We started this thesis from an initial suspicion: Brazilian Private Higher Education has undergone important transformations, entering into the logic of commodification and becoming an object of consumption during the 1990s. In order to do so, it made use of representations of youth as a social category. From the mid-2000s, the logic of consumption intensifies and Private Higher Education goes through a process of financialization, which we are experiencing until today. We seek to prove this hypothesis through the examination of Higher Education institutions advertisements from a semiotic approach, using Discourse Analysis as a research method. Thus, among several possible objects, we have chosen youth as our analytical category, since it is the age group primarily idealized by Higher Education, whether public or private, as its target audience. This very same youth served as an element of distinction for advertising. There is a publicity prior to this hegemonic aesthetic of youth and a publicity that is the consequence of this domination, which began in the second half of the twentieth century and extends to the present day. We believe that it was advertising, following market transformations, that began to stimulate competition among institutions to establish education consumption patterns very similar to the patterns of consumption of goods and services. We have drawn conclusions that identified that the greater the process of financialization, the lesser youth appears as a character in the ads. This disappearance of youth indicates a symbolic passage through two types of Higher Education.