Selling the Experience: A Computational Analysis of Text and Images on Study Abroad Websites

This thesis examines how U.S. universities and third-party study abroad organizations market study abroad through both website text and images. Drawing on a large-scale corpus of webpages collected from 114 leading U.S. universities and 67 study abroad organizations, I analyze how study abroad is framed across these two institutional contexts. The project combines web scraping, topic modeling, and image analysis to identify recurring themes in text and visual patterns in webpage imagery. For text, I use hierarchical BERTopic to model semantic patterns in study abroad-related webpages. For images, I use CLIP-based embeddings and clustering to examine dominant forms of visual representation. The findings show that study abroad is promoted through multiple overlapping frames rather than a single dominant message. In the text corpus, university webpages emphasize Academic Excellence most strongly, framing study abroad through coursework, research, and institutional learning. Organization webpages place greater emphasis on Cultural Development and Global Discourse / Citizenship, presenting study abroad as intercultural immersion and globally engaged experience. Across both corpora, Leisure / Adventure and market-oriented themes are also present, though less dominant in text. On the other hand, in the image corpus Leisure / Adventure is the dominant visual frame for both universities and organizations, especially for organizations, where landscapes, landmarks, group travel, and activity-based imagery strongly shape the visual repertoire. Academic and civic imagery appears less frequently. Taken together, these findings suggest that study abroad marketing operates through a multimodal logic in which text often stresses educational, cultural, or civic value, while images more consistently sell study abroad as travel, enjoyment, and personal transformation. More broadly, this thesis shows how marketing materials help shape what study abroad is imagined to be for prospective students.