Moving through the city: visual discourses of upward social mobility in higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

Chile is one of the world's most neoliberal countries with a high level of privatised healthcare and education. The presence of advertising for both public and private universities points to the radically altered relationship between public and private higher education as a consequence of neoliberalism. Some authors describe the increasing similarities between the representations of public and private universities as evidence of their hybrid nature whereas others contend that what comes across as contingent hybridity is the dominance of a neoliberal discourse that has invaded public universities. This article looks at how public and private universities’ visual and textual representations of themselves evolve in a context of mobile, neoliberalised public spaces. The research is based on a mobile visual ethnography of higher education advertisements on public transport in Santiago de Chile in 2010. The visual and textual dimensions of the advertisements are analysed by means of critical discourse analysis. The universities’ particular sales messages with regard to promised upward social mobility and employability through education are reinforced by the intertwining of images, mobile spaces and actors. However, as the discourse analysis shows, the promises of equal upward social mobility are in contrast with the realities of neoliberal higher education and the increasing financial debt faced by students.

Notes

[1] Denmark (1.8%) and Finland (1.7%) lead the ranking. Within Latin America, Mexico (0.9%) and Brazil (0.8%) show much higher GDP rates for tertiary education than Chile.

[2] The latest research shows that within Latin America, countries with the biggest proportion of private universities such as Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica show the highest rates of social segregation (Brunner and Ferrada 2011).

[3] The most recent example of the increasing colonisation of higher education by neoliberalism is British higher education. The UK experiences an unprecedented funding cut of 40% in funding (excluding research funding), down from £7.1 bn to £4.2 bn (Department for Business Innovation and Skills Spending Review Settlement 2010). The Browne Review proposed a massive rise of tuition fees in order to make up for the loss of public funding (Browne Review 2010). By removing the cap from tuition fees, as of 2012 universities are able to charge fees of up to £9000 a year, three times more than before. This results in only those students being able to go to university who can afford to be in debt for more than 30 years. In September 2012, UK universities already faced a decline of more than 30 000 students (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/10/university-admissions-chaos-clearing-numbers-down [accessed 11 September 2012]).

[4] However, the interaction between public and private spheres in advertising is by no means a new phenomenon. According to Laura Baker, advertising in public spaces can be seen as a key form of commercialising public space that goes back to the nineteenth century in the United States (Baker 2007).

[5] Critical discourse analysis aims to understand the often hidden relationships between discursive practices, events and texts and wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes, investigating the making and origins of such practices as well as attempting to reveal how they are ideologically shaped by relations of power (Fairclough 1993). Discourses are social practices such as spoken or written language use as well as semiotic practices such as photography that take place within a particular social and historical context (Fairclough 2003).

[6] Although I collected visual data of universities, technical training centres and professional institutes, this paper is dedicated to an analysis of public and private universities only.

[7] For further information on how Chileans select schools and how these processes reflect the geographical and social segregation of Chilean society, see Stillerman 2010.

[8] According to John Grady, advertising images are known to be social indicators for the condition of a society (Grady 2007). To take an example, John Grady analysed the changing conceptualisations of race in advertising images published in TIME magazine between 1936 and 2000. In order to make sense of the substantial differences in how race was discursively constructed over time, Grady analysed the images in relation to political and historical developments at the time (Grady 2007).

[9] It is worth noting that the peak time of higher education advertising is between December and March.

[10] This heading is a reference to a famous pop-song in the 1980s: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeyOnNple4M (‘The only way is up, baby!’).

[11] The advertisement of the Universidad de Santiago (USACH), one of the oldest public universities in Chile, presents education as a cultural and collective good that is of national significance. Education is framed as a means of transforming the country. ‘161 years of transforming people and the country. USACH – part of our culture’ (‘161 años transformando personas, transformando país. USACH – en la cultura’).

[12] While this has been the reality for Chilean youth for the last three decades, the funding cuts for British higher education in December 2010 will have similar effects. According to British vice-chancellors, this will mean the disappearance of between 75% and 95% of all teaching funding whilst research subsidies to science, technology, engineering and mathematics will be continued. As a consequence, this will result in the almost complete withdrawal of state funding from the social sciences, the humanities and the arts (Times Higher Education Supplement 2010).

[13] Universities select students according to their scores in the university entry exams (prueba de selección universitaria – PSU). While traditional universities only accept students with very high entrance scores, many private universities do not have rigid requirements and take students with the minimum score in the PSU.

[14] In 2010, public and private universities as well as professional institutes and technical training centres spent $19213378.371 (thousands of pesos) on advertising activities in newspapers, posters, radio and television (data according to MegaTime S.A. 2011).

[15] In Chile the university entrance exam (Prueba de selección universitaria – PSU) is an extensive multiple choice test covering a variety of subjects. It is taken at the end of the last year of secondary school.

[16] The number of students in higher education has risen from 117 000 in 1980 to 245 000 in 1990 to over 678 000 in 2007.

[17] Students from the richest 40% of families are over-represented in all types of higher education institutions, occupying 70.2% of all places in all private universities, 53.2% of the places in ‘traditional’ universities (Universidades del Consejo de Rectores), 51.3% of the places in Professional Institutes and 45.5% of the places in Technical Training Colleges (Centro de Formación Técnica) (OECD and Banco Mundial 2009, 81).

[18] An association of five private universities in the centre of Santiago introduced this specific social higher education loan, which allows people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to attend university.

[19] In July 2011 the Chilean Minister of education Jorge Lavin resigned under the pressure of the students’ movement. One of the key accusations against him was that he himself had been the holder of massive shares of a private university and once declared that his investment would have been worth the money. See http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3303-chile-when-triumphant-neoliberalism-begins-to-crack [accessed 17th November 2011]. In August 2011, pressured by the students’ movement, the Chilean congress voted against profit in higher education. Yet, on a practical level nothing has changed.

[20] For the first two years after graduation, graduates from private universities with a low degree of selectivity would face more difficulties in finding employment compared to graduates from private and public universities with a high degree of selectivity. More specifically, for graduates from private universities with low selectivity the promise of having a better life through education soon after graduation would only be fulfilled by a few degrees such as nursing (Meller 2010).