Higher education and ‘marketization of intellect’: university admission advertisements from a genre perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent years have witnessed drastic changes in the priorities of higher education institutions due to evolving market ethos in academia. The trend has resulted in the hybridization of academic genres, impacting their generic structure and communicative purpose/s. This paper uses discourse analysis to qualitatively investigate admission advertisements as a case to witness the impact of corporate culture and marketization on academic genres. The framework of genre analysis is used to uncover the rhetorical strategies for fulfilling informational and promotional goals. A ten-move structure establishes private universities as comparatively more promotional, while public universities increasingly follow the ways to capture the ‘market’. The results affirm the adoption of corporate trends in Pakistani universities. The discovered move-patterning has implications for the higher education sector across the globe. The in-depth generic knowledge thus gained can act as a resource for the expert members of academia to bring reforms to the existing academic culture.