The University Representative That a Prospective Student Trusts

The article discusses a form of a university communication with prospective students that is mediated by university and its representatives’ image. The results indicate that consumers of educational services (prospective students and students) have ideal images of university representatives that evoke trust or distrust. Emotional and evaluative components of these images are stable and do not change over considerable periods of time. These ideal images are not associated with any individual employee of the university, but apparently participate in the development of trust or distrust to a particular university of educational services consumers (study of the trust developmental process to a particular university was not the goal of our empirical study). Ideal images of the university and its representative that are trusted (or distrusted) by prospective students have common emotional and evaluative characteristics. The university representative is truly a university’s “face” (attitude to him/her transfers on to the university and vice versa).