The Politics of Designing Tuition-Free College: How Socially Constructed Target Populations Influence Policy Support

As tuition-free college policies spread rapidly across the states, an increasingly important policy debate has emerged regarding the optimal policy design of tuition-free college. However, existing scholarly evidence has focused almost exclusively on student outcomes, leaving the political decision-making processes among the public and policymakers unexamined. In this article, I leverage a nationally representative survey experiment and policy design theory to explore the power of social constructions of target populations in shaping a cornerstone of politically feasible tuition-free college—public opinion. In line with theoretical expectations, the analysis reveals that including a minimum high school GPA requirement increased support for tuition-free college, while targeting benefits to low-income families reduced perceptions of fairness, relative to a universal policy design. The findings also reveal that the effect of policy design on public perceptions of tuition-free college is moderated by region and age. Together, these findings reveal how a nationally representative sample of the public view the key policy design debates on tuition-free college and demonstrate the importance of social constructions of target populations for the study of higher education policy processes.