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Marketing higher education online
Over the past 15 years, the National University of Singapore’s website has changed dramatically. But it’s not just new technology that’s been driving the changes. Two scholars argue that the main force behind the radical revamp is the on-going marketization of higher education, as “universities morph into corporate entities”.
Yiquong Zhang and Kay L. O’Halloran examined six different versions of the NUS homepage from 1998 to 2012. They studied the text as well as the colours, images, hypertext, typography and layout used, and reveal their findings in the current issue of Critical Discourse Studies.
During their research, Zhang and O’Halloran discovered that the evolution of the NUS website was about more than just giving the site a visual overhaul. They write that redesigns were “one part of the process of aligning the university ever more closely alongside a set of ideas and values where universities are not based on sound traditions of knowledge, free thinking, the discipline of study, intellectual challenges, and mentoring by scholars, but around more abstract concepts and ideas that represent the values of managerialism and consumer capitalism.”
One particularly telling change to the homepage was the noticeable expansion of navigation content “not centred on educational purposes”. Other subtle changes, such as the angle from which pictures were taken, also contributed to selling NUS more as a “lifestyle and experience, as the university moves toward [being] a global knowledge enterprise.”
Zhang and O’Halloran conclude that “promotional discourse has come to dominate both the reading and navigational dimensions of the NUS homepage”. It has gone from being a useful tool for providing students with information about educational resources, “to promoting the university as a desired environment for students to obtain a degree as the end result, removed from actual processes of learning, the rewards of hard study, and the mentorship of scholars.”
While producing visually enticing websites, this marketization also places “unbearable demands” on universities to maintain both academic standards and “customer satisfaction”. In the authors’ view it also gradually undermines “the mission of higher education as transformation of individuals through learning.”
As university websites come to both reflect and reinforce a growing corporate culture, whether they’ll ever again focus on the education itself may take more than another refresh.
* Read the full article online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2013.813777#.UoyawtJSjeQ
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