New York — The television advertisements produced by most major universities depict their campuses as overwhelmingly white, privileged environments, likely deterring many minority students from applying, according to a paper being presented here this week as part of the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

The study that the paper summarizes closely examined videotapes of the 30-second television spots that 43 colleges aired during the 2006-7 Bowl Championship Series. The researchers — Brian Bourke and Michael S. Harris, both assistant professors of higher education at the University of Alabama — analyzed the images, narration, characters, scenes, and music in the ads, applying key concepts from the field of critical race theory.

The researchers found that the overwhelmingly majority of the students and alumni depicted in the advertisements were white, with minority members generally being depicted only as token members of larger groups. The common image of a group of students strolling the campus, for example, typically depicted three or four white students and a single student of color.

(A feature story about a few colleges’ 30-second spots, which may or may not have been part of the study, appears in The Chronicle this week.)

In trying to convey the message that their graduates are successful, the universities typically showed images of alumni who are white and wealthy. And the images shown to depict the tradition and history of the institutions were so void of students of color they sent the message “tradition equals whiteness,” the paper said.

Some of the universities examined by the researchers have enrollments that are so overwhelmingly white that advertisements depicting large numbers of minority students arguably could be called misleading. But the two researchers say that the messages that the advertisements send to minority students are not going to help bring much racial and ethnic diversity to those campuses anytime soon.

“With the use of people of color as token display pieces in their advertisements, these institutions communicate to any would-be students of color that their experiences will be marked by tokenism,” the paper says. As a result, it says, “The message that these advertisements send to potential students of color does untold damage to the public missions of these institutions to increase access and attainment among all populations, not simply those that are part of the dominant white and wealthy elites of the state.” —Peter Schmidt