Public Relations Education Report 2024 2/4

Public relations degrees and the marketisation of higher education

About the author

Richard Bailey Hon FCIPR is editor of PR Academy's PR Place Insights. He has taught and assessed undergraduate, postgraduate and professional students.

Public Relations Degrees and the Marketisation of the Higher Education Sector

Last year’s PR Academy research report PR Education, Training and Accreditation, documented the decline of single honours BA Public Relations degree courses at UK universities.

From there being more than 20 public relations courses available two decades ago there remains only one single honours BA Public Relations degree offered today – at the University of the Arts, London.

There’s a long list of universities that once taught the subject at undergraduate level and no longer do so, or do so only in combination with other disciplines. As we reported, among those to have closed or consolidated their Public Relations undergraduate degrees are the following universities and colleges: Bournemouth, Central Lancashire (UCLAN), Edge Hill, Falmouth, Gloucestershire, Greenwich, The College of Mark and St John (Marjon), Leeds Beckett, Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores, Manchester Metropolitan, Robert Gordon, Solent, Teesside, University of West of England and Westminster.

In place of single honours degrees there are hundreds of combinations available: public relations is commonly combined with advertising, marketing, media or journalism, but also with fashion, mass communication, politics and international relations.

An impure discipline

This interdisciplinary approach makes sense. Public relations is not a pure discipline: it does not operate in isolation from its context in society, politics and business. It draws on psychology and communication theory. Students, especially on three year undergraduate courses, should be encouraged to broaden their horizons and explore new areas.

The decline in undergraduate courses and numbers has partly been offset by strong recruitment onto MA Public Relations programmes, but each serves a different demographic. Three or four year undergraduate programmes recruit mostly home students whereas one year taught Master’s degrees recruit well among international students.

Yet our question from a year ago remains unanswered. What does the loss of a specialist focus on public relations education in universities mean for the professional project? Because if a student only experiences public relations from within the context of a marketing degree, why would they seek to affiliate with the public relations professional associations (such as CIPR or PRCA) when their natural fit would be with the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)?

We also need to explain this decline in undergraduate education in contrast with the resilience of the public relations industry that faces skills shortages and alongside the flourishing field of public relations academic research and publications.

If recruitment onto degree courses was closely mapped to graduate career prospects, then public relations degrees would be flourishing whilst journalism degrees would have faced a steep decline. Yet the trend has been the other way around.

Journalism, media, advertising, marketing, branding and psychology are all more familiar to those of school age faced with a decision about what to study in higher education. They may have already studied these subjects. Public relations is an unknown quantity.

Public relations: a surprising victim of marketisation

So one hypothesis for the decline in public relations degrees in the last 15 years – suggested by Bournemouth principal lecturer Dr Anastasios (Tasos) Theofilou – is that it inversely followed the rise in fees (these went up three fold to £9,000 following the 2010 election). When fees were low, students seemed more willing to take a risk on an unknown course, but once the fees had increased students retreated to the safety of a familiar subject.

The other explanation for the decline in public relations degrees comes from management decisions within universities.

Higher fee-paying students brought a short-term boost to university finances, resulting in many new buildings and increased marketing budgets. Universities became brands competing for student customers in an educational marketplace.

Just as it was a political decision to increase fees to £9,000 (backed by student loans), so it’s been a political decision to prevent further substantial increases. That £9,000 in 2012 has only risen to £9,250 today – a substantial fall in real value given inflationary costs affecting the sector (staff salaries, energy costs etc).

The pain of this falling fee income was for some years masked by two trends: the recruitment of greater numbers of international students whose fees are uncapped; and the removal of the cap on undergraduate numbers.

So the way to balance the books was to recruit larger numbers of students and to teach them on lecture-based chalk-and-talk courses – in preference to those requiring expensive laboratories and studios and specialist technical and tutor support – coupled with closures of smaller courses and a programme of redundancies or voluntary severances to cut staff costs.

In this context, business schools became cash cows: their courses were attractive to international students and the staff-student ratio on a lecture-based course was attractive to university managers.

Public relations courses suffered because they were no longer large enough to benefit from these economies of scale. A course recruiting 40 students is relatively more expensive to staff and teach than a course recruiting 200.

The marketisation of higher education has also had unintended consequences for students and for universities.

We have already suggested that students faced with lower fees were willing to take greater risks with their choice of course. By extension, risk averse fee-paying students have been less willing to embrace activities and discussions that they feel do not contribute directly to their goal (the achievement of high grades). So where most students could once be encouraged to gain extensive work experience alongside their studies, many now avoid this and view their university experience as centred around their few timetabled classes.

Cost of living pressures play a part in this, with students often working part-time through university to fund their living expenses (an academic experience survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that more than half of ‘full time’ students were in paid employment during term time – a record 56% – working an average of 14.5 hours a week). So the unintended consequence of marketisation for students is that the more they pay, the less they get in terms of a well-rounded university experience.

