Universities make big promises in their ads, but can they back them up?
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Earlier this year, the U.S. Education Department announced it would forgive the loans of more than 1,200 former University of Phoenix students. Federal officials said the school misled students over a roughly two-year period, from 2012 to 2014, into thinking it had relationships with Fortune 500 companies and that those firms would give hiring preferences to students from University of Phoenix.
That got us thinking about the ways in which colleges and universities market themselves more broadly, and some of the pitfalls that can come with the claims schools make.
Jason Brennan is a professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches classes on Political Economy and Business Ethics. He’s also the co-author of the 2019 book “Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education.”
The Show spoke with him and asked how advertising for universities differs from the way other entities might try to advertise themselves.
JASON BRENNAN: In my view, I think it's just significantly less ethical than what other companies do and the reason is because they can get away with it. So universities make very large promises and they don't do much to back up those promises. I think that's the biggest difference you see between them and some other companies. So if I think about, say BMW says that a you know, I don't know, a three series car with a 3 L engine can go 0 to 64.3 seconds. They're going to test that over and over again to make sure they can verify that claim universities will make similar kinds of promises, but they don't test their claims.
MARK BRODIE: Is there an extra sort of layer of variables with the university though? In terms of like, yes, the BMW company can test the car, the machine to make sure that it does what the company says it does. But with a university, I wonder, like they can say something like, oh, well, you know, you'll have a good chance of getting into this, you know, getting into this grad school or getting this job, but it's not reliant on a machine. It's relying on a human being to, to try to make that happen.
BRENNAN: Oh, absolutely. That's one of the reasons why universities don't test it. It's because it's too difficult if you think about what would it take to discover? Am I a good teacher or not, for instance? Am I good at doing what I do? You have all these problems about the quality of the background students, what else is going on in their schedule and so on. And so in order to determine like the value add of a particular teacher, you have to do these complicated randomized control experiments which violate student freedom and require massive amounts of data collection. And so no one does that. And the reason except for people who want to publish papers on how effective university teaching is, and then that's where we get to find out the truth about what's going on. And that's where we start finding is extremely depressing results, which is that we're not actually delivering the goods that we say we're delivering to students.
BRODIE: Is there a difference, do you think between, for example, what University of Phoenix was accused to have done in terms of saying that it had a relationship with particular companies that could help students get internships or jobs versus saying, "hey, if you come here, you know, you'll get a good education and you'll have a good leg up when you graduate into the job market."
BRENNAN: Yeah, I think we have to differentiate those two things. So it is in fact true that if you go to an elite university or even just a regular university, you can expect to have a pretty high salary premium as long as you graduate, you will actually it will actually help you get jobs, you will have a high return on your investment. I think that stuff is true, but that's not really what most of these universities are advertising. Instead they say things like we're going to transform you into a better person. We'll deepen your critical thinking skills. We'll make you able to appreciate diversity better. We'll make you be able to analyze complicated texts and understand complicated ideas. So they're making these promises about improving your, like, your knowledge, your soft skills and making you a better person. That's the stuff that they're claiming. And that's what they're not delivering on. And really, that's, that's what they think is the ultimate essence of their argument. They're not going to say if you go to Yale, we'll give you a better job. They'll say if we go to Yale, we'll make you a better person. But what if they don't?
BRODIE: Right. Do you find that different types of colleges and universities market themselves differently? Like you mentioned, elite universities may be sort of a, a level or two below versus like community colleges versus, you know, other like trade school type places.
BRENNAN: No, you know, in trying to collect the sort of things that universities say about themselves, they kind of think the same promises. If anything, perhaps the promises are more exaggerated in the lesser schools, but they'll all say things like will help you grow spiritually and intellectually and emotionally, or we're committed to an ideal of helping you think critically and write clearly, which will be the foundation of all professions. Smith at one point said that the world is your campus and you'll be ready to live and work and lead across global borders. And then Northwood University says, you know, leadership isn't simply taught, it's instilled and so on and so forth. They're all making these really exaggerated claims about transforming students without actually, first of all, not testing to see whether they are actually transforming them the way they are and ignoring a really large literature that actually examines whether or not these transformations take place and basically gets a negative result.
BRODIE: Is it even possible for some of those lines? Like those seem like lines that come out of Madison Avenue as opposed to, you know, like a dean's office, like, is it even possible to test whether or not if you go to Smith College that the world will become your campus?
BRENNAN: In a way we can and by the way, you said Madison Avenue and, and you're right. These schools were, I forget the exact number off the top of my head. But when we were looking into this, we found that on average universities were spending about half a million dollars a year hiring basically New York firms to come up with marketing campaigns for them. So it really is being done by smooth professional marketers. So here's the kinds of things you can do. There's a number of scholars, for instance, (Richard) Arum and (Jospia) Roksa has a have a famous set of studies where they look at students and give them something called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which tests their soft skills, their critical reasoning, their math skills and so on. And you give the students this, when they come into school, you give it to them like a year in another year, in another year in and basically track their performance over time. And then you can see are they growing and what they found is, you know, to sort of simplify it. Roughly, about half of students have no growth at all in any of their skills, except for math, which goes down for them. The next 40% or so have only a small amount of growth like not even one standard deviation, and then maybe the top 10% of students actually have any significant degree of growth. So we can look at things like that, we can look at where people get jobs we can look at and compare the again, like comparing the student who goes to the school and is admitted to the school versus the person who doesn't and we keep getting these kinds of negative results. We're just not delivering what we promise.
BRODIE: So you mentioned earlier that one of the reasons schools say things like this is because they can, they like there's really no repercussions for, for saying it. Why is that?
BRENNAN: Yeah. It's an odd thing if you think about compare it to like say a drug company. So I like to say, imagine Pfizer offered a drug called callegra. It costs $280,000 you have to take it over like 40 hours a week for 30 weeks a year. It takes an incredible amount of time. And then at the end they say we're going to make you smarter better person who's able to understand the world and critically reason about almost anything, etc., etc. making all the very same promises universities make. And then they offered this drug to people, they didn't do any kind of testing. And in fact, there's a massive scientific literature that they ignore, which says that the drug doesn't work. If Pfizer did that, the FDA would put them in a lot of trouble, they would get some sort of massive fine. People would be able to sue them who took the drug and say that the drug didn't work and they'd be in trouble. Nothing like that happens for universities. There isn't a regulatory agency that's overseeing them that's punishing them for making the kinds of promises that they can't keep in the way that like normal companies are punished for false advertising. And the other thing that could really regulate them would be if they were competition from the outside, that would in a way like provide the same good that a university does but does it better. But the problem is universities don't really have competitors.
BRODIE: Do you see this trend changing at all anytime soon?
BRENNAN: No, I don't think so. I think it's just going to continue as is, there's going to be a reckoning at some point. It can't, this can't sustain itself, but I don't know how long it's going to take, back when I was going to college in the '90S, people said, oh, by the time we get to the early 2020s, this reckoning will take place. And frankly, it isn't really, I mean, there are, there is less enrollment because of like a demographic drop-off and a few other things, but I, I think we might be 30 years, 30 years away or so from any real change.
BRODIE: All right. That is Jason Brennan, a professor at Georgetown University. Jason, thanks so much for the conversation. I appreciate it.
BRENNAN: Yeah, thanks very much. Appreciate it too.
