Where Did All the Ads Go?
Prospective college students face a daunting task in choosing which of the more than 6,000 U.S. postsecondary institutions will meet their needs and improve their lives. Some students are bombarded with information about colleges from a wide range of sources with varying credibility, while others may have very little information on their college options. In both cases, information — or the lack thereof — plays a critical role in college choice. In this environment, college advertising (i.e., paid commercial advertising on television, radio, outdoor ads, websites display ads, or social media) can have an important effect on student choice — and we know very little about it. In this brief on college advertising, the first in a series from the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research (PEER) Center, we describe the patterns and changes in college advertising in the United States over the last decade and a half.
We draw on proprietary “Ad Intel” data from Nielsen, a company widely known for its estimates of advertising spending and audience size across the universe of television, cable, radio, and outdoor advertising. In recent years, Nielsen has added online and social media advertising, allowing us to explore digital advertising by colleges for the first time. We document changes in advertising spending by colleges, the number of institutions that advertise, and the modes (or media types) of advertising each year from 2010 to 2022.
Our exploration of advertising data for U.S. colleges shows steep declines in advertising expenditures and the number of colleges advertising over time since 2010, and especially since 2014. Advertising expenditures by higher education institutions peaked at $1.26 billion in 2014, but dropped by more than half to $600 million in 2022. The large drop appears to be driven by spending declines in the for-profit sector, which accounted for about 88 percent of the decline from 2010 to 2022. We also document a steep decline in TV advertising. Much more research is needed to understand the driving forces behind these patterns. For instance, the declines we observe may reflect contracting enrollment and/or closures of for-profit institutions, changes in the costs or effectiveness of advertising, or new ways of reaching prospective students with direct email marketing or other types of recruiting.
An important insight we have gleaned from the data so far is that more than half of colleges in the United States do not advertise at all, and among those that advertise, most spend very little on commercial advertising. The typical institution that advertises spends about $70,000 per year — and most spend that money locally, on outdoor ads and local media. Still, there are some very large spenders, leaving average spending close to $475,000 per year overall. For-profit institutions appear to spend much more than their public and nonprofit counterparts. We further document that a set of about 400 to 600 institutions consistently spend on national TV and national print, while most other institutions choose local advertising. Our preliminary analysis of digital media also suggests that the declines we see in traditional modes of advertising are giving way to much more targeted — and less expensive — advertising on social media and other digital platforms. Forthcoming briefs will seek to explain the differences we see here — exploring advertising spending patterns by institutional sector, level, enrollment, and field of study — to uncover how and why these patterns emerge and what their implications are for students.
