Affiliated Nonprofit Organizations: Strategic Action and Research Universities

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the growing number of affiliations between research universities and the “affiliated nonprofit organizations” (ANPOs) that exist to support them. We posit that universities’ increasing ties to ANPOs represent strategic responses to unfavorable environmental conditions. In other words, it is likely that the practice of affiliating with many ANPOs reflects an institution’s position within the field of research universities. Panel regression results indicate that the practice of affiliating with large numbers of ANPOs is associated with particular indicators of field position (e.g., tuition revenues for public universities and research spending for private universities). These results indicate that universities that were relative incumbents were more likely to affiliate with ANPOs than were either low-status or the highest-status institutions. The paper concludes with implications for research on institutional stratification, university management, and the nature and role of ANPOs in US universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Foundations
• organizational affiliations
• organizational field
• research universities

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this work was presented at the Association for the Study of Higher Education Annual Meeting (2014, Washington, DC). The authors are grateful to Sheila Slaughter, Christopher Morphew, and two anonymous The Journal of Higher Education reviewers for their thoughtful comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Additional information on how ANPOs are defined can be found in the Methods section.

2. We created a database of this information from the IRS 990 form for each organization. We obtained the organization name from the address information provided in Part C; the mission and/or purpose from Part 1, Line 1 and/or Part 3, Line 1; and the program services descriptions from Part 3, Lines 4a, 4b, and 4c.

3. These two criteria were mutually reinforcing for the overwhelming majority of cases; if there was a contradiction (e.g., an endowment organization that did not solely support the university, such as a system-level foundation), all three team members discussed and generally chose in favor of the first criterion (i.e., if the nonprofit supported organizations other than the university or in addition to the university, it was excluded).

Additional information

Funding

This material was based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1262522. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.