Why Most Academic Advertising Is Immoral Bullshit

This chapter criticizes how universities and colleges market themselves to potential students. In particular, it examines how they promise (or at least strongly insinuate) that they will transform students, teach them to think, and turn them into leaders. The problem is that very little evidence exists that universities succeed in doing any of these things. Thus, universities engage in, if not quite false advertising, what might instead be called negligent advertising. They are not exactly lying, but selling snake oil. There is no proof that universities deliver, or are capable of making good, on most of their promises. Universities do not just engage in unethical marketing. Rather, they seem to not even do much educating.