Public sentiment is crucial to the overall wellbeing of higher education. Recent polls point to a growing divide between the public and academia, as well as waning confidence in the necessity of higher education. And yet, polls tell us relatively little about how the various publics think and feel about our nation's colleges and universities. People's actual unfiltered thoughts, words, and conversations tell us more. With the advent of the internet and the ease at which people can in an instant transmit, view, and infect opinions worldwide, we now have an unprecedented ability via the digital public sphere to investigate and understand people's emotionally charged opinions. The number one reason people post online news comments is to express an opinion or an emotion, and yet researchers have largely ignored this rich online data source. While not a mainstream form of dialogue, online comments represent a backchannel into the conversations of digital publics. The purpose of my dissertation was to investigate online news comments to learn what they might tell us about the conversations people are having and what they think about higher education. Utilizing a multiple methods approach, I analyzed comments made in response to four news articles pertaining to higher education from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. My findings revealed commenters utilizing the online comments to engage in conversation by asking a multitude of questions, providing evidence to support their claims, and at times, replying to one another. Through these online conversations I distilled opinion themes pertaining to higher education, as well as the overall emotional tone of each forum. Implications for higher education include recognizing online news comments as a mechanism to listen to the concerns and deliberations of the people within its publics, as well as an opportunity to engage with them.
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