A Degree in Advertising : an unwanted child of the business. Why academia and advertising should not be bridged.

According to the directives bestowed on British Higher Education in the aftermath of the 1992 educational reform, employability, which became the responsibility of educational institutions, and employment, which stayed in hands of the employers, should overlap in the process of mutual imitation. Their common aim was to achieve better standards of life by exploring the potential of the mind and transferring it onto the ground of practical experience (Gibb, 2002; Cohen, 1993). Knowledge, and especially creative knowledge and communication, has become a political and economic target in the process of improving the level of wellbeing (Barnett, 2000). In this paper the employability potential of an advertising degree will be discussed within the British context and the heterogeneity of advertising as an academic discipline.