Political, Socioeconomic and Demographic Patterns of Support for Public Higher Education

ECAUSE higher education is an important output of state political systems and because the great majority of professional students of politics are employed by colleges and universities,' it is surprising that this area of public policy has been left generally unexplored by political scientists.2 Instead, the topic has been left largely to those in colleges of education and to a number of scholars from a wide scattering of disciplines. But aside from the intrinsic significance of the subject, it is even more important for those interested in public policy to seek out the correlates and causes of financial support in this