Marketing EIE programmes in higher education towards students from underrepresented groups

Widening participation in higher education has become a major concern for many higher education institutions in order to redress the imbalance that has be created where specific groups in society have over time become underrepresented within higher education. To redress this imbalance, higher education institutions need to set-up and maintain supports to attract more students from these underrepresented groups to enter mainstream higher education. These include the marketing of programmes with targeted access routes into education and to enable full participation once the student has commenced a programme of study (appropriate and targeted supports to be made available). In this paper, specific questions are asked and a review of approaches in marketing programmes and supporting students are identified and discussed. The motivation for the paper is to consider the marketing of programmes within European higher education institutions towards electrical and information engineering (EIE) programmes for students with disabilities.