The paper seeks to investigate how the shift towards the ‘marketisation’ of academia, widely discussed by critical discourse scholars and researchers specialising in academic discourse, is refl ected in the genre of university admission bulletins. The study examines two sets of texts: the admission bulletins published by four Polish universities in the years 1978-1981, and the ‘Admissions/Information for candidates’ sections found at the websites of those universities in June 2014. Acknowledging the rather obvious differences between the two corpora stemming from the development of Internet technologies, the analysis focuses on the evolution of the communicative goals of the genre and its inner structure, seen as being largely determined by the external social context. The fi ndings indicate that although some of the structural elements appear to remain rather stable over time, others demonstrate a considerable tendency to being colonised by promotional functions. The linguistic/ communicative strategies realising particular moves confi rm the evolution of the genre, refl ecting the broader shift towards ‘marketisation’ of academia.