New Mexico

New Mexico is heavily invested in its performance based funding policy, championed by Governor Martinez following her election to office in 2011. Much of the support for this policy is cited as being due to the state’s chronically low numbers of college-educated population. In fact, between 1990 and 2010 New Mexico ranked 50th out of 50 states with regard to “improvement of the proportion of the population with a college degree.”1 In collaboration with College Complete America and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, the state set out to rectify this problem by developing a set of performance metrics aimed at increasing the overall number of undergraduate degrees and certificates, increasing the number of financially at-risk graduates (i.e., closing the achievement gap), and increasing the number of graduates with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEMH) degrees. 2012 marked the performance funding policy’s inaugural year.2