Insights from John Deveney of Worldcom PR Group Partner DEVENEY
Higher education is navigating extraordinary pressure from multiple directions.
Institutions are being asked to rebuild trust, demonstrate the value of a college education, navigate political and financial pressures, strengthen faculty-leadership relationships, and determine the appropriate role of AI, all while confronting the demographic cliff and the enrollment challenges that come with it.
The numbers underscore the urgency. According to BestColleges and CAPPS, from March 2020 through 2025, at least 49 nonprofit colleges closed and at least 40 merged. Current analyses estimate more than 100 additional U.S. universities could be at risk of closure or merger by 2030, particularly small private nonprofits with endowments under $100 million.
Against that backdrop, The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting its Chronicle Festival September 10–17, aptly themed “Building Trust During Change.” What caught my attention most were the four questions The Chronicle placed at the center of the conversation.
Because higher education is confronting something deeper than a communication challenge.
It is confronting a confidence challenge.
Students are asking whether college is worth the investment. Parents are asking whether it is worth the cost. Faculty are asking what their roles become in an AI-enabled world. Employers are asking whether graduates possess the skills they need. And the public is asking whether colleges understand the world they are preparing students to enter.
The institutions that emerge strongest will not be those that communicate the loudest. They will be those that listen most carefully, adapt most intelligently, and demonstrate their value most convincingly.
Here are my thoughts on the four questions shaping that challenge.
1. Can colleges rebuild trust?
Yes, but not by talking about trust. Trust is not a key message. It is an institutional outcome.
Recent Student Voice research found that students place substantially more trust in professors than presidents and senior administrators. That should tell every college president something important: an institution’s most credible communicators may be the people closest to the learning experience, not necessarily those at the top of the organizational chart.
And the trust problem is more nuanced than simply saying the public has lost faith in higher education. Recent research found that 62% of students expressed somewhat or very high trust in their institution, even as affordability remains a significant source of distrust.
The opportunity, therefore, is not to launch another campaign telling people that college matters. It is to prove it.
Colleges need to make their value visible throughout the student experience. Students and families should be able to answer questions such as:
- What will I learn?
- What will I be able to do?
- Where will this education take me?
- Was it worth what I invested?
And institutions should be able to answer with evidence, not slogans.
That means telling stories connected to outcomes, people, and transformation: a graduate who turned what she learned into a company, a professor who changed the trajectory of a student’s life, or a research project that became a new technology.
These are not simply success stories. They are evidence of institutional value.
But colleges also must listen before they communicate. Understanding what students, faculty, employers, parents, trustees, and communities actually believe about an institution, and where that differs from how the institution sees itself, is where rebuilding trust begins.
Don’t tell people what to believe about your institution. Find out what they believe and determine what needs to change.
2. How do you reconnect students with learning?
The answer is not more technology, more engagement programming, or more content. It is more meaning.
Students have unprecedented access to information. What they increasingly need from an institution is help turning that information into understanding, judgment, capability, and purpose.
Instead of asking, “How do we get students more engaged?” perhaps the better question is: “What makes learning worth engaging in?”
The classroom should be a place where students do things they cannot do as effectively alone: solve real problems, work with real organizations, debate difficult questions, create, lead, fail, and try again.
And increasingly, it should be a place where they learn to work alongside AI without surrendering their own thinking, creativity, or authorship to it.
Inside Higher Ed’s 2025-26 Student Voice Survey found that 85% of students used generative AI for coursework, with brainstorming, tutoring, and studying among the most common uses. Relatively few said AI had diminished the value of college; 23% said college had become more valuable.
That suggests the opportunity is not to fight AI, but to make the human value of learning more explicit.
Before graduation, students should be able to demonstrate more than the courses they completed. They should be able to show what they know, what they can do, what they have built, and the problems they have solved.
That is a much stronger response to the value question than a diploma alone. The next generation of higher education must make learning visible, applicable, and consequential.
3. Can AI strengthen, not divide, a campus?
Yes, but institutions need a shared approach. AI should not be treated simply as a technology initiative or procurement decision. It is an institutional issue touching academics, ethics, privacy, intellectual property, equity, and the student experience.
Allowing every faculty member, department, and administrator to develop an AI philosophy independently creates confusion and distrust.
Instead, institutions need clear principles around questions such as:
- What should AI do, and what should it never do?
- What constitutes authentic learning?
- How will academic integrity, privacy and intellectual property be protected?
- How should AI improve, rather than diminish, the student experience?
Some institutions are already treating AI as an institutional design challenge. At the University of Texas at San Antonio, for example, AI spans degree programs, research, teaching innovation, and institutional strategy, with an emphasis on ethical, multidisciplinary, and industry-connected education.
The lesson is larger than any one institution. The winning AI strategy will not belong to the colleges that deploy the most AI. It will belong to those that best teach their communities how to use it intelligently.
AI should become a new form of institutional literacy. That requires leadership.
Presidents and their administrations should establish AI principles aligned with the institution’s mission, academic standards, and core values. The responsibility is neither to embrace AI uncritically nor reject it reflexively. It is to establish boundaries, model judgment and create the conditions for responsible use.
And there is an important distinction between policy and principle. A policy tells people what they can and cannot do. A principle tells them why.
Universities cannot write policies fast enough to govern every new application of AI. But clear principles give faculty, students, and administrators a framework for exercising sound judgment as technology continues to evolve.
The fundamental question is not simply what technology can do. It is what we should allow it to do, and what we believe should remain distinctly human.
4. What should the next compact for colleges look like?
Higher education needs a new compact built around mutual accountability. The old compact was relatively straightforward: students invested time and money, colleges provided education, and graduates received a credential. That is no longer sufficient.
The better question is: “What should colleges promise students, and what should students expect in return?” Colleges should promise to create value, not merely deliver courses, but develop knowledge, capabilities, relationships, and experiences that matter.
Students should actively participate in their education and take responsibility for their development.
Faculty should teach for the world that exists, embracing new technologies while protecting the intellectual rigor and human development that make education meaningful.
Employers should participate by helping define needed skills, providing experiential learning and creating clearer pathways from education to opportunity.
And communities should engage with their institutions as engines of economic, cultural, and civic development. The degree, then, becomes evidence, not the entire product.
It should represent something more meaningful:
- I learned.
- I contributed.
- I demonstrated capability.
- I can think.
- I can adapt.
- I can communicate.
- I can continue learning.
That is a compact worth believing in.
The Opportunity Ahead
The institutions that thrive over the next decade will not necessarily be the largest, wealthiest, or most famous. They will be the institutions that can answer three questions better than their competitors:
- Why us?
- Why now?
- Why is what we do worth it?
And then prove the answers. That requires more than marketing.
It requires alignment among mission, leadership, academic experience, student experience, reputation, communications, technology, and outcomes. It requires institutions to understand how they are perceived, not simply how they see themselves. And it requires stories that demonstrate transformation rather than merely describe programs.
Most importantly, it requires the courage to change what is no longer working. The future will belong to colleges that stop defending their relevance and start demonstrating their value.
The question is no longer whether higher education will change. It will.
The question is whether institutions will lead the change or spend the next decade explaining why they didn’t. Higher education doesn’t simply need to communicate a new value proposition. It needs to make a new promise and then keep it.
