As soon as admission season kicks in around April, coaching institute advertisements take over newspapers, magazines and billboards. The ads often feature images of toppers who have made it to elite engineering or management institutes along with their AIR (all India rankings). Not only are these ads a badge of honour for coaching institutes but also a way to attract new batches of ambitious students who are looking to crack various competitive exams. The target audience is mostly students who have just graduated from schools or those who have dropped a year to prepare.
But more often than not the veracity of the claims made in these ads go unchecked and unverified. For instance, a recent in-depth report from Moneycontrol explained how multiple coaching centres use images of the same top student and claim her or his success as their own.
The report states that coaching centres caught in the vortex of intense rivalry are trying every trick – from straightforward pitches to offers of cash and cars, and even blackmail, to lure the brightest students so that they can leverage the association with the toppers later.
Education advertisers are biggest defaulters
Education institutes and online education firms remain the single largest violators of advertising codes, followed by health care and personal care product companies, according to a recent report by The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI).
ASCI is a non-profit company that promotes self-regulation in advertising and lays down guidelines for different sectors to protect consumers from misleading ads. ASCI said it went through 5532 ads in 2021-22 and education companies made up 33 percent of all complaints by consumers.
“Education category is the number one defaulter when it comes to misleading advertisements. It has been the case for the last few years. Close to one third of the ads of the overall complaints we process are from education. The gap between education and the next category is much more as well,” says Manisha Kapoor, CEO, ASCI.
ASCI says that apart from consumer complaints, it has an active suo moto surveillance mechanism that gets activated in the admission season. It has partnered with TAM Media Research to scrutinise both national and regional dailies as the education category ads rely heavily on print platforms.
The most common and popular claims made by coaching institutes and educational instructions are guaranteed admission in high-profile institutes, guaranteed placements/jobs or being number one in rankings.
“The whole idea of projecting themselves as number one through means which are not fair is problematic. The basis on which they are claiming this is often unclear, vague or just an assertion without a test done or an independent body verifying their claims. All these are dubious claims. We definitely see these claims coming more from coaching centres that focus on helping students clear competitive exams,” Kapoor notes.
More often than not, being awarded something is also a common hook that these institutes tend to use in their campaigns. “Most of these awards are paid awards. It is a well-established mechanism in the industry,” Kapoor says.
Coaching centres vs university ads
Certainly, universities are under regulation and have a certain scale which is not true for coaching classes. This makes them unaccountable for the promotions and advertisements that they roll out.
“…..the nature of promises that are being made by coaching institutes in their ads is more dangerous. Universities will largely promise guaranteed placement or being the number one university. On the other hand, coaching classes’ claims are around guaranteed admissions or entry in certain institutes,” Kapoor points out.
The ads are also targeted to a certain section of students who are looking to crack government jobs in banking, army or police service.
“A lot of candidates who wish to get into these services are not affluent and a government job is a huge ambition for them. People do spend a lot of money they can’t really afford on these services and that puts an extra responsibility for these services to not take advantage of consumers,” Kapoor asserts.
Regulatory challenges
The biggest challenge to regulate the advertising in this category is the sheer volume of advertising that happens in a single quarter (April – July) every year. This is the time when students graduate from schools and often enroll in competitive exam entrance classes.
“The number of advertisers in this category is massive and a lot of them are operating at local and hyperlocal level. They make exaggerated claims and when they hear from us they withdraw the ads. However, there is a set of new advertisers who make similar claims next year. This becomes a continuous cycle. So our compliance rate is high but we do hope to see that the sector bodies or industry associations take this issue seriously,” Kapoor shares.
ASCI says that apart from consumer complaints, it has an active suo moto surveillance mechanism that gets activated in the admission season. It has partnered with TAM Media Research to scrutinise both national and regional dailies as the education category ads rely heavily on print platforms.
“However, another challenge is that these ads appear in small, local level regional publications/newspapers which might be hard to track. Owing to the multiplicity of the players that becomes challenging for us to deal with every single coaching class or institute. One of the ways is to explore and work with their industry bodies to have a wider reach,” Kapoor concludes.
As competition intensifies between offline and online education and coaching institutes to gain a large number of students, their advertising is bound to get more aggressive. The sheer volume of ads and their spread make it harder to track, monitor and red flag violations of all nature. So the responsibility then falls on the consumer – parents and students. Consumers have to become vigilant and smart enough to spot an unverified claim in a dubious ad.
But as the Moneycontrol report mentioned earlier indicates, sometimes consumers turn a blind eye to claims in ads, when they are presented with an offer they can’t refuse.