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.
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