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it encourages students to believe themselves customers
At least now that university courses come under Consumer law there is a little more incentive not to completely fabricate the marketing material. Unfortunately the complete (total) marketisation of education means that providers are greatly incentivised to find ever more slippery ways to embellish the truth about what they offer. It's all about making the sale. Although there are dozens of metrics used to assess the quality of the service (including student satisfaction, rate of employment etc), these only seem to have value for more marketing, through ranking and rating.
hoefla
It's a negative in terms of perception of what a University education is for, in that it encourages students to believe themselves customers who are investing in themselves in order to make more money than if they did not go. University should be about an education - not about a future financial transaction.
If I was looking at University now I would assume that I'd be balancing the average student debt of 50k against my chosen course being 7 years instead of 3 (Architecture), and therefore a total debt load of 100k before I started working properly. An average salary for an Architect is ~77k, which isn't bad - but that's a lot of debt to shoulder and a significant tax burden to pay it back.
Contrast that with Fine Art BA then MA - same debt load, unsure what the salary/earning potential would be.