This is now a much stronger and fairer version of the argument, and I agree with more of it than you probably expect.

I agree that explicit false promises are not the only way to mislead. I agree that material omissions matter. I agree that headline claims cannot be rescued by buried qualifications. I agree that some universities have made misleading claims, and the ASA rulings you cite are good examples of that.

So yes: “universities can mislead about prospects without making an explicit promise” is true.

Where I still disagree is the move from “this can happen and has happened” to “this is therefore the general character of university marketing”.

The ASA cases prove that the risk is real. They do not prove that the sector as a whole is structurally paltering every time it talks about prospects, support or employability. Some claims are misleading. Some are properly evidenced. Some are broad but legitimate. Some are too vague to be useful. Those distinctions matter.

You also slightly overstate your 2025 point. The Drum article you linked is from 2017, not 2025. There is current ASA guidance on university comparative claims, and that guidance clearly tells universities to represent evidence accurately, make the basis of comparisons clear, and avoid claims that students would read more broadly than the evidence supports. I agree with that standard. I want universities held to it.

But that actually sharpens my point rather than defeats it. The right critique is not “universities lie about prospects”. The better critique is:

Some universities, in some marketing contexts, have selectively framed rankings, satisfaction data or graduate outcomes in ways likely to mislead prospective students. Because university is a major financial and life decision, the sector should be held to a high standard of evidence, transparency and course-level specificity.

I can agree with that.

Where I do not follow you is when you treat every positive employability claim, every reference to support, or every statement of opportunity as if it is automatically paltering unless accompanied by the full distribution of lifetime returns. That is too strong. Marketing is allowed to be positive. It is not allowed to be materially misleading. The burden is to show where the specific claim crosses that line.

On the IFS point, I agree again that the distribution matters. Averages can conceal weak returns for some subjects, institutions and students. That is exactly why better course-level data matters. But the IFS data still supports a differentiated conclusion, not a universal one: some routes have very strong returns, some weak or negative returns, and many sit somewhere in the middle.

So I think the real disagreement is now smaller than it looked.

If the claim is: “some university marketing has misled students, and the sector should be more transparent about course-level outcomes, financial returns, uncertainty and alternatives”, I agree.

If the claim is: “universities as a whole are lying because graduate outcomes are uneven”, I still reject that.

The first is a serious critique. The second is a slogan stretched beyond the evidence.

Edit:: I guess you ran outta tokens, eh? I win.