Managing higher education and neoliberal marketing discourses on Why Choose webpages for international students on Australian and British university websites

Current discourses of international student education

International student education is currently being underpinned by several discourses, in particular the ‘trade discourse’ about international student education (e.g. Lomer et al., 2018; Rizvi, 2011; Waters, 2018). This discourse aligns with neoliberal thinking in higher education which views international student education as a service commodity for trade and international students as customers involved in education for individual gain, rather than for the purpose of transformation, truth seeking and the public good (e.g. Chowdhury and Phan, 2014; Tight, 2019). There has been fierce criticism of this approach on moral and ethical grounds. For example, the neoliberal discourse has been critiqued for failing to ask questions about the purpose of engagement of students in higher education (Zepke, 2018). It is argued that the recruitment and education of international students at Western universities is engendered by a Western supremacy view in which international students are charity recipients or consumers of superior Western knowledge (Stein and de Andreotti, 2016).

Comparative perspectives on international education have shed light on how different political and social goals are reflected in policies and practices in international student education in various countries (Hong, 2020; Ma and Zhao, 2018). Critiques have also been made about the compatibility of the business perspective and practices for university. For example, Marginson (2013) argues that capitalist approaches to business management are conflicting with the inherent mechanisms of university operations.

Reflecting the critical discourses in international student education, calls have been made for international student education to orientate to collaborative knowledge production (Rizvi, 2011; Ryan, 2011). According to Arkoudis et al. (2012), international students can be capitalised on to internationalise the education for both international and local students. Also, to educate international students, it has been proposed that Western universities need to consider the different knowledge traditions their international students have been initiated into (Ndhlovu and Kelly, 2020). Ogden et al. (2014) envisage a transcultural education where both international students and their universities have roles and responsibilities to undertake in order to achieve reciprocity or mutual benefits.

There is also an emphasis on international students’ agency and reflexivity in recent research on international student education (Kettle, 2021). To productively engage international students, Kettle (2021) suggested that universities and staff need to listen to their international students’ voice and act responsively. This emphasis is akin to asking for a return to the fundamentals of university, that is, to promote the public good, generate knowledge and transform people (Natale and Doran, 2012), not only in higher education for domestic students, but also in international student education. At a time of unprecedented challenge for international student education, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and counting forces of globalisation, universities and students alike are forced to rethink the purposes, goals and approaches to international student education for the sustainable development of the higher education sector (Stein, 2017; Tran, 2020).

University webpages for multiple purposes

University public communications including university websites, handbooks and prospectuses for international students are important texts in international student education. Studies of university prospectuses indicate a tendency of such texts being marketing discourses (e.g. Askehave, 2007; Ng, 2016). In addition, university public communications are becoming increasingly multimodal (e.g. Tomášková, 2015). Linguistic texts, and increasingly visuals and videos, are used to represent, construe and index marketing and promotion intentions and functions, for example, university as a lifestyle and experience (O’Halloran et al., 2015).

University websites are often reported to be contaminated by neoliberal practices in the world of economics, thus sacrificing the tradition of valuing education per se in exchange for marketing outcomes. For example, marketing the lifestyle rather than academic studies to attract the student-client/consumer is viewed in this light (Gottschall and Saltmarsh, 2017). However, as repositories of multiple webpages, university websites are complex, typically including a host of other landing webpages for various audiences. This study focuses on the ‘Why Choose’ webpage for international students because this site has the distinct purpose of presenting the reasons for choosing the university as the destination of choice for study abroad. This purpose distinguishes this webpage from other university webpages or print prospectuses, thus opening up various challenges for universities. That is, universities may need to speak to the market forces but, as organisations distinct in their tradition and values (Marginson, 2013), they need to maintain these traditions while distinguishing themselves from other higher education institutions and commercial organisations.

