A Critical Discourse Analysis of Financial Aid Staff Perceptions

• In Event: Tangles of Difference: Transnational and Transgenerational Curriculum Relationalities

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives: The recent conversation around race-blind admissions is not new to higher education (AERA, 2023). In both higher education and K-12, equity hides behind the mask of equal treatment. Equal treatment also manifests at the material level. Like admission to elite institutions, financial aid policy—the mechanism by which low-income students use governmental funding to subsidize the costs of higher education—walks the razor’s edge of implicitly acknowledging the impacts of structural racism at the level of the student while being unable to acknowledge it explicitly due to current jurisprudence (Wilkinson, 2005). Financial aid policies are implemented at the local level by financial aid staff, administrators tasked with policy explanation and determination of institutional awards (Lange & Stone, 2001). While seemingly neutral on the surface, the perception financial aid staff have of students can lead to inequitable, racist outcomes in practice. It can be a cover for race-blind policy carried out in a discriminatory manner.

Methods & Data Sources: To illustrate this mechanism in practice, I draw on 13 years of the Journal of Student Financial Aid–financial aid staff members’ trade publication from their professional organization, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. In these pages, the staff members write to each other about research, tips, tricks, advice, and their opinions regarding students. I chose the period of 1965¬–1978 due to its similarity to the contemporary moment. In both periods, a major educational policy change went into effect, namely the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 that allowed both grant and loan availability for low-income students (Fuller, 2014) and the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and v. University of North Carolina that banned outright consideration of race in admission to elite institutions while still allowing for the discussion of its impacts in a feat of legalistic sleight-of-hand (Totenburg, 2023), in what Author (2005) might term a “working difference” in the concepts (p. 180).

Sample Results: In one 1972 piece, a financial aid administrator argued when explaining the difference in aid budgets between Black and White students: “[Black students] attempt to rationalize all the wrong doing that has befallen their race by loading themselves down with an abundancy of clothing, living in apartments or other areas that are above their means as a student, and acquiring a car which, for many, is the first real materialism they have experienced” (Saurman, p. 25). I wonder how this overt racism manifested covertly at the level of individual student experiences in financial aid interactions.

Significance: I will illustrate what the Call for Proposals described as an omission of examination of race and racism in education research, policy, and practice in the historical record. Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (Burt & Baber, 2018; Reisgl & Wodak, 2016; Wodak, 2011), I show how the seeming race-neutrality of staff members’ commentary can hide discriminatory, patronizing, and exclusionary views that could harm students past and present.

Author

• Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley, Baylor University