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Higher Education Doesn’t Need a Better Story. It Needs a More Believable One.

Restoring public confidence will require colleges to listen, modernize and deliver the value they promise.

No amount of communications polish can repair a gap between what colleges promise and what students, families and employers experience.

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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........

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