La imagen de calidad de la educación superior privada en el diario El Universal

Abstract

Nowadays the topic of Private Higher Education Institutions (IESP) has taken again importance since there is a great diversity of institutions that offer plans and programs of study with very unlike levels regarding the academic quality they offer. In order to contribute to the discussion on this problematic we carried out a study whose aim was to detect the social representations of the academic quality of IESP that circulate in the mass media and more specifically in the written press. What is presented in this text is an analysis that was carried out having as a corpus of study 30 news articles (news stories, opinion articles and feature reports) that were published in El Universal newspaper on the topic of IESP. In the analysis it was possible to identify two social representations of this type of institutions: the universidades patito and the real private universities. The identification and analysis of these two social representations showed that for El Universal the academic quality rests on a very important idea for contemporary society: the originality of a commercial brand.