The demands of paid work may be one reason for poor attendance at timetabled classes; reports in Times Higher Education and The Guardian show attendance has not recovered since the pandemic. Poorly attended classes are less likely to deliver a valuable educational experience, leading to a further downward pressure on attendance and engagement.

The reality facing universities competing in a market for students is that they need to recruit and retain those students; they need to keep their customers happy

Yet the reality facing universities competing in a market for students is that they need to recruit and retain those students; they need to keep their customers happy. The National Student Survey completed by final year students is a contributor towards those league table rankings that are so important in helping universities recruit. And the government’s Office for Students measures universities on the numbers progressing through the course to graduation and then moving on into well paid occupations.

If you are going to be penalised for failing students and if you are going to be marked down by students by not meeting their aspirations, then is it any wonder there has been grade inflation in higher education? A report by the Office for Students shows that while 15.5% of students achieved First Class degrees in 2010-11 (the year before fees increased three fold), a decade later (2020-2021 – the year of pandemic lockdowns) this had risen to 37.4%.

‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees

This evidence that degrees are getting easier provided by statistics on grade inflation feeds into the political narrative about ‘low value’ degrees. Media Studies (and by extension communication and thus public relations) is often condemned as insufficiently rigorous and unlikely to provide a return on a student’s investment in time and fees. It’s a political issue because graduates who don’t achieve a threshold salary (currently just under £25,000) do not repay their student loans. Instead, it’s the government that funds the gap.

A June 2024 report for The British Academy investigated the value of Media, Screen, Journalism and Communication Studies degrees and provided an evidence-based response to these culture wars attacks on university courses. The authors noted that the creative industries accounted for 2.3 million jobs in 2021; yet they also observed that value is not only a question of economics.

According to The British Academy report, ‘In 2021/22, there were 58,700 students taking undergraduate degrees in Media, Screen, Journalism and Communication Studies, studying at 134 (79%) out of the 170 HEIs in the UK.’ These degrees are popular, and widely taught.

Yet these are generic issues facing the higher education sector. This report looks specifically at public relations education, and the same discussions about the status, definition and location of public relations that take place within organisations have been the focus of academic thinking.

A frustrated academic discipline

Strategic communication scholars Howard Nothhaft from Lunds University in Sweden and Ansgar Zerfass from University of Leipzig in Germany addressed the status of public relations within an increasingly postdisciplinary world in a book chapter published last year. They group public relations alongside other applied communication disciplines (such as integrated marketing communication and organisational communication) and argue that these developed first as de facto functions rather than as intellectually coherent projects. In other words, practice came before theory.

They also highlight the gap between the theoretical and practical challenges of public relations: ‘By no means trivial in practice, public relations problems look simple on paper.’ (Nothhaft and Zerfass 2023: 253)

They argue that the distinctions between applied communication disciplines are not logical, but rather tribal and they identify six academic tribes from within the field with each having its own scholars and cheerleaders:

  • Public relations
  • Integrated marketing communication
  • Corporate communication
  • Strategic communication
  • Organisational communication
  • Digital communication and social media culture

The main difference between these perspectives, they argue, is cultural. ‘The marketing communication mindset gravitates towards simplification. Marketers are used to encapsulat[ing] the heart of the matter in a slogan… Digital communication and organizational communication are perhaps the disciplines with the greatest affinity to complexity… Public relations and strategic communication are in between, on the higher side.’ (Nothhaft and Zerfass 2023: 257-8)

This issue of complexity versus simplicity provides a frame for explaining the rise and fall of public relations degrees that we have previously documented. Public relations degrees once recruited well because the courses were novel and sounded fun. Besides, how hard could they be?

Then the students met their lecturers, keen to introduce nuance and complexity into the field. There must have been some cognitive dissonance as students who thought they were studying an easy practical discipline found themselves learning about sociology, philosophy and ethics.

Fast forward to the demands of a fee-paying student wanting the shortest route through to the highest possible grade and this level of nuance and complexity becomes an unwelcome distraction. Much safer to choose the textbook territory of a marketing degree, even if it may not be as much fun.

The cultural or tribal view of applied communication disciplines explored by Nothhaft and Zerfass covers more dimensions than that of complexity versus simplification. But it will suffice for this analysis and it leads to this further thought: ‘The view also shows why marketing communication does not fit with crisis communication… Marketing communication prefers to operate in attraction categories rather than truth and does not cope well with complexity. Journalistic interest, which is high in a crisis, can only be satisfied with high truth value.’ (Nothhaft and Zerfass 2023: 261)

Their conclusion?  ‘Public relations research aspires to recognition as a “proper” academic discipline but remains frustrated.’ (Nothhaft and Zerfass 2023: 250)

New developments

Look back at that list of universities that have closed public relations degree courses and you may spot a pattern. They are post-1992 universities that were created from former polytechnics.

