Marketing higher education to minority groups : the case of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel

           In recent decades, Israeli higher education institutions have sought to integrate the Haredi community through significant structural accommodations. However, this process requires not only structural but also discursive adaptations, and the marketing designed to bridge the cultural gap between academia and Haredi society has remained underexamined. This thesis addresses this gap through a qualitative content analysis of marketing advertisements in the Haredi printed press. The analysis reveals a coherent strategy that frames higher education as a feasible, ideologically safe, and professionally valuable endeavour by emphasizing logistical accommodations, guarantees of religious supervision, and the ultimate promise of employment. The study argues that this strategy is built upon a significant compromise, in which foundational academic principles such as critical inquiry and intellectual autonomy are systematically subordinated to the goals of access and ideological conformity. The result is a narrowing of the public meaning of higher education, which is reframed from a transformative intellectual project into a safe and efficient credentialing service. The findings contribute to the sociology of education by providing a critical analysis of the value-based tensions inherent in integrating conservative minority groups into liberal institutions and the specific discursive mechanisms through which these tensions are managed in the public sphere.