Who Deserves Benefits in Higher Education? A Policy Discourse Analysis of a Process Surrounding Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act

Abstract

This study examines policy discourse surrounding a policy process to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, the most significant federal policy concerning higher education, a decade following the previous reauthorization. Guided by the theory of social construction and policy design, we draw on data from 14 hours of deliberation in a congressional hearing and employ policy discourse analysis. The findings shed light on which populations policymakers address in their discourse, how they portray various groups as deserving or undeserving of policy benefits, how they rationalize the alloca-An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the 2018 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. We thank Taylor Cox for her outstanding research assistance in this study.Denisa Gándara is an assistant professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University. Her research examines higher education policy, politics, and finance with a focus on the implications of policy for historically underserved populations.

Understanding Higher Education Bill Success in the United States Congress

“…Most people think the Higher Education Act is about student aid and affordability. But the legislation addresses and includes … many other complicated 2 This finding aligns with the literature on the social construction of target populations, which observes that policymakers conceptualize some groups-such as higher education students-as more deserving of policy benefits, making it easier for legislators to support policies that benefit those groups (Gándara & Jones, 2020;Schneider & Ingram, 1993).…”

“…In 2017, when the HEA was years past due for reauthorization and the Republican party controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress, the House Education and the Workforce Committee considered a Republican-sponsored bill to reauthorize the HEA. Introduced by then-chair of the House education committee Representative Virginia Foxx, the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform Act (PROSPER Act) was a comprehensive bill that, among other things, would deregulate for-profit higher education, simplify the FAFSA, eliminate some forms of financial aid while expanding the federal work-study program, and provide performance accountability requirements for MSIs (Gándara & Jones, 2020;Kreighbaum, 2017b). The PROSPER Act passed the Education and Workforce Committee without Democratic support, and no action was taken on it thereafter (Congress.gov, n.d.-a;Kreighbaum, 2018a).…”

“…Case-study bills that lacked widespread support from the higher education lobby-that is, associations representing the interests of higher education institutions in Washington, D.C.-went unenacted. Lack of higher education's support was a key characteristic of the Republican PROSPER Act, which most of the higher education lobby strongly opposed (see also Gándara & Jones, 2020;Kreighbaum, 2017b). An association representative and former congressional staffer told me, "The entire higher education community did not support" that bill because "it would have dramatically cut back student access to loans, to grants, would have cut a lot of programs. "…”

Democratic Backsliding and the Balance Wheel Hypothesis: Partisanship and State Funding for Higher Education in the United States

“…Angry Republican voters often express hostility toward higher education as "too liberal," a result consistently found in public polling (Fingerhut, 2017;Gallup, 2017) and academic research (Johnson and Peifer, 2017). As Gándara and Jones (2020) have shown, framing beneficiaries as "deserving" or "undeserving" is a key lever for higher education policy formation and enactment-or for opposing such policies. Such approaches to governing do not appear to make sense in a context where participation in higher education is widespread, even on the political Right (Cantwell and Taylor, 2020).…”

Gender and higher education in African universities: A critical discourse analysis of key policy mandates in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda

“…Additionally, we summarize this information in Table 3. Drawing from the CDA studies of George Mwangi et al (2018) and Gándara and Jones (2020) as our examples, we developed a two-stage process to analyze these documents to understand how social (in)equity, power, and dominance were expressed through the discourse.…”