Economic development has assumed enlarged importance in public postsecondary education in recent decades. In fact, efforts to harness academic functions for statewide economic growth have been accentuated to such a degree that some consider the mission to be the fourth pillar of public higher education. Yet the extent to which economic development has been adopted as a central administrative feature of public institutions and how this has changed over time are unexamined in the current literature. Moreover, what drives the prioritization of economic development as an administrative focus in public postsecondary institutions is also unexplored. The authors explore these questions by deploying an event history analysis in concert with the neo-institutional and strategic action fields theoretical frameworks. The authors’ findings reveal that economic development has been progressively emphasized by public universities and that a variety of institutional and environmental factors appear to influence the mission’s accentuation.

在最近的几十年中，经济发展在公立中学后教育中已变得越来越重要。实际上，利用学术职能来促进全州经济增长的努力已被强调到某种程度，以至于有人认为该使命是公立高等教育的第四大支柱。然而，在当前文献中，还没有研究经济发展在多大程度上被用作公共机构的中央管理特征，以及经济发展如何随着时间而改变。此外，还没有探索将经济发展作为公共高等教育机构的行政重点的优先次序。作者通过与新制度和战略行动领域的理论框架相结合的事件历史分析来探索这些问题。