Evaluating a university’s investment in arts programming on student arts participation

ABSTRACT

An individual’s level of education has the strongest relationship with his or her arts participation. What is unclear, however, is why high-educated individuals are more likely to participate in the arts. Economic models indicate that price, income, and background are relevant to attendance, but the role these factors play among high-educated groups, like college students, remains underexplored. This study sheds light on what makes college students more likely to participate in the arts by evaluating a university’s investment in arts programming on campus. We analyse data from an experiment in which a university made substantial investments in arts programming largely centred on increasing access to the arts by providing more free programmes. Using pre- and post-intervention survey data, we analyse changes in students’ reported level of arts participation and barriers to arts involvement. The results from our analyses show that background, such as familiarity and experience in the arts, is the strongest predictor of increased arts participation among college students when prices are reduced.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts participation
• accessibility
• impact
• higher education
• arts socialization
• programme evaluation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the feedback we received on drafts of this paper from participants at the Center for Cultural Affairs 2019 Research Workshop and anonymous reviewers. We also thank the Center for Survey Research, Survey Committee, and the Arts & Humanities Council at Indiana University Bloomington for their assistance with collecting data for this study.

Funding details

This project was supported in part or in whole by an award from the Research: Art Works programme at the National Endowment for the Arts: Grant# 17-3800-7015. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of the Office of Research & Analysis or the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information included in this paper and is not responsible for any consequence of its use.

Notes on contributors

Jessica Sherrod Hale is a doctoral candidate at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include public and non-profit management, leadership, organizational change, programme evaluation, and education policy.

Joanna Woronkowicz is an assistant professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, co-founder and Director of Institutional Advancement at the Center for Cultural Affairs, and co-director at the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab. Her research interests include arts policy and management.

ORCID

Jessica Sherrod Hale http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5455-9609

Joanna Woronkowicz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0501-9478

Notes

1 See Nagel and Ganzeboom (2015) for a recent literature review on arts socialization.

2 See The Bicentennial Strategic Plan for Indiana University Bloomington at https://provost.indiana.edu/doc/IUB-Bicentennial-Strategic-Plan.pdf – specifically, objectives 2 and 6.

3 A portion of these funds was used for renovating the campus arts museum ($15 million), externally funded research programmes in the arts and humanities, and several ongoing initiatives as outlined in the strategic plan. For example, the university started to invest in expanded curricular offerings in the arts after 2018 and building a Center for Arts & Humanities, both of which took place after the period of study.

4 The university closed a major art museum for renovations between the wave 1 and wave 2 surveys. To account for possible declines in participation from students no longer attending the museum, we adjusted our estimates of non-participation using wave 1 data of students reporting that they attended the art museum. The adjusted difference in participation was not significant and therefore we do not report the adjusted estimates.