Abstract
In the UK, higher education (HE) policy discourse over the past 60 years has advocated flexible part-time HE for social mobility, personal development, economic advantage and leisure. However, part-time undergraduate HE in the UK is in steep decline. Against this backdrop, we were interested in how universities promote, or fail to promote, part-time study options today. We built a corpus of 90 UK undergraduate prospectuses for 2018 entry (5,673,799 words). Using a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach, we found significant mismatch between policy discourse and marketing discourse regarding part-time study. In particular, we found that UK university marketing discourse positions full-time study as the dominant mode of study and writes of part-time study as ‘second-best’. This discourse mismatch is particularly marked when it comes to the elite Russell Group of universities. Viewing the absence of strong promotional discourse relating to part-time study alongside other factors such as increased tuition fees and the rise of global online education platforms adds a new perspective to the decline of flexible part-time undergraduate HE at campus-based universities in the UK.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1186-1201 |
Journal | Higher Education Research and Development |
Volume | 39 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 29 Jan 2020 |
Keywords
- Higher education policy
- Discourse analysis
- Democracy
- Online education
- online education
- discourse analysis
- democracy
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education