Current discussions of engagement of international students seem to gravitate towards treating international students as objects, for example, promoting an employable identity or lifestyle in neoliberal societies to them. They are seldom treated as subjects who are able to make reflexive deliberations (Kahn, 2014; Zepke, 2015). What makes ‘Why Choose’ webpages interesting for this study is that they construct texts which are accompanied by videos of students relating their lives and experiences at the education institution, which may align or contradict universities’ constructions of themselves and their students. An examination of these multimodal constructions and how international students themselves experience and respond to these constructions on ‘Why Choose’ webpages is highly relevant at a time of uncertainty and change in international student education.

Interdiscursivity and management of discourses

Interdiscursivity is a valuable concept for analysing the management of multiple discourses. Fairclough (1993) is often attributed to having initiated the use of this concept in studies of social practices. This concept has also been applied and further developed by Bhatia (2017), who defines interdiscursivity as the appropriation and hybridity of different discourses, genres, modes of communication, and practices for achieving the purposes of professional communication. The concept of interdiscursivity has informed the study of university publications (e.g. Teo and Ren, 2019), which have demonstrated the co-existence of multiple discourses in the construction of multimodal texts, for example, policy and promotional discourses (e.g. Feng, 2019). Interdiscursivity offers an appropriate tool for analysing ‘Why choose’ webpages which are complex multimodal texts. The complexity arises due to the need to respond to multiple purposes attributed to university webpages, for example, marketing for student and staff recruitment and displaying institutional identity (O’Halloran et al., 2015), addressing universities’ organisational goals such as aspirations for excellence and sustainability which make them similar to other business organisations (Giannoni, 2018) as well as universities’ tradition as educational institutions (Natale and Doran, 2012; Zepke, 2015). By using the perspective of interdiscursivity, we are prompted to ask how these different discourses involving business goals and academic traditions are managed in the communication space of the webpage.

Research using the concept of interdiscursivity often uses genre analysis. For example, Askehave (2007) identified the genres in university prospectuses and described their generic structure and lexicogrammatical features. This is useful as the linguistic features are clearly described through the genre analysis conducted on the texts. For our purpose, however, as interdiscursivity concerns diglossia in communication, the concept of engagement, as defined by Martin and Rose (2007), is used instead. From this perspective, engagement refers to the positioning and articulation of self in relation to the other in communication. Engagement may be achieved through a number of linguistic resources, for example, reporting voice, modality, polarity, concession, and causality. Engagement, however, does not rely only on linguistic features. Multimodal features such as gaze, camera angles, colour, layout and framing also contribute to engagement. For example, compositional features such as the top-bottom, left-right arrangement on the page, can cause certain elements to stand out to make them more salient and endow them with specific informational values (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021; van Leeuwen, 2011, 2020). Linguistic and multimodal resources combined are therefore useful analytical tools for identifying different discourses and the way they are introduced on the ‘Why choose’ webpage.

This study is guided by the following three research questions:

Data

The data for this study comes from a wider corpus of studies on university webpages for international students (e.g. Zhang and Tu, 2019; Zhang et al., 2020). In this study we focus on the ‘Why Choose’ webpages of one British university, the University of Liverpool ¹ (UOL), and two Australian universities, Curtin University ² (Curtin) and the University of New England ³ (UNE). Although the three universities are not ranked among the top 100 universities internationally, they enjoy certain prestige domestically and internationally. UOL, for example, is a member of the Russel Group universities in the UK and among the top 200 universities internationally. Likewise, the two Australian universities are not among the top ranked universities domestically or internationally. However, Curtin has a long history as Australia’s first university of technology, and UNE is the oldest university in regional Australia. As the prestige of universities may impact on the way internationalisation is discursively handled (e.g. international student education being marginalised in prevailing discourses at non-elite British universities (Lewin-Jones, 2019)), we selected three universities of considerable prestige each enrolling a sizeable number of international students to investigate how they manage the multiple discourses of international student education on their ‘Why Choose’ webpages.

