A narrator speaks over images of busy cityscapes, children playing in a field and ominous scenes of natural disasters and civil unrest.
“There’s no sugarcoating it,” the deep voice warns. “America’s future is under attack.”
Its salvation: higher education, personified by young people shown listening attentively in classrooms and busy at work in high-tech labs.
“College,” the speaker concludes with the heroic inflection of a movie cowboy: “Proud sponsor of America at its best.”
This 60-second public service spot is part of a small but growing response by the higher education industry to more than a decade of plummeting public confidence and falling enrollment followed by a year of political attacks against which insiders and advocates concede it has until now been mostly silent.
“We have let the narrative take on a life of its own,” said Tamalyn Powell, senior vice president of higher education practice at the advertising agency BVK, which developed the campaign.
That’s been true not only since the start of the second Trump administration — which cut billions of dollars in federal research funding and cracked down on diversity policies and international students — but before then, when state legislatures were imposing their own restrictions and public support was already plunging.
Now the sector is peering over the top of the trenches and launching initiatives like this “Proud Sponsor” campaign in the hope of reclaiming the message about itself.
“After years of headlines questioning the value of college,” the campaign’s creators explained when they unveiled it, they were “reminding Americans that higher education remains vital to the nation’s future.”
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That’s become a tougher sell than it once was. The proportion of Americans who say college is “very important” has slid from three-quarters when Gallup first asked the question in 2010 to about a third today. Judging by Google search data, questions about “college value,” “college cost” and “college return on investment” continue to grow. The proportion of high school graduates going directly to college has fallen from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2023.
“When all they’re hearing is ‘It costs so much’ or ‘You’ll end up as a barista in a coffee shop,’ then it’s harder to break through,” said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, or AASCU, a membership group of public higher education institutions?. “We’ve let that narrative be crafted for us.”
Even the marketers emphasize this isn’t just a marketing problem. Higher education has to understand why people have lost faith in it, they say, and address those issues.
AASCU has begun to put alumni forward as what it calls “a powerful source of evidence for demonstrating the true value of postsecondary education.” It’s publicizing new survey results that show state university and college graduates are generally satisfied with their educations.
“We have not done a good job of making a case for our value,” said Welch. “We’ve got to get out there and tell that story.”
The Big Ten Academic Alliance of the athletic conference with the same name has rolled out an ad highlighting not the usual scenes of exuberant students on leafy campuses but how those campuses produce “the medicine that keeps your family healthy” and “the discoveries that drive the nation and economy forward.”
Purdue University’s new promotional campaign, which shows students transforming their personal interests into careers, is “a love letter to the promise of college” meant “to win the hearts and minds of the skeptics,” spokesman Trevor Peters said.
And Johns Hopkins University has created a campaign in response to federal research funding cuts called “Research Saves Lives,” making the logo and other elements available for free for anyone else who wants to use them.
These efforts may be mostly just getting under way, but they show that “there’s at least recognition that we have to do something” in response to the relentless criticisms, said Terry Flannery, chief operating officer of the industry marketing and communication association CASE, or Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
That things like medical and scientific research are important was previously assumed by higher education leaders to be self-evident, said Jenny Petty, co-chair of the American Marketing Association’s higher education committee and former vice president of marketing communications at the University of Montana.
“The fact that they are saying, ‘We have to tell the world about our research’ is evidence that this is changing,” Petty said.
That change has been slow. It took two years to develop the “Proud Sponsor” campaign, which was created pro bono by BVK; the reason most Americans haven’t seen it yet is because CASE is still trying to raise funding to air it from corporate and philanthropic sponsors.
It’s not that higher education doesn’t have money for marketing. Colleges and universities spend, on average, nearly $4 million a year apiece on marketing and communications, or the equivalent of $607 per student, according to data provided by the higher education marketing agency SimpsonScarborough, which tracks this.
The biggest institutions have an average of 51 marketing and communication employees. Those numbers have been going up, even as college budgets are being cut and staff laid off, researchers at Kennesaw State University and the University of Mississippi and Southern Mississippi University found.
But institutions have directed almost all of these resources toward the increasingly tough job of attracting applicants to their own campuses, said Greg Summers, a senior strategic advisor at BVK and a former university provost — not to addressing mounting skepticism about whether college in general is worth the cost to families and taxpayers.
“Most institutions, for understandable reasons, want to talk about themselves,” said Summers. “And they particularly want to do that in the context of recruiting students.”