This has echoes of a former perceived educational divide between research universities and lower-ranked technical universities.

If we accept the logic of the Nothhaft and Zerfass argument, public relations is a complex discipline that should be intellectually challenging to study. Yet the highest ranked university mentioned in the earlier list is Bournemouth (a former polytechnic), ranked 45 in the Times Higher Education best universities in the UK 2024.

Yet take a closer look at this same league table and at 31 is Swansea University which offers public relations degree courses including a BA (Hons) Public Relations and Media degree and an MA in Communication, Media Practice and Public Relations.

In 26th place, University of Leicester offers an MA in Media and Public Relations; also in 26th place is University of Reading whose Henley Business School is home of research centre the John Madejski Centre for Reputation;  24th placed Cardiff University offers an MA in International Public Relations and Global Communication Management alongside an MA in Political Communication; 20th placed Newcastle University offers an MA in Media and Public Relations; 15th placed University of Leeds offers an MA in Corporate Communications, Marketing and Public Relations.

Meanwhile 7th placed London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) offers an MSc course in Media and Communications, another in Politics and Communication; an MSc in Strategic Communications and Society (see below) and another in Social and Public Communication; 6th placed King’s College, London offers an MA in Strategic Communications and first placed University of Oxford has within its Said Business School a Centre for Corporate Reputation. This is research focused but also offers executive education (see below).

What patterns emerge from these courses offered at these universities? If there has been a decline in public relations courses it seems it has been limited specifically to undergraduate programmes; and the losses have been within lower ranked universities. Meanwhile, public relations has found a place at some of the UK’s most prestigious universities, though it tends to go by another name.

Indeed, the range of these MA programmes exemplifies the themes in the Howard Nothhaft and Ansgar Zerfass chapter: to add to their public relations, marketing communication and strategic communication tribes, there may also be a political communication tribe and a corporate reputation tribe; by implication, there’s also a critical theory tribe that is focused more on the impacts of public relations on society than on organisations.


Profile: Rupert Younger, founder and director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation

Rupert Younger is co-author (with David Waller) of The Reputation Game (Oneworld, 2017) and (with Frank Partnoy) of The Activist Manifesto (CreateSpace, 2018).

He teaches electives on reputation and leadership for MBA students and delivers executive education programmes.

He was co-founder with Roland Rudd of corporate and financial public relations consultancy Finsbury, now FGS Global.

Speaking on a PRCA podcast in May 2024, he said:

‘Roland [Rudd] has extraordinary connections. He’s a fantastic front person for the organisation, very instinctive. I was always more interested in trying to understand the concepts behind what we were doing; to try to put models into the business; trying to make sense of how communications professionals go about their work and why and how these things that we do are meaningful.

‘The move into academia gave me freedom to explore those things in more detail. The Centre that I founded in 2008 is interdisciplinary which looks at how social evaluations such as reputation, status, legitimacy, trust, stigma and celebrity are important for organisations. How do organisations seek to manage or influence them? This was hard to do in an agency; you have to get on and solve clients’ problems.’


Profile: Lee Edwards, Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science

Lee Edwards is programme director for the MSc in Strategic Communications and Society at London School of Economics.

She is the author of Understanding Public Relations: Theory, Culture and Society (Sage, 2018); and Power, Diversity and Public Relations (Routledge, 2014). She is co-editor of Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History (Routledge, 2019) and co-author of Public Relations, Society and Culture: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations (Routledge, 2011).

This last mentioned publication, written with Caroline Hodges, addressed the ‘socio-cultural turn’ in public relations scholarship. Scholars were turning away from the previous focus on the contribution of the discipline on organisational effectiveness (see for example the Excellence theory from James Grunig and others) and turning the focus onto the effect of public relations on society.

‘Historically, public relations research has been driven by organisational interests, treating the profession as an organisational function first and foremost. The view is exemplified in the work of James Grunig and his colleagues in the United States of America.’ (Edwards and Hodges 2011: 1-2)

They then turn to the socio-cultural ‘turn’ in public relations scholarship.

‘In this theoretical turn, public relations moves from being understood as a functional process enacted in the organisational context to being a contingent, socio-cultural activity that forms part of the communicative process by which society constructs its symbolic and material ‘reality’.’ (Edwards and Hodges 2011: 3)

While this might have led to a widening of the gap between academics and practitioners, it anticipated the greater emphasis on ESG (environmental, social and governance) considerations in business.

Lee Edwards is a leading figure in critical public relations scholarship following in the footsteps of Jacquie L’Etang.

She gained her PhD from Leeds Metropolitan (now Beckett) University.


Public Relations Education Report 2024

  1. Introduction and executive summary
  2. Public relations degrees and the marketisation of higher education
  3. Skills policy and apprenticeships
  4. Public relations research and knowledge transfer

Read our Complete Guide to CIPR Qualifications