Dennis Jones, of NCHEMS, seems to be all over the place. We've seen him recently at a SCUP board meeting, at the second Action Analytics Symposium, at SCUP-45, and now he has this piece in The New England Journal of Higher Education:

In all states, state governments decide how much of their budget goes to direct support of institutions and how much to student financial aid. In some states, elected officials also set (or must approve) tuition levels; in others, tuition policy is within the purview of institutional governing boards. Legislatures also affect institutional finances by mandates regarding the use of institutional resources devoted to student financial aid. In some cases, this takes the form of requiring that institutions waive tuition for certain groups of students (war veterans, families of protective service personnel killed in the line of duty, etc). In other cases, states put limits on the use of tuition waivers.

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Given the lack of attention given to alignment of the pieces, the fact that different policies are often the responsibility of different decision-making groups, and the different constituencies that line up behind different parts of the policy framework, it is little wonder that coherent policy is hard to achieve. The secret is aligning policy with goals; if this can be accomplished, aligning the various components with one another other becomes much easier.