Expectations in Higher Education

The public has high expectations of education, especially in post-graduate environments. Colleges and universities do more than teach young people to recite facts; they teach them new ways to think. These institutions have the distinct function of building the next generation of citizens. Student protestors are often met with conflicted responses from the general public. Students are taught to be free thinkers but can quickly cross the line into forming negative public opinions. Further research is needed to examine the potential impact of the protest paradigm on framing student protests on college campuses. 

The Possibilities of Student News Coverage 

Student journalism presents an alternative form of media that speaks directly to the environment in which reporters belong. For the purpose of this research, student journalism describes students who write for their college’s newspaper. They do not necessarily need to be majoring in a related field. Some papers pay students for their work, others offer class credit, and some offer neither. The audiences addressed by campus newspapers is also varied. 

Student journalists often rely on personal networks and social capital to find stories, sources, and expand their audiences. As the media continues to focus on protest activity at college campuses, research is needed to understand how framing may operate at different levels of the media– from national outlets to local coverage to student papers.

Heath and Lowrey hypothesized that social trust would form a social safety net for journalists to report on contentious issues. Their mixed method approach of surveying student editors and nationwide content analysis of US student papers. Results contradicted their hypothesis as data instead alluded that the higher the newsroom social capital, the more likely the paper would take on a “safer” role as disseminator. Additional research is needed to confirm this finding (Heath and Lowrey 2021).