The world of education, like that of commerce, is one under pressure to draw profits from it’s exploits. It is for this reason that potential students are big business, and therefore no wonder that barely post-pubescent kids, all but ready to leave sixth form, are drowned in a mass of advertising from the many acedemic institutions across the country. I spent a short amount of time visiting the web sites of a small number of British universities looking at the subtle advertising and marketing tactics which are employed by each.

Cardiff University
The first destination on this whistle-stop tour of university websites was, of course, my own beloved Cardiff University. Now, at first glance the home page for Cardiff is quite dull, with simple a picture of some nice architecture on campus and a little news about what’s going on. But delving into the underbelly of this site (simply googleing “Cardiff University”) I found this…

Look at how happy these three young attractive girls are, holding their drinks as if to say “I’m drunk and would like to have sex with you if you attend Cardiff and join the rowing club“.

University of Wales Institute Cardiff
Now we all know that students at UWIC are just students who applied to Cardiff and didn’t get in, well that’s too bad! However, their home page seemed to imply (to me at least) that UWIC university is only for white folk. A quick inspection of the images of people from the home page (and there were a lot of those) alone had the following ratio:
White: 90%
Black: 5%
Asian: 5%
Promoting ethnic diversity my arse!
However, the foreign students who DO make it into the university seem to prosper in their pursuits and have a grand old time of it on the way. Take a look at this man and his child i found on the international page:

Just look at how happy they are! They are loving their time at UWIC. See how they are prospering, that kid has even got a scholar’s hat on at a jaunty angle! Doesn’t it make you want to go there!

Lancaster University
The first image I came across on my Googling of British Universities when it came to Lancaster was the following:

We can clearly see from this image that students at Lancaster enjoy a lot of time out on the grass in front of what are presumably their halls of residence. There seems to be no evidence of them studying, and they seem to be happier for it. Look at how nice and warm it is there, it’s almost like a holiday camp.

In Conclusion…
So there you have it. University advertising makes the university look amazing when we all clearly know that UWIC can’t possibly be anywhere near as good as Lancaster and Cardiff. I would analyse other websites too, but I am quite frankly bored of this now and will leave that up to you.