Neoliberal clickbait: University websites and the digital marketization of Philippine higher education

This paper explores how the websites of Philippine higher education institutions (HEIs) serve as virtual linguistic landscapes that reinforce the homo economicus perspective. As universities pursue internationalization, their digital presence increasingly reflects market-driven discourses that frame education as a commodity, prioritize global rankings, and align with neoliberal economic goals. University landing pages, as curated representations of institutional identity, play a crucial role in shaping perceptions of higher education. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, this paper interrogates the textual and visual elements of these websites to uncover how HEIs construct narratives of employability, global competitiveness, and economic utility while marginalizing indigenous epistemologies and local linguistic diversity. A purposive sample of public universities across the country was analyzed to capture how marketized language, Westernized aesthetics, and corporate-style branding contribute to the internationalization agenda while erasing alternative community-based understandings of education. This paper contributes to educational policy by exposing the digital marketization of HEIs in the Philippines. It critiques the dominance of Western metrics of academic legitimacy and calls for context-sensitive, equitable, and decolonial approaches to internationalization. Consequently, it advocates reimagining university websites not as neoliberal clickbaits or corporate branding tools, but as sites for featuring student-centered, community-based and culturally responsive education.