Abstract
This paper examines misleading marketing claims in UK university prospectuses. It reviews earlier studies suggesting that the imagery and language of university marketing can be misleading. It considers the use of data and statistics by universities in their advertising – a topic not previously studied. From a sample of UK university prospectuses a typology of misleading data-based marketing claims is proposed, with nine categories: omission of facts and selective reporting; misleading wording; misleading inferences about an attribute; misleading associations between attributes; misleading endorsements; claim-fact discrepancies; falsehoods; carefully crafted comparisons, and claims without a reference point. Because choosing a university is so important to students and because universities aspire to high ethical and scholarly standards, the issues raised by these findings are significant. The two bodies empowered to address this issue in the UK do not take a proactive approach and so it must fall to universities themselves to address the ethical challenges raised by misleading marketing.
Highlights
Figures often beguile me, when I have the arranging of them myself. (Mark Twain, 1906)One consequence of the move to the marketisation of higher education (HemsleyBrown, 2011; Molesworth, Nixon, & Scullion, 2009; Sawyer, Johnson, & Holub, 2009), has been an increasing emphasis by universities on how they promote themselves to potential students
The author has chosen not to name the universities in the study, and department names and other potentially identifiable references have been edited out. This decision was taken because any shortcomings identified in the integrity of these prospectuses are likely to be found more widely across the sector
This study suggests that UK university prospectuses provide examples of data-based marketing claims that are potentially misleading
Summary
When I have the arranging of them myself. (Mark Twain, 1906)One consequence of the move to the marketisation of higher education (HemsleyBrown, 2011; Molesworth, Nixon, & Scullion, 2009; Sawyer, Johnson, & Holub, 2009), has been an increasing emphasis by universities on how they promote themselves to potential students. The university prospectus that was once “a modestly produced booklet mostly written by academic staff” (Brockbank, 1996), has become a large illustrated glossy brochure with a parallel website designed by marketing professionals (Steele, 2009). This marketing effort seeks to persuade potential students to attend the university. In the UK, attendance at university has been promoted by central government as serving the interests of the individual, the national economy and the cause of social justice (Bradley, 2012).
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