Research Forum 2002

Mario Martinez
New Mexico State University

A View of the Market through Studies of Policy and Governance

Higher education scholars have used traditional concepts from economics and business as a springboard to understand what the market means in higher education. Our purpose was to look at higher education governance and policy itself to formulate insights about the market. We rely on two avenues to accomplish this: 1) a review of the higher education literature relevant to the notion of market, and 2) case studies from two states that investigated the linkage between higher education and performance. A synthesis of the literature, in combination with supplementary evidence from the case studies, gave rise to a new conception of how the higher education market might be defined.