Speaking with a single voice is even harder in a higher education sector that ranges from community colleges to giant research universities — public, private, nonprofit and for-profit — with different missions and interests.
But by failing to respond to larger criticisms, universities and colleges have become an easy target for critics of such things as their purported ideological leanings, said R. Ethan Braden, vice president and chief marketing and communications officer at Texas A&M University.
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“If you have a void in how you’re being understood, you have a choice,” said Braden: “You can either fill that void or someone else will fill it for you.”
That’s what experts say has happened — that universities and colleges have let others commandeer the message, including about whether the returns on a degree are worth the price.
Even as pressure built for universities and colleges to confront this trend, however, they found themselves a target of the unprecedented onslaught by the Trump administration. Instead of speaking out, they shut down.
“They said, ‘We can’t really talk about this and we can’t really talk about that,’ ” said Powell. Added Jason Simon, CEO of SimpsonScarborough: “It’s a challenging political and social environment for any institution. So higher ed is doing what they typically do, which is to be risk-averse and put their heads down in the sand.”
There are new reasons for caution, including concern about retaliation. “It’s not an irrational fear,” said Petty. The presidents of the University of Virginia and Texas A&M and Northwestern universities, for example, all resigned in the past year under political pressure.
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What responses have occurred to date have been low-key. Three months into President Donald Trump’s second term, for example, 400 of the nation’s 4,000 college presidents and chancellors signed a letter calling for “constructive engagement.” Seventy presidents used their spring commencements to speak out for civil discourse.
Higher education’s broader defense of itself has been “muted or mostly nonexistent,” as the industry publication Inside Higher Ed put it. “Say something,” Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth, one of the few presidents who was publicly critical of Trump administration actions in the spring and summer, implored his counterparts, in an op-ed in Slate.
“Higher education moves slowly and deliberately and this past year it was moving against forces that were moving so much faster,” said Rajiv Vinnakota, president of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, which encouraged those presidential remarks at the spring’s commencements. “It’s only now that it’s catching up.”
Even today, much of the response is coming from associations such as CASE and AASCU, rather than from individual institutions. The six principal associations that collectively represent almost all colleges and universities are also trying to align their messages, said Welch, at AASCU.
“There’s this thought that if you stand up, you’re sort of a fish in a barrel. But if you do it together, that’s safer,” Powell said.
Among the members of the Big Ten conference, for example, there was a push “to come together and show our impact” collectively, said Kelly Hiller, chief marketing officer at Purdue, which is part of the Big Ten. “It definitely seems like there’s this snowball of groups joining together to take a unified stance.”
There’s not much choice, said Simon, as colleges and universities now face the added challenge of a demographic decline in the number of traditional-age students.
“Just playing it safe is not the right strategy anymore,” he said. “Less because of politics and more because of social reality, they’re beginning to do things they should have been doing already, which is to really care about what consumer sentiment is and deal with typical marketing problems, like price and competition,” he said.
That’s about more than just marketing, Petty said. Higher education needs to pay attention to what’s keeping customers away. “I get a little tired of people saying we just need to tell our story better,” she said. “There’s a product problem” — legitimate questions about the outcomes provided by higher education institutions for their cost.
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That alumni survey AASCU hopes will help rekindle public confidence in college, for instance, found that — while most graduates were satisfied with their educations and careers and expected to earn more than their parents — only around 40 percent said that their resulting debt was manageable or that their colleges helped them network with employers to find jobs.
It’s still early to know how effective higher education’s revamped sales pitches might be. Nearly 4 million social media users have viewed Johns Hopkins’ Research Saves Lives initiative, a university spokeswoman said. Perceptions of the value of higher education improved among more than 2,000 Americans who were shown the “Proud Sponsor” campaign, according to BVK, including people without degrees and in rural areas, who have been particularly skeptical.
One thing is clear, said Ted Eismeier, senior vice president and head of postsecondary communications at the communications strategy firm Whiteboard Advisors: Being absent from the conversation hasn’t worked.
“Maybe the default is to say nothing or clamp down on communication and maybe that eliminates risk in the short term, but it’s not really a long-term growth strategy,” Eismeier said.
“Institutions are going to have to emerge from this bunker and be a lot more vocal. Clamming up and treating public communication as this highly controlled exercise in risk mitigation — I don’t think that’s the path for higher education to restore public trust in what it’s doing.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about higher education marketing and PR was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Nichole Dobo. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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