With COVID 19 preventing attendance at Open Days and with career counsellors working hard but with less immediate access to those they help, the issue of the usefulness institutional materials in career decision making comes to the fore, as Anne Delazun has written about on this blog ‘Workplace rights: vital careers information for a ‘new normal’.

As Anne says, in this moment, there is a recognition of the increased reliance of materials that are available for many and freely available, high quality, understandable career information is a critical part of a well-developed career guidance system. I’m particularly concerned for those without access to career counsellors whether because they are outside an institution, or the impacts of the pandemic have made career support hard to access. So I am writing this first substantive post for the blog about my own research interest in career information and belief in the importance of seeing what is available when career practitioners are not.

As I wrote in my introduction to the blog last month, I’m keen to be able to write up my academic research in an accessible way and also explore what the outputs of research might mean for career practitioners. So this blog coincides with an academic output from my PhD which suggests that over the last forty years that institutionally provided pre-entry materials has become less useful and institutions’ marketing has become more similar.

Public information as the backstop of career information

I started working on this area of research as I think it’s important to see public information as a backstop of career information, and the most scalable part of provision. I acknowledge the critical and influential support of all those who surround someone making tertiary transition choices and the great difference that career education and career guidance / career counselling can make – but here make the case for publically available, easy to understand materials as a force for scaleable career information.

Although now most prospective students make their first interaction by reading online material on the university website there still remains a place for printed prospectuses in the school and college career library – and this was even more the case in 2010 when the research started. In the recent article published in the Journal for Marketing in Higher Education I look at prospectuses of British institutions over the last forty years, and try and understand how they’ve changed.

Prospectuses were for many years most easily accessible and widely disseminated by institutions to students. These have been theorised as ‘cold knowledge’ and their lack of impact noted in comparison to the ‘hot knowledge’ of friends and families (following work by Stephen Ball and Carol Vincent in 1998 writing about school choice in the 1990s). Unequal access to first-hand information informing choice of higher education makes transparency in the institutional texts important. This is as officially published documents like prospectuses and university websites can be for some opaque, and so leave information gaps heightened through obscure language, jargon and unexplained concepts.

Inaccessible information as an equity issue

Problems with the accessibility and ease of use of public information to support career decisions give an advantage to those able to use their hot knowledge (read social capital), and those who can access more face to face support. Using this lens, many career information offerings do not meet the requirements for clear and concise information laid out in various national standards for career information provision. Here I’m drawing particularly on my knowledge of the Career Industry Council of Australia’s Guiding Principles for career information products but also similar which are mirrored throughout the world.

A marked finding of my 40 year analysis of prospectuses was the rising standardisation of the publications, in physical form, layout and textual features: the prospectuses at the end of the period are more similar to one another than at the start, and this homogenisation of form also impacts on the differentiation of the texts. Institutions increasingly struggle to distinguish themselves within a competitive market, and these struggles impact how students can differentiate higher education offer, as codes become less easy to understand.

Public information as a career information product

In my work I use the term ‘homogenisation of vocabularies’ meaning that all the institutions seem to be marking the same claims of why their institution is the one people should come to and drawing on the same values of the idea of a degree which was not the case at the start of the research in the 1970s. Following Norman Fairclough’s work using texts to trace marketisation, I see this similarity of messages as a symptom of the marketisation of the universities as none now wish to be seen to be offering a lesser degree than the others. The difficulty in separating the institutions through their prospectuses are hidden behind a deceptive openness, and career guidance professionals need to exhort institutions to do better and also to prepare students for using career information which is increasingly less focused on the career decisions needed – and more on the marketing of their products.

The UK government has consistently raised concerns about information given by institutions on undergraduate degrees through pre-entry materials, and issued guidance on consumer law and undergraduates. To ensure access to enhanced information through the student choice process, analysis of key information statistics, introduction of teaching excellence frameworks to inform students, and measures such as standardisation of terminologies are provided. Yet previous work indicates that more information available does not necessarily make the student choice process easier or more equitable.

With the proliferation of career information and the decrease in person to person engagement we must have scrutiny of official information and a consideration about how career practitioners can support opportunity awareness. We must start to see the prospective or future student aimed publicity materials of higher education institutions should be considered career information products. I am making the case for the importance of career guidance to attend to what information is publicly available, even not produced by them, what institutions say about themselves, how they present and represent their offers to students to be easily understandable and accessible – in all senses of the word.

Let me know in the comments what you think about this blog or get in contact with me on LinkedIn if you’re interested in any of my research – you can see it on my ResearchGate profile.