Similarities and differences in image projection of Korean universities across institutional types: A text mining analysis of university president messages

Abstract

The study aimed to explore university presidents’ messages (PMs), which encompass missions, visions and strategies, to examine how Korean universities display their image in response to various stakeholders. Assuming the missions, visions and strategies vary according to the characteristics of universities, this study analysed the PMs according to institutional types: (1) public and private universities; (2) metropolitan and local universities; and (3) top-ranked and mid-to low-ranked universities. This study collected 105 PMs from Korean universities on a large scale and applied a text mining analysis to calculate the frequencies of keywords, draw word clouds, analyse the degree of centrality of keywords and examine bigrams across university types. The results showed that Korean universities project their images in a relatively homogenous way, but there are differences in the ways universities project their images between public and private universities, metropolitan and local universities, and top-ranked and mid-to low-ranked universities.