Cross-Border Policy Diffusion and Discourse: Computational Analysis of Financial Aid Reform in the United States and Canada

• In Event: Poster Session 5
  In Poster Session: Cross-Border Policy Diffusion and Discourse: Computational Analysis of Financial Aid Reform in the United States and Canada

Proposal

The comparative political economy of higher education has long emphasized the international diffusion of tuition and student aid policies (Altbach, 2015; Johnstone & Marcucci, 2010). Existing research documents how models of cost-sharing, income-contingent loans, and tuition-free higher education travel across borders. Yet less attention has been given to the discursive transmission of reforms between closely linked systems. This study addresses that gap by examining the United States and Canada, two federal systems that face parallel challenges of affordability and equity but pursue divergent approaches to program design. By focusing on discursive spillovers, the project highlights how financial aid reforms function not only as domestic interventions but also as cross-border policy signals.
The analysis centers on four pivotal reforms: (1) the U.S. transition to prior–prior year income reporting for the FAFSA (2016), (2) the 2022–23 student loan forgiveness initiative and its subsequent legal challenges, (3) Ontario’s expansion of the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) in 2017 and its retrenchment in 2019, and (4) the temporary increases to federal student grants during the COVID-19 pandemic. These episodes represent “critical junctures” that generated significant national debate and provide opportunities to observe whether, when, and how reforms also shaped discourse across the border.
The study draws on multiple corpora of text, including national newspapers (New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star), government and think tank releases, and social media discourse (#FAFSA, #StudentDebt, #OSAP, #FreeTuition). Using an event study framework, I compare discursive trends in the six months before and after each reform. Natural language processing methods identify key frames — affordability, debt, equity, burden — and measure their salience and sentiment over time, while network analysis maps the organizational and actor-level pathways through which references travel. This computational approach captures both the volume and content of cross-national references, allowing assessment of whether U.S. and Canadian reforms operate as policy signals with discursive spillover effects.
Preliminary expectations are that U.S. reforms, particularly debt forgiveness, will generate stronger spillovers into Canadian discourse than the reverse, reflecting the global visibility of American higher education debates. At the same time, Canadian OSAP reforms may serve as policy reference points in technical or provincial-level conversations within the United States. The analysis also anticipates differences in how equity-oriented versus efficiency-oriented frames travel across borders, raising questions about which discursive framings are most mobile and influential.
By situating U.S. and Canadian student aid reforms within a transnational frame, this study contributes to three strands of scholarship: (1) literature on policy diffusion and borrowing in higher education, by emphasizing discourse as a mechanism of transmission; (2) methodological debates in comparative education, by demonstrating the value of computational approaches such as event studies, NLP, and network analysis; and (3) policy discussions of affordability, by showing how reforms not only shape domestic landscapes but also reconfigure comparative imaginaries of what is possible. Ultimately, financial aid reforms should be understood as part of a cross-border conversation in which discursive signals travel as powerfully as policies themselves.

Author

• Margaret de Leon, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto