policy Studies

School of Education-Department of Educational Administration & Policy Studies

Thesis Title: Measuring Entrepreneurship in the Academic Heartland

About

My research on entrepreneurship in higher education focuses on research-parks, the impact of increased collaboration of higher education, government, and the private sector (known as the triple-helix), and organizational adaptations to a rapidly changing external environment. Specifically, by measuring the quantitative change in programmatic offerings, I am seeking to uncover how entrepreneurship manifests itself in academic units and disciplines. 

Relying on strong conceptual and theoretical foundations, and quantitative, secondary source data, my dissertation explores the nuances of entrepreneurship in higher education.  I emphasize the use of quantitative analysis to understand how institutions are entrepreneurial in different ways.  This is accomplished by constructing new, timely, and innovative measurements of institutional adaptations to new opportunities, growing oversight, changing funding sources, and diversifying influences. 

Using the databases made available from National Center for Educational Statistics, and Patent and Trademark data available from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, my current research detects relationships between the changes in total core revenues, academic-oriented expenses, and patent assignments within institutions. A research paper based on this work was accepted for presentation at the 35th Annual Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference, which is currently under review by the Journal of Higher Education Finance.  This study revealed notable significant findings.  These included negative correlations between changes in total core revenues and academic-oriented expenses, and significantly different revenue and expense patterns based on institutional characteristics.  This finding was based on a series of ANOVA analyses, which used institutional categorization and classification frameworks such as Carnegie classification Basic, Institution Size, and Sector to determine if institutions were responding to a changing environment in different ways.  The findings that institutions were not using growing revenues to increase academic-oriented expenses echoes the concern that more entrepreneurial institutions may be shifting priorities away from the academic core towards revenue generating activities.  In addition, the findings demonstrate how institutional identities and characteristics matter to how academic capitalism functions. 

My dissertation is an attempt to quantify the impact academic capitalism has on the entrepreneurial university. Specifically, I am seeking to uncover how entrepreneurship manifests itself in the academic enterprise.  This is being accomplished by measuring quantitative changes in degree conferrals, which can serve as measures of entrepreneurship within academic units and disciplines. By using techniques that include correlation, and regression analyses, it was determined that institutional characteristics explain the variance in entrepreneurial activity within the academy.  To support these measurements of entrepreneurship, analyses were undertaken to identify how institutions may be experimenting with their programmatic offerings to reflect an evolving set of market demands, oversight pressures, and societal expectations. 

Key findings include that institutions demonstrate differences in entrepreneurial activity based on numerous institutional characteristics, which include Carnegie classification-Basic, Institution Size, Sector, and Carnegie classification-Undergraduate Instructional Program Profile.  Additionally, institutions are adapting their programmatic offerings in such a way that reflects a shift from liberal, to practical arts. This research has earned me a fellowship at the Association for Institutional research (AIR).  There, I will work directly with the people who design the databases I use to define and study entrepreneurship, and learn advanced techniques that will allow for deeper exploration.  Promising lines of inquiry include:  1) Creating and refining new quantitative constructs of entrepreneurship in higher education that are timely, and conceptually sound, 2) Exploring how, and why institutions demonstrate different entrepreneurial activity based on their unique traits, 3) Further analysis of transformations in curriculum, and how such changes relate to shifts in market demands, 4) Projecting future entrepreneurial activity based on the findings of previous research, and 5) Determining the impact that economic, and research and development policies have on the university, and vice versa. 

The controversy regarding the promise and peril of entrepreneurship in higher education has inspired me to address the issue.  My current and past works have continued to craft measurements and definitions that help reveal the impact of entrepreneurship on the academy.  In the near term, my goals include furthering the development of operational definitions of entrepreneurship.  Secondly, by illustrating that different institutions adapt and evolve in diverse ways with these measurements, I hope that broad national, and international levels of analysis can be undertaken.  Such studies will help to reveal how institutions interact with a more global, intertwined economy.  My long-term goals include examining the intersections of economic policies, institutional changes, and market demands with one another, allowing me to pursue the creation of a metric to quantify entrepreneurship.  Using National Science Foundation data that identifies R&D expenditures by dollar amount and funding source, Patent and Trademark data that identifies the number of patent assignments per institution, and data provided by the National Center for Educational Statistics that detail degree conferrals, I intend to quantify the total entrepreneurial activity of an institution. 

My research agenda advances the study of entrepreneurship in higher education by: 1) Understanding how institutions are entrepreneurial in different ways by providing clear, contextual definitions of entrepreneurship that advance beyond its current limitations, 2) Doing so in such a way that focuses on the act of change within academic units and disciplines, or as my dissertation frames it; entrepreneurship in the academic heartland, 3) Using robust methodologies, and multivariate, quantitative tools to advance measurements of entrepreneurship, and 4) Reframes organizational entrepreneurship on the process of change, rather than its outcomes.  This line of research will help identify the impacts that institutional characteristics have on entrepreneurship, and the social, political, and economic implications of these entrepreneurial actions. 

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