The webpages were captured using the FireShot screen capture software on 17 July 2020 and 17 May 2021 respectively, originally for the consideration of detecting any possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the universities’ communication with their international students. No difference was detected, which means that the universities have kept this theme page consistent despite the global impact of the pandemic.

Methods of analysis

In this study we follow a content analysis approach by identifying text themes and photographic themes (de Groot et al., 2006). In this approach, text themes are derived from clusters of words and expressions that point to a concept of relevance to the professional communication under question. Similarly, photographic themes are a set of visual features in the images which realise particular concepts. The three university webpages and embedded videos were inductively coded to identify the text and photographic themes. These themes were then compared with the literature on university marketing, for example, Gray et al.’s (2003) student-reported criteria for choosing an overseas university including ‘learning environment’, ‘reputation’, ‘graduate career prospects’, ‘image of destination’ and ‘cultural integration’, as well as Gatfield et al.’s (1999) student-reported criteria for quality including ‘academic instruction’, ‘guidance’ and ‘campus life’. The themes identified were also related to research on the traditions of university (e.g. Askehave, 2007; Natale and Doran, 2012) as the discourse maintaining the university tradition. Figure 1 presents a screenshot of the analysed webpages with theme-based text blocks highlighted. An example of the coding scheme for identifying text themes and photographic themes on the webpages is shown in Figure 2. Through this coding and analysis procedure, we were able to identify the reasons the three universities constructed on their ‘Why Choose’ webpages for their international students to choose them as their destination university.

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Figure 1.

Screenshot of analysed ‘Why Choose’ webpages for international students.

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Figure 2.

Example of coding scheme for text and photographic theme analysis.

Engagement practices were captured by coding the reporting of the university’s ranking or evaluation by external bodies or agencies, such as the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings, the use of modal expressions (such as will, can), polarity (clause expressing a positive or negative statement), mood (e.g. phrasing a clause as a statement, imperative or question), concession (e.g. clause using words such as even, just, rightly to concede other possible points of view). Causative structure was also coded as a feature of engagement, as in the following example on UNE’s ‘Why Choose’ webpage: ‘We work hard to give you the best possible learning and research environments’. In this example, the university and student roles are explicitly constructed, with the university providing and the student receiving/benefitting from the opportunity to learn and research.

While the coding of the textual and pictographic themes provides insight into the various discourses in use on the webpage, the analysis of engagement practices allows us to describe how the universities construct roles and responsibilities for themselves and their international students in relation to the discourses; that is, what reasons are provided by the universities and how the reasons are to be taken on by (prospective) international students.

The accompanying videos were analysed in similar fashion by identifying common themes and multimodal features of engagement in the voice-over narrative and filmic representations, using Multimodal Analysis (MMA) Video ⁴ software. The software permits users to make annotations [1] by selecting a particular system choice (i.e. coding feature) [2] from a list of available choices [3] for a range of multimodal resources [4]. All annotations are time-stamped and synchronised with the portrayed action in the video player [5], the film strip [6], the sound and dialogue strips [7] and the transcript of the voice-over narration [8] (see Figure 3 for illustration).

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Figure 3.

Excerpt of analysis conducted with Multimodal Analysis Video software.

Managing reasons universities give to international students for choosing them interdiscursively

The content analysis of the ‘Why Choose’ webpages yielded a range of reasons the three universities provided to international students for choosing them as the destination university. These reasons and the way they were presented illustrate the universities’ approaches to managing interdiscursivity, in particular the competing discourses of traditional higher education and neoliberal thinking in higher education (see Figure 4 for a comparison of the reasons given by each university and examples of corresponding themes taken up in the accompanying videos). These are detailed in the next two sub-sections.

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Figure 4.

Reasons for choosing each university featured on the ‘Why Choose’ webpages and corresponding themes in accompanying videos.

