Social life for sale! A critical discourse analysis of the concept of student life on Danish university websites

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to investigate the marketization of higher education (HE) as it manifests itself in the concept of Student life on Danish HE websites. Taking Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis as its starting point, this paper critically examines this particular practice of marketization by making a single-case study of the pages called Student life at the biggest university in Denmark, Copenhagen University (CU). The findings show that these page elements of social life are intensively and routinely used to soften up the more demanding aspects of being a university student, and that this involves a significant positive evaluation of life as a university student. The paper addresses the potential problems related to the findings in order to contribute to further discussion and reflection upon issues centred around the marketization of HE on university websites and around the construction of what it means to be a student today.

KEYWORDS:

• Marketization
• higher education
• student life
• commodification of social life
• websites
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on the original draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Student life is our translation of the Danish word ’studieliv’. This is also the translation that is used by the universities themselves and on international universities’ websites.

2. Founded in 1479, CU is the oldest, largest and most prestigious university in Denmark. It has about 9000 employees and 40,000 students; it has also the largest number of applicants each year (about 8000). A search on ‘Wayback Machine’ (https://archive.org/web/) shows that the word Student life appears on CU’s websites for the first time in 2006. However, it is not until 2011 that it develops into a concept in its own right with its own elaborated websites with short films from students.

3. This information was given in an email correspondence with employees at CU in December 2014.