Abstract
The field of education has experienced numerous shifts, including internationalization, greater competitiveness and collaboration, and globalization. Today, higher education branding has become a common trend. To differentiate themselves in the business world, universities apply different branding techniques and this study aims to examine how some Saudi universities advertise themselves. Incorporating Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study analyzes the “About Us” sections of seven Saudi universities’ websites to explore the rhetorical moves and discursive strategies employed for marketization purposes. The selected universities all featured in the top 1000 universities in the QS World University Rankings 2020. The results show diversity in these universities’ choices of implemented rhetorical moves and sub-moves. They used eight rhetorical moves and 13 sub-moves, with only one of these sub-moves occurring on all seven universities’ websites. The discursive strategies were employed to foster self-promotion, while the results demonstrated that the “About Us” sections of all universities were promotional. Finally, some recommendations are provided for universities for marketization purposes if they want to be global and compete with other international universities in the higher education market, in addition to providing suggestions for future studies.
Highlights
Universities’ role used to be to retain their esteemed reputation and contribute to society by dissipating awareness, and the single and worthy goal of higher education was to establish non-utilitarian awareness, promote human growth, and generate great scholars (Askehave, 2007; Kwong, 2000; Zhang, 2017)
The medium by which universities communicate with prospective students has changed over time
The findings demonstrated that the websites use promotional discourse, and this was attributed to the effect of marketization and globalization
Summary
Universities’ role used to be to retain their esteemed reputation and contribute to society by dissipating awareness, and the single and worthy goal of higher education was to establish non-utilitarian awareness, promote human growth, and generate great scholars (Askehave, 2007; Kwong, 2000; Zhang, 2017). International study is available to all, and the number of colleges and universities has increased. Osman (2008) claims that colleges and universities began advertising to make themselves more appealing and interesting to national and international students for the purpose of encouraging prospective students to apply. To succeed in this environment of strong competition among higher education institutes, universities are implementing several techniques and approaches to satisfy students’ needs, one of which is to use their websites to offer relevant information to prospective students. The medium by which universities communicate with prospective students has changed over time. The information provider must provide the information that meets the needs of the information receiver. Symonenko (2007) states that “there has been a trend towards greater similarity, or conventionalization, in the organization of website content” (p. 4), perhaps because such similarity helps users to navigate and explore the website
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