A clear higher education brand strategy helps institutions communicate their value, attract students who belong and make difficult decisions with greater confidence.
Syracuse University’s recent enrollment challenges reveal a difficult question facing higher education:
How do you protect an institution’s reputation while making the changes necessary to sustain it?
As reported in The Wall Street Journal in its August 30, 2026, article, “The College Enrollment Crisis Is Coming for Bigger Schools”, Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez describe a university navigating enrollment shortfalls, financial pressure and concerns about maintaining its standing. One response proved particularly revealing. In spring 2025, Syracuse offered substantial additional financial aid after the traditional May 1st commitment deadline. Families who had already committed on less generous terms felt poorly treated. An effort to fill the incoming class became a question of fairness and trust. The dilemma deserves sympathy. Protect selectivity and risk empty seats. Expand access and worry about perceptions of quality. Invest in facilities and assume more debt. Delay investment and risk disappointing students.
But the episode raises a question that reaches well beyond one campus: What does a college want families to believe about its value and do its decisions consistently support that belief?
When Prestige Becomes the Story
Prestige carries value. It can signal achievement, open doors and build confidence. The difficulty begins when prestige becomes the most developed part of the story. Families may recognize a college’s name without understanding the education behind it. They may know where a school ranks without knowing how its students learn, what its graduates contribute or why its particular approach would suit their child. That leaves a college vulnerable. When price, rankings or selectivity change, families have fewer substantive reasons to remain confident in their choice. And the pressure is likely to continue. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s 2024 projections anticipate a 13% decline in U.S. high school graduates between the projected 2025 peak and 2041. Institutions face a sustained need to explain their relevance to a changing population. A clear identity alone cannot guarantee survival. Purpose, public understanding and financial sustainability have to work together. A useful brand strategy connects all three.
When Your Capabilities Outgrow Your Reputation
A college’s capabilities can evolve faster than the public’s understanding of them. Our recent conversations with leaders in art and design education have brought this perception gap into focus. Families may carry a narrow picture of an art education while an institution is expanding the connections among creativity, technology and professional practice. The Cleveland Institute of Art’s Interactive Media Lab offers a tangible example. Its capabilities include virtual production, motion capture and rapid prototyping, with opportunities for industry collaboration. The strategic opportunity is to connect those capabilities to a larger educational promise.
Cleveland Institute of Art Interactive Media Lab
What will students learn to imagine, make and contribute? Who will they work alongside? How will that experience prepare them for a changing world? Showing what those resources make possible gives families a reason to care.
We explored a related challenge in TWIST’s work with Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. The thinking centered on “unpretentious excellence” and a clearer identity as “The Leadership School,” grounded in purposeful innovation and leadership with practical impact. Unpretentious excellence is powerful because it makes high standards approachable. It invites students to see themselves participating in excellence: asking questions, developing judgment, working with others and contributing something meaningful. When an institution works too hard to appear exclusive, it can obscure those opportunities. Some students may dismiss it as inaccessible. Others may pursue the credential without understanding the educational experience they are choosing. A stronger connection begins when students recognize an institution’s values in the way it teaches and behaves.
Three Ways to Close the Gap
For college leaders, building that connection requires deliberate action.
1. Understand the Perception Cap
Research what prospective students, families, counselors, employers and alumni actually believe. Include students who chose another institution and those who left. Then compare those findings with the leadership team’s assumptions. Is the obstacle awareness? Affordability? An unclear value proposition? Or an experience that fails to meet expectations? Each calls for a different response.
2. Define and Demonstrate Your Value
A useful “why” explains whom the institution serves, what its educational approach makes possible and why that contribution matters.
Connect that purpose to demonstrated strengths. Identify the commitments that must endure and the programs, delivery methods or partnerships that can evolve. Then make the evidence visible throughout the student journey.
Connect the website, campus visit, admissions conversation and aid offer through a consistent explanation of value. Show student work, faculty relationships, professional experiences and verified graduate outcomes. Explain costs clearly.
A college shouldn’t simply tell families what it offers. It should help them understand what that education makes possible.
3. Let the Brand Guide Decisions
A brand should be more than a marketing expression. It should help guide institutional decisions. Bring academic leadership, enrollment, finance, student affairs and marketing into the same conversation. Establish principles for aid, access, investment and program changes before a shortfall demands an immediate response.
If financial aid changes, can the institution explain the criteria honestly and address the effect on families who have already committed?
Every decision teaches people something about the institution.
Then keep testing the strategy against experience and economics. Track whether audiences understand the institution’s strengths, whether admitted students choose it, why others decline and whether enrolled students stay. The goal isn’t to create a reputation immune to change. It’s to create an institution capable of changing with integrity.
Purpose provides continuity. Evidence guides the response.
A college grounded in creative problem-solving can extend that purpose into emerging technologies. A university committed to access can develop new pathways while maintaining clear academic expectations. A leadership school can revise its curriculum as the responsibilities of leadership evolve.
The purpose provides continuity. The evidence guides the response.
No college can build a reputation immune to criticism. But it can earn a reputation for making principled decisions, explaining tradeoffs honestly and correcting course when experience demands it. That is a stronger foundation for trust than an appearance of perfection. It also gives prospective students something more meaningful to choose:
An education whose values, expectations and possibilities they understand.
Is your reputation keeping pace with your real value?
If your institution’s reputation has fallen behind its real value, TWIST can help you understand the gap and build a strategy to close it.
About the Author
Michael E. Ozan, Co-Founder & CEO at TWIST Creative, is a strategist and brand builder trusted by purpose-driven CEOs and boards. For over 25 years he’s delivered market guidance and campaigns that align teams, sharpen spend, and produce measurable, defensible outcomes.
