Colleges Fight Google Ads

Ads are everywhere.  Anywhere we look we see an advertisement for something, but when it comes to the Internet, it is upgraded ten fold.  Within five minutes a surfer can be bombarded with thousands of different ads having to do with anything from colleges to Burger King.  With all the confusion, how can any normal person be expected to filter through the fake ones to find the “real” ones?  In this article, Mark J. Rosenberg points out that, “With the internet, people are lazy, and if they get to the wrong web site, and it’s good enough, they don’t leave.”  I know that for me this is absolutely true, and I’m willing to bet that most other people are the same way, especially when I’m not specifically sure about what I’m searching for (like a prospective college search).

The sometimes grueling, and usually frustrating, task of searching for the right college is only made more difficult by the faults mentioned in this article.  College’s pay to put their ads on search engines with the certainty that it will bring them back business in the form of potential students.  The problem comes in when these college ads mislead students to thinking they are sending their information to one school, when in fact it could be going to multiple, unrelated schools.

Of course, especially for bigger schools it is hard to monitor the Internet to verify that anything with their name on it is legitimate.  The article argues that it is mostly the fault of the search engines themselves for not being more careful with their investor’s information.  I agree that the blame should be put on companies like CollegeBound and Vantage, but I believe that The Education Marketing Council and the Department of Education could play a bigger role in fixing these problems by better enforcing the rules that already exist, or by making newer rules with little wiggle room.  I think that certain search engines that have been problematic in the past should be avoided by colleges looking to advertise themselves, and that if all of these factions were able to communicate more clearly and truthfully about their intentions with each other, there would be fewer problematic instances.