Themes/reasons featured on the ‘Why Choose’ webpages

On the ‘Why Choose’ webpages, the reasons were clustered to reflect or even foreground different discourses. For example, all three universities include their mission and vision as reasons which invariably encompass learning, research and transformation, even though there exist notable differences between the universities in the specifics of learning, research and transformation each claims to offer. For instance, UOL has the mission of ‘advancement of learning and ennoblement of life’ for not only the individual but also an ‘increasingly complex and challenging world’, while pursuing the vision of transforming life and the world through ‘research and education’. Curtin’s mission has a more practical orientation, that is, to problem-solve through innovation and forward-thinking. UNE offers to make higher education accessible to students and presents the vision of educating graduates to ‘make a real difference in the world’. As learning, research and transformation are advocated to be the core of a Western university (Natale and Doran, 2012), by describing their mission and vision in these terms upfront on their ‘Why Choose’ webpages, the three universities arguably uphold this tradition of university.

Other reasons were clustered around the five factors international students value when deciding on their destination university for study abroad (Gray et al., 2003): Institution reputation (history, recognition in external rankings, range of discipline areas, quality of academic instruction), learning environment (quality of staff in teaching, peer support, extra-curricular activities, campus environment, equity and egalitarianism), employment prospects (graduate employability, support for careers and employment), image of the destination (safe life in the country), and cultural integration (valuing diversity in broader community).

In the case of UOL, below the opening section with the mission and vision descriptions, are five multimodal text blocks (see Figure 1, left), each of which is led by three icons, followed by captions and then a linguistic text. The icons are transparent as their associated meanings are readily available to viewers with some understanding of visual communication (e.g. the icon of an academic hat in text block 1 indicating graduates). The second multimodal text block then portrays possible futures for potential graduates, including further study or joining the white-collar professional workforce (e.g. as suggested by the icon of a tie) akin to Gray et al.’s (2003: 115) ‘graduate career prospects’. For UOL, this also includes the climbing up of the social ladder as suggested by the drawing of a ladder and the explicit caption of ‘UK leader in social mobility’. This future may allude to the mission of ‘ennoblement of life’, indicating the possible intention of infusing the traditional higher education discourse into the marketing neoliberal discourse. It is interesting to note that international students are included in the discussion of social mobility in the UK on UOL’s website.

For Curtin, nine text blocks follow the opening sentence of the ‘Why choose Curtin’ theme page: ‘Curtin University is a vibrant forward-thinking, innovative university where you can move forward in your chosen career’ (see Figure 1, middle). These include three text blocks focussed on the university’s reputation as a quality higher education institution, citing the university’s key strength of offering ‘practical’ internationally recognised courses (text block 4), describing course-and-student goals-commensurate teaching methods (text block 5), and showcasing university and industry connections (text block 6). Another example of Curtin’s marketing practices is that the visuals (images of campus scenes showing a spacious relaxing campus as part of the learning environment Curtin is able to provide; text block 9) complement the verbal messages by conveying a sense of study and life being balanced through laying out text-heavy study-related text blocks above the image of an iconic campus scene at the bottom of the whole webpage.

At UNE, the six text blocks elaborating on the university’s appeal to international students (see Figure 1, right) include reasons of flexibility (in the fourth text block about the on-campus and distance study options) and sufficient support as constituting the learning environment (text blocks 3, 5 and 6, highlighting close student-teacher interaction, English language support, and support and services departments and personnel, respectively).

According to Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) and van Leeuwen (2011, 2020), the compositional value of information arranged along the vertical axis on a page can be interpreted as reflecting the ‘Ideal’ and the ‘Real’. In other words, the Ideal, representing ‘the idealised or generalised essence’ of the information may be found in the upper section of a page or screen, while the Real, placed at the bottom of the page, and contrasting with the Ideal, may present the factual details, documentary evidence, or practical consequences (van Leeuwen, 2011: 677). This is evident in the compositional layout of the reasons on the ‘Why Choose’ webpages of the three universities described immediately above. The missions and visions of the three universities which embed the discourse of the tradition of higher education are presented in the opening paragraph or paragraphs at the top of the webpage, in contrast to the elements of the discourse of neoliberal marketing which are placed at the bottom of the webpage. Metaphorically speaking, the three universities impart the message that the tradition of university is still maintained as the ideal and various student-embodied concerns are recognised as the reality. The two discourses which are often described in the literature as competitive (Natale and Doran, 2012; Zepke, 2015) are shown to be in co-existence on the universities’ ‘Why Choose’ webpages.

