Alternative pathways to legitimacy: promotional practices in the Ontario for-profit college sector

ABSTRACT

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 (1) emphasizing their expedient provision of modern, practical skills and (2) the convenience afforded by the location of their campuses. We interpret these findings through the lens of the new institutionalist theoretical perspective, highlighting how these organizations draw upon alternative strategies to legitimate their chosen forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Ontario
• for-profit colleges
• legitimacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. By ‘marketing’, we refer to the ‘communication-persuasion strategy and tactics that will make the product … . acceptable and even desirable to the audience’ (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971, p. 7).

2. Not all private career colleges in Ontario are for-profit entities. Approximately 6% of all 420 registered private career colleges in 2014 were non-profit (Author, 2014). These non-profit institutions have been excluded from the sample that we analyze later in this paper.

3. We use this common moniker to make the general structure of the Ontario PSE system easier to follow for non-Canadian readers. The official name of public colleges in Ontario is either ‘College of Applied Arts and Technology’ or ‘Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’.

4. The one exception to this would be university rankings. Research (Espeland & Sauder, 2007, 2008; Lacroix & Maheu, 2015; Sauder & Espeland, 2006, 2009; Sauder & Lancaster, 2006) has documented that PSE organizations are extremely sensitive to these indicators, either strategically boasting about them when they place well or denigrating their methodology when they perform poorly.

5. Also see Davies and Pizarro Milian (2015) for more recent work on the Toronto private school sector.

6. Please see Appendix 1, where we reproduce and cross-reference the findings presented in Tables 2 and 3 using the alternative data set.

7. Despite this validation exercise, the quantitative element of our analysis remains descriptive and exploratory by nature. We employ no advanced statistical techniques which assume the independence of observations. Rather, we were simply interested in analyzing word usage patterns across the entire set of promotional profiles in order to guide the qualitative step of our analysis.

8. From now on, we will present these figures simply as (x, y). ‘x’ referring to the total number of times the word occurred across all profiles in the data set, ‘y’ referring to the percentage of profiles in which the word was present.