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3 Ways Colleges Convince the American Public we Need them.

Don't be fooled, colleges are a money making industry. Private and public schools a like are using social and persuasive tactics to convince american youth to attend their school and convincing their parents its the right thing to do.

This pamphlet shows college marketing at its finest 

Neuromarketing

One aspect of college and university persuasion lies in the science of advertising, more specificly neuromarketing. According to Persuasion and Influence in American Life Neuromarketing involves our brains accepting attitudes or behaviors that match prior knowledge. This plays into the fact that universities thrive off of that it is a genuinely accepted principle that if an individual wants to be successful they must attend college. Where this is simply not true, and there is evidence that college is a must have on the resume by the gigantic 949 billion dollars of federal direct student loan debt by 2016's fourth quarter.

Branding

Colleges also thrive off of the use of branding. Schools brand by highlighting their features in order to best lure prospective students. Colleges invest a great deal of time and money in creating a particular brand that best suits them in order to successfully capture as many students and parents into their programs as they need. This branding is done over many platforms. This branding taps into our basic psychological needs and in the case of colleges, it taps into our needs of belonging and respect. Which is what supposedly comes from a college degree.

Integrated Marketing  

The third reason colleges have convinced the american public that we need them, is because of frequency of which they market our kids. Upon the Junior year of high school a teenager starts to become bombarded with mail from possible colleges. What colleges are really good at are leveraging each mediums strength to reinforce all communication. This is called integrated marketing. How this communication looks like is the emails students receive, to the pamphlets in their mail box at home, and the colleges even sending representatives to high schools across the nation. All these forms of advertising benefit and work off of each other.

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One of the questions I thought of in regards to chapter four from Nyberg is;

 Are we ALL being deceptive to our parents when we return home from college? or vise versa as we return to college from home, is this deception? or is it simply the fact that people can only gather information about us from where they see us..?

Another question I had is in regards to the "good person fallacy". Doctors are some of the least second guessed, and questioned people in our society. Is our belief to trust our doctors a fallacy? based off the fact that since they are supposed to help us, this makes us inclined to believe they would not lie to us. But should we believe them based on this reasoning?

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Why is walking the fine line between deceiving and truth-telling so prevalent in politics? Is deception a necessary tool for politicians / political campaigns? Why or why not?

The answer to both these questions is simple but also complex in nature. Upon reading the article, "lie or lose" it is clear that politicians fear if they do not tell the public what they want to hear, that they will be crushed by their opponents.  What the public wants to hear, in many cases is not the truth. Let me be clear, we want to know the truth, but mostly we want the truth to be good, or what we want to hear. Many times politicians will simply tell us what we want to hear even if they know it is completely false. For example during the 1988 presidential race George Bush Senior said: " Read my lips, no new taxes". It is said that many economists knew this to be an outright lie, but Bush had determined he could not risk telling the public the truth. After examining this example it should be clear that deceiving is both  prevalent and necessary for politicians, for they fear they can not win an election without it.     

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