Framing College Affordability Across the Ideological Divide

• In Event: The Rise of Partisanship in Higher Education Policymaking

Abstract

During the 2016 presidential primaries, college affordability became a central policy issue, especially for Democrats (Pasquale, 2015). Highlighting the salience of this issue, presidential candidates across party lines (i.e., Sanders, Clinton, Rubio, and Trump) advanced proposals related to college affordability. These candidates all agreed that college was not affordable; yet, their proposed solutions differed considerably, particularly across party lines.

Beyond these conspicuous examples, we know little about the degree to which college affordability is an ideological issue. Addressing this void, this study examines how groups that are distinctly progressive or conservative (based on their stated values) frame the issue of college affordability. Our data comprise a corpus of text (n=224 documents published between 2008 and 2014) acquired from state-level ideological think tanks’ websites. We focus on the five states where ideological think tanks are most engaged in higher education (Ness & Gándara, 2014). Using these data, we employ framing analysis to examine how conservative and progressive groups frame the issue of college affordability. Framing analysis focuses on how individuals define a problem (diagnostic framing) and propose policy solutions (prognostic framing) (Benford & Snow, 2000; Cress & Snow, 2000). We anchor this study in the advocacy-coalition framework, according to which policy actors unite around overlapping beliefs, building coalitions (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). As such, we group progressive and conservative think tanks in two separate coalitions based on their stated values. Specifically, we examine: (1) how progressive and conservative think tanks framed the issue of college affordability; and (2) the degree to which these two coalitions’ framing of college affordability diverged.

Our results reveal limited overlap in framing across the progressive and conservative coalitions (e.g., support for financial aid). We also found stark distinctions across the coalitions (e.g., conservative groups assign blame to colleges and universities; progressive groups point to government disinvestment in higher education). Regarding within-coalition variation, we found more variability in framing within the conservative block than with their progressive counterparts. By focusing on think tanks that are inherently ideological, this study provides unique insights into differences between progressives and conservatives on a pressing issue in higher education, college affordability.

Authors

• Denisa Gandara, Southern Methodist University

• Erik Ness, University of Georgia