Can Homepage Openness be a Signal of Institu-tional Quality in Higher Education?

Absztrakt

This exploratory study analyses a rarely investigated element of online marketing of higher education institutions (HEIs) using a sample of 150 doctoral/research universities (DRU) and 150 liberal arts colleges (LAC) from the USA. Using quantitative analysis, it primarily examines the homepage of the institutions’ websites according to various aspects of openness (availability of the homepage in foreign languages and for visually impaired users, presence and type of search options and social media links on the homepage, and the number of news articles published on the website in a given week). Besides the analysis of the whole sample, the types of institutions (i.e., DRUs and LACs) as well as higher or lower ranked institutions according to an HEIs ranking list are also compared using these dimensions. The main findings are that DRU homepages provide more advanced search opportunities, present a higher number and different order of social media links, and publish a greater volume of news than LAC websites. The higher ranked DRUs present the most news, followed by lower ranked DRUs, and then higher ranked LACs; the lowest number of news items were provided by lower ranked LACs. Moreover, in the case of LAC institutions a significant negative correlation was also identified between their rank and the number of news items displayed, while no significant correlation was found in the case of DRUs.