Over the past several years, public higher education, both in the U.S. and internationally, has increasingly been required to explain, defend, and validate its performance and value to a wide variety of constituents, including governors, legislators, students, parents, employers, and taxpayers. In addition, in 2006, then U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings formed the bipartisan Commission on the Future of Higher Education that looked at the problems of higher education. Among those problems the Commission addressed was the absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students. This focus on "accountability" led to the development of a continuum of performance-oriented mechanisms ranging from higher education "report cards" to performance-based funding for public colleges and universities. However, the current wave of performance-based funding is quite different from that of a decade ago. State higher education leaders have begun to link calls for additional funding to increased accountability and increased efficiency of operations. One of the main differences between performance-based funding then and now is the change in the focus from meeting the needs of higher education to meeting the needs of students, the state, and its economy. (Contains 3 tables and 11 endnotes.)