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Vol.1 , No. 1, Publication Date: Mar. 10, 2018, Page: 6-10
 colleges and universities create and maintain a distinctive identity in an effort to build legitimacy towards their status and attract students and thus revenue. The approach utilizes Discourse Analysis (DA) to examine the language on the institutional official websites since institutional websites are increasingly important to the admissions and marketing practices of colleges and universities due to their ability to rapidly communicate a significant amount of content to a vast audience. The findings suggest that colleges and universities hold a significant amount of control over the information the visitor has access to on their website. Additionally, the authors found that this content control has led to a reduced sharing of scholarly material associated with higher education while the intangibles available to the prospective student are now at the forefront of representations on the websites studied. The results of this study will be very useful to educational leaders when making policy decisions related to marketing and recruitment.&picture=http://www.aascit.org/aascit/decorators/img/journal/932.jpg)
| [1] | Jeremy Leach, Department of Informatics, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, USA. |
| [2] | Sridhar Ramachandran, Department of Informatics, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, USA. |
In this research work the authors examine how colleges and universities use language to represent themselves on their institutional official websites. The authors study and report about how some (local to their geographic location) colleges and universities create and maintain a distinctive identity in an effort to build legitimacy towards their status and attract students and thus revenue. The approach utilizes Discourse Analysis (DA) to examine the language on the institutional official websites since institutional websites are increasingly important to the admissions and marketing practices of colleges and universities due to their ability to rapidly communicate a significant amount of content to a vast audience. The findings suggest that colleges and universities hold a significant amount of control over the information the visitor has access to on their website. Additionally, the authors found that this content control has led to a reduced sharing of scholarly material associated with higher education while the intangibles available to the prospective student are now at the forefront of representations on the websites studied. The results of this study will be very useful to educational leaders when making policy decisions related to marketing and recruitment.
Keywords
Discourse Analysis, Discourse and Power, Higher Education Website Policy
Reference
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