What is more revealing is that the three universities are not presenting the two discourses as of equal weight on their ‘Why Choose’ webpages. Using multimodal resources, they tend to give prominence to, or accentuate, the discourse about the tradition of higher education. For example, UOL made its mission statement stand out by displaying it visually saliently through the use of colouring and larger and italic font. The motto ‘For advancement of learning and ennoblement of life’ is eye catching and displayed on the right next to the first two paragraphs as a separate text block of its own, using varied colours to represent key aspects of the mission. The location of the fifth (which is also the last) text block (see Figure 1, left, near bottom; reproduced as Figure 5) on the whole theme page can also be said to enhance the weight to learning, research and transformation as its first and last bullet points explicitly reflect the mission and vision of the university – transforming and ennobling the life of not just the individual but also of the broader community, or public good (Natale and Doran, 2012). That is, elements of the discourse of traditional higher education are infused into the neoliberal marketing discourse and portrayed as the real.

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Figure 5.

Text block 5 on UOL’s (2021) ‘Why Choose’ webpage.

The compositional layout of the ‘Why Choose’ webpages also incorporates a progression from ‘process’ to ‘product’. On Curtin’s webpage, for example, the text blocks cover both the product (employable and well-paid graduates) and process (conducive learning support and environments) of the Curtin experience. Given that the process of ‘Join a global university’ leads the nine text blocks, there is a sense of progression conveyed from choosing the university, going through the magic transforming process and achieving the anticipated outcome of securing well paid professional life. Therefore, the ideal as stated in the opening statement announcing its mission and vision ‘Curtin University is a vibrant forward-thinking, innovative university where you can move forward in your chosen career’ is not a promise but an anticipation implying action by the students; that is, choosing the university and going through the processes described in the ensuing text blocks. Therefore, international students are not constructed as merely receiving what is on offer by the university. Instead, they need to be agentive even to achieve the individual gain.

In other words, giving prominence to the tradition of higher education on the ‘Why Choose’ webpage accentuates this discourse. By incorporating elements of the mission and vision of the university into the reasons for choosing them as the destination of choice, the strategy of infusion of this discourse into the neoliberal marketing discourse is made apparent. The product presented ahead of, and as a result of, the processes indicates progression, which challenges the prevailing conception that international students are treated as objects rather than agentive subjects, as highlighted in the videos and discussed in the following sections.

Engagement practices and interdiscursivity management

The engagement practices through choices of mood, polarity, modality and causative structure on the ‘Why Choose’ webpages put the onus on both the university and the student in the interaction. Rather than being consumers of education as a service, (international) students are portrayed to gravitate towards the traditional university students as (needing to be) agentive learners.

The mood choice between statement and imperative is strikingly purposeful. The opening section and elaborating multimodal text blocks on the three universities’ ‘Why Choose’ webpages feature statements that inform or imperatives that invite viewers/prospective international students to act: Be informed of the university’s tradition, reputation and values as through the opening section, and partake, join or take on roles of discovering and transforming their lives and the broader world in the subsequent text blocks (see Figure 1). For example, UOL positioned its long history, mission of ennobling life and advancing research, and vision of a transformational experience for its students in statement mood on top of the webpage. From a multimodal social semiotic viewpoint, this information is thus presented as the ‘Ideal’. The remainder of the information on the webpage, which features more specific reasons such as university reputation as an international university, graduate employability and learning environment, is then presented as the ‘Real’. These specific reasons are phrased as actions international students are called on to take, and presented in imperative mood. For example, ‘Learn from academics who are leaders in the field’, ‘Play your part in a world where, everyday, new discoveries are changing lives’. The university experience is not to be taken-for-granted but requires individual effort. Clearly, through the mood choices, the tradition of the university is foregrounded, both verbally and visually. That is, the university adheres to the traditional role of the institution to educate, research and transform both individual lives and the broader world.

