| The practice of marketing and public relations for higher education has become more and more important. There is general agreement in many scholarly journals that education does not tell its story well. Calls are made for higher education to proactively shape public opinion, moving it toward metaphors and understandings that are more favorable to the current theoretical basis and practice in higher education.; This descriptive and qualitative study investigated images in the portrayal of the mission of higher education in the United States news media in 2003. A content analysis was performed on news stories archived in the LexisNexis online database. The methodology combined descriptive analysis of positive and negative evaluative statements in news articles with qualitative examination of notable images of missions of higher education. An important framework through which this study was interpreted was Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC), a structure for managing, planning, and practicing public relations and marketing communication.; Descriptive analysis was used to enrich qualitative understanding. Of the qualified articles in this study 51.8% contained no positive evaluative statements, 75.3% contained no negative statements, and 36.5% contained neither positive nor negative statements. Due to the limited distributions of positive and negative evaluative statements, it was impractical to use Chi Square analysis or other statistical operators.; This study produced a typology of seven themes in the recurring images of the mission of higher education. They are higher education as an economic engine, access and affordability defined as a mission of higher education, budgetary problems and the need for refocusing higher education missions, images relating to the non-financial administration and governance of institutions, social missions of higher education, diversity as a component of the mission of higher education, and other images.; Conclusions and discussion of the findings of the study include an interdisciplinary examination of the practices of journalists and of representatives of higher education communicating with the media. Parallels between educational constructivism and marketing communications theory are presented. A conceptual model is presented to illustrate the role of social construction in development of missions of higher education. |
