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Article published In:
The Agenda Setting Journal
Vol. 1:2 (2017) ► pp.137–157

Do english-language newspapers make universities prestigious?

Rise and fall in media salience of top Japanese private universities

| The University of Texas at Austin
| The University of Texas at Austin

This study investigated whether English-language news media, which increased coverage of two large, well known private universities in Japan, increased their salience in the minds of international residents in Japan. Based on the agenda-setting theory of media influence, the authors made use of university enrollment trends as an indicator of public salience and found that the English-language media contributed to the growing prestige of the universities among the non-Japanese population. Academic reality in Japan underwent little change during that period with the top ranking government-funded universities, whose coverage in the English-language media did not increase, remained more prestigious within the local context, as is evident from local university rankings. This study also demonstrates that the media can exert an agenda-setting influence on institutions of higher learning, a domain that has not been traditionally investigated. The study also addresses the influences of the international, English-language press in the context of a non-English speaking country, Japan, and how the, “need for orientation” (NFO), might have been a factor.

Keywords: agenda setting, higher education, Japan, news, media salience
Article outline
  • Theoretical background
  • Keio and Waseda: A history
  • Method
  • Media salience
  • The China survey and the Chinese newspaper database searches
  • Public salience as measured by behavior
  • Survey
  • Results
  • Survey
  • Chinese-language database
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • What changed?
  • Need for orientation
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/asj.1.2.04tan
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