To all the marketing students out there, I have a plea – and it has nothing to do with your perv marketing professor, although he is a great target for crude jokes.

My plea was born about two weeks ago when I was perusing Penn’s campus express online brochure, conveniently located online at http://campusexpress.upenn.edu/static/brochure.pdf. 

The brochure is designed to inform prospective and incoming students of the services Penn offers, including telephone service, banking service, transportation and parking service, college house computing service and the ever-popular dining service.

It’s brightly colored and informative; it is the pinnacle of the marketing discipline. The headlines are catchy, the students conveniently multi-cultural and the photographs so full of young smiling faces that you’d think Scott Ward imported them from Thailand himself.

The photos left me in awe, even while I know Penn has no team of attractive smiling black people who enjoy picking up trash in front of brightly graffiti-ed red and black walls.

Yet when I started exploring the information, handily organized by bullet points and subheadings, Wharton style, I became a bit confused. The writers of the brochure appeared to have confused Penn with another school. Perhaps Penn State?

The bullet points and subheadings described school services and programs with words like “easy,” “fast” and “direct.” It ensured the student and parents of “quality”, “reliability” and “support,” with little or no mention of “outrageously inflated prices,” “rude attitudes of lazy workers” or “long lines and double-stick-red-tape.” There was no way this was the same University of Pennsylvania (the one without the good football team.)

I’m quite aware that in this 21^st century world of doublespeak and euphemisms where “I’m the decider” means “I’m a presidential puppet” and “I’ll call you sometime” means “I’m drunk; we had sex; but never speak to me again,” it’s sometimes difficult to decode what people are saying. Yet at the same time, this clearly-worded informative packet stood far outside the realm of truth. How could such a thing have happened in a school, which, with the exception of a few sex-soliciting forays, prides itself as being upright and just? Stranger yet, how could so many untruths emerge from a focus group?

Find below the incomplete, twisted and exaggerated claims of the Campus Express Brochure, and the truth behind them.

CLAIM: Use your meals at any of our three residential dining facilities, which provide a full menu of freshly prepared foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

TRUTH: Use your meals at any of our three residential dining facilities, which, provided you can get a seat, offer the same menu everyday. Beware of the pizza, which is usually topped with the remnants of yesterday’s salad bar, and make sure all chicken is fully cooked before digging in. For a meal-time workout, breaking off a hunk of frozen strawberry ice cream from the dessert freezer will strengthen your biceps in no time. Be forgiving during Sunday brunch – you will not get real eggs.  And forget about dinner after your evening class; the dining halls close between 7:30 and 8:30. You’ll pay about $11 per visit.

CLAIM: Houston Hall features made-to-order salads, pasta, fresh sushi, gourmet burgers, cheesesteaks, soups and sandwiches.

TRUTH: Made-to-order salads are probably great, but nobody ever finds out, since the made-to-order touch screen is always broken. A box of pasta costs about $1.35, yet Penn charges you $5 for a modest-sized helping. You’ll pay close to $10 for a burger or cheesesteak and wait in line for about 45 minutes, only to discover your burger is cooked to smithereens and might be made of sawdust. The sandwiches have clever names to camouflage high prices. The soups are watery at best. Houston Hall sushi can lead to a long experience in the bathroom.

CLAIM: The bookstore has it all! Visit for an extraordinary shopping experience!

TRUTH: The bookstore has all the overpriced textbooks, office supplies and Penn-embossed clothing you could want! Visit for a long wait and mediocre merchandise! Purchase your textbooks at the bookstore, and pay double the price you’d find online!  Purchase your notebooks and pay triple the price you’d find at an office supply store!  Convince yourself that shopping at the University Bookstore means supporting the school, and ignore the fact that the Penn Bookstore is really a Barnes & Noble in disguise.

CLAIM: The overall value of buying a computer through Penn’s Back-to-School Sale is very hard to beat. The features, quality, reliability and support options of these systems exceed those typically offered by retail outlets.

TRUTH: Like the bookstore, the University Computer Store offers the same products you can find elsewhere, but they pack them in a Penn bag and charge a higher price.

CLAIM: Help keep your property safe with Penn’s free bicycle and computer registration program. Registering your property establishes a record of ownership and significantly increases chance of recovery if it is ever lost or stolen.

TRUTH: Kiss any lost or stolen property goodbye. This is West Philly, where even the middle-school kids partake in vicious gang wars. I’m sorry about your bike. Now you’ll have to take SEPTA like the rest of us.

CLAIM: Student Telephone Service provides convenient, low-cost telephone service to students living on campus…the service is required in all rooms for safety reasons and each student is billed separately for their usage.

TRUTH: Cell phones are rapidly rendering landlines obsolete.  We know you probably won’t even hook up a phone in your dorm room. That’s fine – we’ll charge you anyhow.

There you have it – the plain simple truth, sans PR manipulation.  Unfortunately, by this time, it is already too late to save this year’s freshmen from a letdown. So my plea to the marketing students: have a soul. Campus Express is a high-traffic webpage and readers should receive accurate, unbiased information.  The business of college selectivity statistics is dry, competitive and cutthroat, especially in the face of an imminent US News and World Report ranking drop, but freshmen are not yet equipped to deal with the horrors of the real world.

Freshmen deserve to know the truth about Penn, and that’s what they should receive.