Future of Higher Education

Members of our research centre Réka Tamássy, Zsuzsanna Géring, Gábor Király, Réka Plugor and Márton Rakovics published a new article in the Journal of International Education in Business.

 In the article “The portrayal of the role and agency of students and higher education institutions in highly ranked business school discourses“, the researchers analysed the ’about us’ section of the top 100 business schools’ websites from the Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2019 Business and Economics list. Their study aimed to investigate how highly ranked business schools portray ideal students in terms of their attributes and agency and how business schools represent themselves and their roles.

The study was carried out using a mixed methodological textual analysis. First, six language use groups were identified with the help of latent Dirichlet allocation, and second, these six groups were qualitatively analysed, focusing on sentences containing the word ‘student’.

The research project found that the six identified language use groups (offer and receive; professional and self-development; entrepreneurial success; student formation; motivation and support; and academic perfectionism) greatly differ regarding the portrayed agency and role of the students. Furthermore, even though all institutions constructed themselves as active agents, they showed variety concerning the aspect of social roles they chose to highlight on their websites.

The article is available here.