The public's demand for accountability will have a significant impact on research universities' revenue resources in the future. Driving the demand is a perceived lack of institutional productivity. Undergraduate students' graduation rates represent one product of public research universities. States have already latched onto these rates as a measure of institutional performance; and as a result, states have provided a basis for public research universities to use the relationship between dollars invested in the institution and undergraduate students' graduation rates to respond to accountability issues. Current research provides little insight into this relationship. Research in this study uses concepts from the higher education production function, the resource dependency theory, and the Principal-Agent Model to investigate undergraduate students' four-year and six-year graduation rates as an institutional product. The research provides a greater degree of transparency into the relationship between dollars invested in public research universities and undergraduate students' graduation rates than has previously been shown. As a result of this relationship analysis, the research enables the development of a model for predicting undergraduate student graduation rates relative to dollars invested in the institution from different sources.

Service-learning, with a longstanding history in American higher education (Burkhardt & Pasque, 2005), includes three key tenets: superior academic learning, meaningful and relevant community service, and persistent civic learning (McGoldrick and Ziegert, 2002). The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has created an elective classification system – Carnegie Community Engagement Classification – for institutions of higher education to demonstrate the breadth and depth of student involvement and learning through partnerships and engagement in the community (Dalton & Crosby, 2011; Hurtado & DeAngelo, 2012; Kuh et al., 2008; Pryor, Hurtado, Saenz, Santos, & Korn, 2007). Community engagement "is in the culture, commonly understood practices and knowledge, and (CCEC helps determine) whether it is really happening – rhetoric versus reality" (J. Saltmarsh, personal communication, August 11, 2014). The study considers the applications of three Carnegie Community Engagement Classification designated institutions to understand the institutionalization of service-learning over time by examining the 2008 designation and 2015 reclassification across institution types – a Private Liberal Arts College, a Private Teaching University, and a Public Research University located in the same metropolitan area. Organizational Change Theory was used as a theoretical model. Case study methodology was used in the present qualitative research to perform document analysis with qualitative interviews conducted to elucidate the data from the 2008 and 2015 CCEC applications from the three institutions. Using intra- and inter-comparative analysis, this study highlights approaches, policies, ethos, and emerging concepts to inform how higher education institutions increase the quality and quantity of service-learning opportunities that benefit higher education practitioners as well as community leaders.