Similar to UOL, Curtin University employed a large number of imperatives, including in the section headings such as ‘Join a global university’ and ‘Live in a vibrant city’. For UNE, which seems to prefer statements over imperatives, conditional statements such as ‘If you are ready to apply, you will find the online application process is easy’. present the university’s stance of offering to help and the invitation to prospective students to act actively. Here, the process of transformation is explicitly stated and the student role in the transformation is laid bare. This is contrary to the prevailing view that on university webpages students are typically portrayed as customers/consumers with entitlements (e.g. Gottschall and Saltmarsh, 2017). For all three universities, international students are not construed as recipients, but as agentive doers.

When mood, polarity and modality are examined in tandem, the universities do not allow negotiation with what they claim they provide (by using positive polarity almost all the time and few modals for their statements). However, modal expressions (such as ‘can’ or ‘will’) are used to make room for international students to consider their role in the university-initiated processes of education for learning and life:

‘Join a university where you can get the support you need to create your future’ (UOL)

‘. . . you ’ll have the opportunity to shine’ (UOL)

‘Curtin University is a vibrant forward-thinking, innovative university where you can move forward in your chosen career’. (Curtin)

‘When you join Curtin University, you will become part of an international family’. (Curtin)

‘When you have this close contact with your teachers and peers, you can have in-depth discussions and ask questions more freely’. (UNE)

‘. . . you will leave here with so much more than a degree’. (UNE)

The use of the modals clearly indicates the roles that are constructed for international students. That is, international students need to take action so that the university provisions can materialise.

The use of causative structure on the webpages of UOL and UNE explicitly lays out the responsibilities of the university (providing the environment and support) and the students (studying). UNE particularly uses the causative structure to construct the student as being assisted or even guided by the university:

‘With one of the lowest staff-to-student ratios among Australian universities, we give you the chance to interact more easily with your classmates and academic staff’. (UNE)

For UOL, students need to take up the chance and opportunity to ‘interact’ and ‘think beyond’ rather than being passive recipients:

‘Join an institution that will challenge you to think beyond the textbook, and apply that knowledge to the world around you’. (UOL)

The university’s stance as being the main actor in this exchange is also reinforced in the accompanying videos. For example, in UNE’s video, the message is constructed by using the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’, and by closing out contrary positions through expressions of positive polarity:

‘ We are proud of our ability to offer transformational and personal educational experience where our students have easy access to lecturers and support staff. In fact , UNE has one of the best teacher to student ratios of any university in Australia’. (UNE)

Similarly, the students’ voices in UOL’s and Curtin’s videos echo, and respond to, the university voice projected on its webpage. Here, modals such as ‘will’ and ‘definitely’ function to endorse the authorial stance taken by the university, particularly with a view to the prospective outcomes of a university education:

‘For me it’s been something that has defined my career and it will define me as a person as I continue into life’. (UOL)

‘Yeah, I definitely believe that making [sic] overseas studies will definitely help me, in my own place, to get new facilities, new jobs, new opportunities’. (Curtin)

Consequently, through lexicogrammatical features, including mood, modality, polarity and causative structures, and multimodal resources of engagement, including page layout and composition, the universities showed that they do not attempt to be the omnipresent power but leave room for international students to be agentive, speaking to the traditional emphasis of education as a process and the expectation that students need to work to gain rather than being entitled to the benefits and privileges of the university experience (Natale and Doran, 2012: 188).