Education on the rails: a textual ethnography of university advertising in mobile contexts

ABSTRACT

As universities have succumbed to market discourses, they have adopted advertising strategies. It is not uncommon to see advertisements for them displayed in such mobile spaces as railway stations and alongside highways. Whilst it is true that such environments have always sought to take advantage of populations in transit, the fact that higher education institutions have turned to them as promotional sites, reflects the fact that the ‘transit’ demographic now includes large numbers of young people and high school students. In this paper, a sample of higher education advertisements found in Sydney’s transit spaces is analysed along with the ‘rationale’ provided by advertising companies responsible for their design. It is argued their existence reflects the fact that universities compete against one another for students and need to develop a persuasive ‘brand’. Thus in line with neo-liberalist constructions of subjectivity, they individualise the educational experience, and translate that experience into an economic asset, as a value-adding process. It is of note then that much of the imagery and copy of the advertising ‘visualises’ education as a journey and underpins the fact that mobility is an inescapable predicate of quotidian life.

KEYWORDS:

• Advertising
• Bradley report
• higher education
• mobility
• neo-liberalism
• subjectivity

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Martin Report, which led to the creation of the Colleges of Advanced Education, makes this distinction (First Report of the Commonwealth Advisory Committee on Advanced Education 1966, p. 23).

2. The Murray Report promoted this view, and argued that ‘high intellectual ability’ was scarce in Australia, something its universities needed to redress (Report of the Committee on Australia universities, 1957, p. 8).

3. The ‘Group of Eight’ universities in the interests of protecting their cohorts of able students, have generally maintained high ATAR scores (Nelson 2013). In an attempt to staunch the flow of poor quality students into their undergraduate programmes, they have proposed an ATAR floor (Mather, 2013). That is not to say an inflated ATAR predicts academic success: many students with low ATARs prove the contrary, and vice versa.

4. Between 1996 and 2011, casuals increased 81% compared to just 37% for permanents over the same period (Kimber & Ehrich, 2015). At the same time, professional development and continuity has suffered as sessional teachers juggle their loads with off-campus employment, worry about job insecurity, all of which serves to reduce commitment to student learning that, ironically, many universities upsell in their advertising (Klopper & Power, 2014).

5. Generation Y, also known as the millennials, fit a typical target core clientele for universities, being the age group on the cusp of their working lives and often seeking a career boost through tertiary education.

6. http://www.apnoutdoor.com.au

7. A newsletter from a high school located in one of the city’s most diverse suburbs, identified those of its students who gained places at Sydney by name, an honour not extended to those winning places at other universities. In effect, there are losers among the winners. We are grateful to Susan Markose for this observation.

8. The University of Sydney used its main neo-gothic building as a focal point of an advertisement inviting successful ATAR students to join them at Info Day (‘Campus Tertiary Guide’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 2015, 4).

9. Given that questionability of the financial ethics of some of these providers, particularly in the vocational sector, this appears to have been foolhardy decision. Mercifully, another proposal from the same government, which would have seen the cap on university fees raised, in effect introducing a new numerus clausus, one with an economic rather than meritocratic basis, remains stalled in the Senate.

10. Nor is such solely the province of educational institutions. A recent advertisement seen on a Sydney station suggests that if ‘Commutes are eating into your cooking time’, then ‘We’ve got a soup for that’.

11. Not entirely though: some of the campus will be used for a high-tech high school.

12. See ‘Save with Opal’ leaflet, issued in 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colin Symes

Colin Symes is an Honorary Associate of Macquarie University’s School of Education. He is the author of several books including Setting the record straight: a material of history of classical recording and Transporting moments. Recent papers have appeared in Mobilities, Journeys, Journal of Tourism History and Annals of Leisure Research.

Christopher Drew

Christopher Drew is Senior Lecturer in Education at Teesside University. He conducts research into understandings of the concept of childhood, and the marketisation of education. Recent publications have appeared in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and Elite Schools: Multiple Geographies of Privilege.