No amount of communications polish can repair a gap between what colleges promise and what students, families and employers experience.
With political scrutiny up and public trust down, many in the higher education space are struggling to manage their institutions’ reputations. Spend enough time around college and university leaders, however, and you’ll inevitably hear the same diagnosis: “We just need to tell our story better.”
But what if most people understand the story and find it unconvincing? I’ve watched higher education wrestle with this question throughout my career, first on Capitol Hill and later as a strategic communications advisor to postsecondary institutions, higher education associations and advocacy groups. Too often, leaders treat declining trust strictly as a communications problem when the harder question is whether the narrative—and the experience beneath it—needs an overhaul.
We’ve all seen the warning signs. A 2026 Gallup survey found barely a third of Americans have high confidence in higher education, a drop from 57 percent a decade earlier. Critics point to perceived political agendas on campus, high costs and poor workforce preparation.
Higher education has a bad habit of treating skepticism as a knowledge deficit. The assumption is that if the public better understood financial aid, research contributions, impact on lifetime earnings and the transformative power of the college experience, confidence would return.
Sometimes an institution’s value genuinely does need a clearer explanation. But when skepticism shows up not just in polls but in enrollment declines, spiking interest in alternative credentials and employers’ willingness to embrace other pathways to job skills, it isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s real-world feedback.
What enduring organizations understand
Higher education is not a retailer, and students are not customers. Colleges have educational and civic missions that transcend market demand. But they are not exempt from a lesson every enduring business eventually learns: an important mission and a respected legacy don’t eliminate the need to listen and adapt.
When Satya Nadella became Microsoft’s CEO, he inherited one of the most successful companies in history. He also recognized that success had created a superiority complex. Nadella sought to move Microsoft from a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” culture.
Microsoft changed its leadership framework, embraced upskilling and career pathways and encouraged a growth mindset that Nadella described as “a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.” In doing so, its leaders distinguished the company’s purpose from the products, practices and assumptions that had defined a bygone era.
Higher education faces a similar opportunity. Institutions must not conflate expertise with infallibility. They do not need to shoulder every criticism, but they should be curious enough to ask what persistent skepticism can teach them.
Walmart offers another lesson. Facing declining sales, e-commerce competition and reputational challenges, the company needed to rethink how it could deliver its core promise of affordability while simultaneously attracting new customers. Walmart launched exclusive partnerships with recognizable brands, refreshed store design and built a thriving digital platform to meet customers’ shopping preferences.
Walmart did not assume that shoppers simply misunderstood the merchandise already on its shelves. It modernized its offerings while protecting the value at the heart of its brand.
A small but growing number of colleges are applying similar logic to the bachelor’s degree. Challenging the assumption that a degree requires four years of study, San Francisco Bay University introduced a 90-credit degree that students can complete in three years for a lower cost. Similarly, Virginia is exploring shorter bachelor’s degree pilots across several public and private institutions. Both initiatives ask a question higher education has often resisted: Is every element of the inherited model still essential?
Modernization does not require abandoning mission. It requires distinguishing the mission from one particular way of delivering it. CVS provides perhaps the clearest credibility case study. When rebranding as a healthcare provider in 2014, it confronted an obvious contradiction: outwardly touting its commitment to wellness while continuing to sell tobacco products.
CVS could have continued business as usual and invested more heavily in explaining its healthcare ambitions. Instead, it pulled tobacco products from all 7,600 stores nationwide, walking away from an estimated $2 billion in annual revenue. The company did not simply tell its healthcare story better; it changed its business so the story became more believable.
Colleges should consider whether similar contradictions exist between promise and practice. Can an institution credibly claim to prioritize affordability and access if families cannot understand what a degree actually costs? Can it promise career preparedness without directly engaging employers? Can it celebrate student success while obscuring completion, debt or employment outcomes?
James Madison University presents a concrete example of putting resources behind a promise. “The Madison Promise Guarantees” reinforce JMU’s commitment to ensuring students graduate with real-world skills by pledging additional career coaching, employer connections and internships for graduates who do not land a job within a year.
The guarantees are yet untested, and their credibility will depend on transparent implementation. But the message matters: JMU is no longer asking the public to trust its graduates are ready for the workforce; it is accepting greater responsibility for demonstrating it. In an environment where institutions are facing demands to demonstrate outcomes, accountability can become part of the value proposition.
Explain, reframe or change?
I’m not advocating that every institution needs a three-year degree, an employment guarantee or a wholesale rebrand. But I am encouraging institutions to correctly diagnose the challenge before defaulting to a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Some value must be explained. Colleges provide important research, regional economic impact and critical student supports that may be largely invisible outside the institution. Better evidence and sharper storytelling can close genuine knowledge gaps. Some value needs to be reframed. Abstract language about “transformative experiences” and “preparing tomorrow’s leaders” is meaningless. Institutions should translate those promises into specific experiences, outcomes and benefits.
And some things need to change. No amount of communications polish can make an unaffordable program affordable, a failing program good or a weak connection to employment convincing. In those cases, the desired narrative must wait until the institution is willing to change the experience beneath it.
Effective communication begins only after an institution pinpoints the problem. Strategists should be engaged before major decisions are finalized, not called in afterward to make them more palatable. Their role is to test whether a claim is true for the typical student, identify the evidence a skeptic would require and tell leadership when institutional conduct undermines the story it wants to tell. Sometimes the most valuable communications counsel isn’t “Here’s how to say it” but “You can’t credibly say that yet.”
This is where an outside perspective helps. Internal communicators understand their institutions better than anyone, and many recognize these tensions acutely. But proximity, silos and internal politics make it hard to challenge a narrative that colleagues have spent years building and protecting. An external adviser’s value isn’t superior knowledge of the institution; it’s seeing the institution as its audiences do, naming assumptions that have become invisible internally and bringing lessons from other industries that have faced similar disruption.
That outside perspective can also help leaders distinguish between criticism that should be rejected and criticism that should be investigated. Not every dissatisfied constituent is right, but when the same concern repeatedly appears in surveys, enrollment decisions, employer feedback or student behavior, dismissing it as a messaging problem is itself a strategic decision.
The most enduring organizations do not confuse preserving their purpose with preserving every product, practice or story inherited from the past. Microsoft didn’t abandon its ambition when it became a learning organization. Walmart didn’t abandon affordability when it modernized its offerings. CVS didn’t abandon its business when it stopped selling tobacco. Instead, each made its promise more credible.
Higher education should approach this moment with the same confidence and curiosity. Institutions need not surrender their missions, but they must acknowledge legitimate dissatisfaction and resist the temptation to explain it away. Only then can leaders determine which parts of their story need to be better explained, which need to be reframed and which require the institution itself to change.
