Interdisciplinary programmes have proliferated across post-secondary education in recent decades. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the manner in which interdisciplinary programmes promote themselves to external constituents. To study this process, we conduct a content analysis of the online self-descriptions of 203…

Conventional scholarship within the sociology of education and organizations posits that schools achieve legitimacy by virtue of conforming to normative standards, abiding by government regulations and mimicking the forms of successful peers. Through this study, an examination of a sample of 751 Canadian for-profit colleges (FPCs) is performed,…

Existing research on marketing within PSE tends to focus on homogeneous groups of high-status organisations. This study ameliorates this gap in the literature, conducting a comparative analysis of promotional materials produced by public universities and community colleges in Ontario, Canada. We find that these two groups draw on unique strategies…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine how entrepreneurship education is being marketed to students within the Canadian university sector. Design/methodology/approach: A content analysis of the webpages representing 66 entrepreneurship education programs in Canada is performed. Findings: Entrepreneurship education is found to…

Competition has intensified substantially within the American law school sector in recent decades. Scholars note that this has augmented pressures to engage in institutional self-promotion, as law schools attempt to distinguish themselves within a severely over-crowded marketplace. To date, however, few have ventured to empirically examine the…

The current fiscal environment has driven Canadian universities to become more entrepreneurial, seeking out and competing over new sources of funding. Despite such intensifying competition, little effort has been made to document the promotional tactics that Canadian universities are using to render themselves appealing to external audiences. This…

This study empirically examines how for-profit career colleges in Ontario, Canada market themselves to prospective students. It uses a mixed-methods approach to review the content of 489 online promotional profiles representing 375 unique for-profit colleges. It finds that for-profit colleges adopt several distinct marketing strategies, including…

Canadian community colleges operate within a trying market environment. They compete against a diversified group of post-secondary institutions, ranging from small and relatively unknown for-profit vocational colleges to larger and more prestigious public universities. To date, there has been no effort to empirically examine how Canadian community…