Discussion
The ASA and CAP have taken measured and proportionate action to draw attention to misleading university marketing. By bringing nine examples to public attention and issuing guidance to the sector they have made clear what they believe universities can and cannot claim. They have also helpfully reframed the issue by emphasising that to decide what is potentially ‘misleading’ you need to think from the perspective of what a typical reader might understand by the message, not what the writer intended. Against this backdrop of new guidance though, we must remember that there are more than 130 universities and many other higher education (HE) institutions in the UK. Each of these publishes advertising material through websites, social media, prospectuses, print and broadcast media. In the random sample for the author’s 2013 paper there were an average of 116 data based claims per prospectus – this was without even looking at websites or social media. So we could be talking about more than 15,000 ‘data based claims’ a year, just in the printed prospectuses of mainstream universities. It does not seem reasonable to expect an organisation such as ASA, with responsibilities across the whole range of consumer issues, to pro-actively police university marketing.
