Commodification is a process in which various social areas and social institutions, which normally do not create goods in the economic sense, are organized as production units that produce a service that is then distributed and consumed. Such processes have also entered the field of education and entail a change in approach to students and employees who are required to produce an economically useful product with market value and to sell it to “clients” in the market, in this case students. Education is therefore no longer viewed as a public good to which everyone is entitled, but as a private good available to those who can afford the “product”.

In this research, the intention is to examine to what extent the social phenomena of marketization and commodification have permeated the discourse of education in Croatia, i.e. to what extent knowledge and skills are presented as commodities in the Croatian public space, and to what extent the discourse of advertising, product promotion and self-promotion is present in education (in in this case universities, faculties and employees). In doing so, one should take into account the existence of both public and private universities that have different sources of funding and therefore adapt their discourse to the users. Research so far shows that there has been a shift towards the use of persuasive linguistic means. Norman Fairclough’s assertion about the clear intertwining of language and society, i.e. that discourse constitutes society, but also that society constitutes discourse, is confirmed here insofar as social changes are reflected in the semiotic representations of academic institutions, and such discourse shifts, which are often interdiscursive examples from the advertising industry, can have a stronger impact on the professional role of universities in society and mark the beginning of a more pronounced marketization of higher education.