Why Higher Education Still Does Not Know What Reputation Means

Reputation has become one of the most powerful and least understood forces shaping higher education today. It influences where students apply, which faculty institutions can recruit, how employers value degrees, and how governments and donors allocate resources. It may even be the key factor that stands between a university and financial ruin. Yet despite its centrality, reputation in higher education remains poorly defined, inconsistently measured, and frequently confused with prestige or rankings.

In contrast, the corporate world has spent decades refining how reputation works, how it is built, monitored, protected, monetised, and leveraged as a strategic asset. The gap between these two worlds reveals not only how internal perceptions of reputation in higher education differ, but also what is missing altogether.

REPUTATION IS NOT PRESTIGE & NOT RANKINGS

At its core, reputation is a collective judgment formed by different groups of stakeholders over time, based on observed behavior, performance, and trustworthiness. It is not what an institution says about itself, but what others believe and why.

In higher education reputation is most commonly proxied through global rankings, which offer a narrow and incomplete perspective. Rankings typically measure reputation by surveying academics and higher education professionals and asking them to name institutions they consider the best, while leaving the definition of “best” largely unspecified.

This approach has both benefits and some fundamental problems.

On the positive side, academics are reachable and often keen to share their opinion. Leaving the definition of “best” fluid prevents over-specificity. However their perspective will be constrained by their roles, and will not necessarily represent or even concord with the views of other stakeholders.

In their attempt to measure reputation, Rankings end up measuring academic recognition.

They capture how well known an institution is within elite academic circles, not how it is perceived by the full ecosystem of stakeholders that universities serve. Students, alumni, employers, parents, policymakers, and society at large are either absent or included only superficially.

As a result, reputation becomes recursive. Institutions already perceived as excellent are repeatedly named as excellent in rankings. Visibility reinforces itself. New, differentiated, or mission-driven institutions struggle to be recognized regardless of outcomes.

What is measured in rankings is far closer to familiarity and academic prestige than to trust, value, or lived experience.

THE MISSING PIECE: BRAND VISION & IDENTITY 

In the corporate world, reputation is inseparable from brand identity. Organizations articulate clearly what they stand for, who they serve, what differentiates them, and what promises they make to stakeholders.

Stakeholders then evaluate reputation against that identity. Are organizations delivering on what they claim to be?

Higher education largely lacks this logic.

Rankings do not ask what an institution is trying to be, what unique value it offers, or how its mission translates into lived experience. Universities are assessed only in comparison to a single concept of “best” defined by the logic of the ranking one another, not against their own stated purpose or strategic intent.

A teaching-focused institution is measured against a research-intensive one. A regionally embedded university is evaluated by global publication metrics. Institutions with complex and interlocking missions are simplified into a single dimension. Differentiation is flattened.

This failure cannot be attributed solely to ranking agencies. Institutions themselves often fail to articulate clearly, or sometimes accurately, their own mission and brand vision.

Without a clear brand or mission-led framework and the ability to measure progress against it, reputation becomes generic, and institutions end up chasing prestige rather than purpose.

NO REPUTATION PULSE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Another striking difference from the corporate world is the absence of continuous reputation monitoring.

In business, reputation is actively managed. Stakeholder sentiment is tracked in real time. Trust and credibility are measured longitudinally. Early warning systems detect reputational risk. Behavior changes, not just messaging, are used to course-correct.

In higher education, reputation is typically static and retrospective, updated annually through rankings and detached from real-time stakeholder experience.

There is often little systematic monitoring of how students perceive value for money, fairness, support, or career relevance. Employer perceptions are rarely tracked beyond anecdotal feedback. Alumni trust, faculty morale, and societal legitimacy are often invisible until a crisis erupts, or they are measured in isolation without being linked together.

Universities often discover reputational damage only after it materializes, through enrollment declines, protests, scandals, or sudden drops in public trust.

AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL FOR REPUTATION

A model that might serve as a better guide to reputation management for universities is one that we are all familiar with: the insurance industry.

As Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University, famously observed, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Education functions as one of the most essential insurance policies in a world undergoing rapid and often brutal transformation.

Students do not enroll in higher education simply to acquire knowledge or earn a credential. They invest time, money, and future opportunity to protect themselves against uncertainty, skills obsolescence, and exclusion from economic and social mobility. In that sense, education operates as a long-term risk mitigation strategy, much like insurance.

This is precisely the profession of insurers, whose reputation is continuously exposed and tested under public scrutiny and increasing demands for efficiency, fairness, and reliability. For insurers, reputation is not a communications exercise. It is their principal asset.

Like universities, insurance companies operate in high-trust environments, rely on long-term commitments rather than immediate returns, serve multiple stakeholders simultaneously, and offer intangible value that is only fully tested over time. When trust is broken, reputational consequences are severe.

Insurance reputation is built not on expert opinion alone, but on credibility, transparency, consistency, and the ability to deliver when it matters most. Insurers actively monitor trust, customer confidence, claims experience, ethical conduct, and alignment between promise and performance.

A single failure can permanently damage credibility, which is why reputation in insurance is treated as a continuously managed asset rather than an annual score.

COMPETITION, LEGACY & DISRUPTION

Like higher education, the insurance sector operates in a highly competitive environment dominated by long-established brands whose reputations were built over decades. Yet legacy does not immunize incumbents against disruption.

New entrants such as Lemonade have reshaped expectations around transparency, customer experience, pricing models, and trust, particularly among younger generations. They have not displaced incumbents overnight, but they have changed what credibility and reputation look like in practice.

The same tension exists in higher education. Long-established institutions continue to dominate reputational hierarchies, often benefiting from historical prestige rather than current performance alone. At the same time, new models, including alternative credentials, digital-first institutions, employer-led education, and hybrid learning providers, are challenging traditional assumptions about value, outcomes, and relevance.

Insurance shows that reputation is never fully owned, only continuously renewed. Legacy can slow decline, but it does not prevent it. Institutions that rely exclusively on historical prestige and peer recognition risk protecting yesterday’s reputation while losing tomorrow’s trust.

Universities face similar dynamics. Students make high-stakes, long-term commitments not simply to earn a credential, but to build a career and a future. They expect their institution to help them do so through teaching quality, skills development, networks, signaling power, and access to employers. Trust in academic integrity, fairness, and career relevance is therefore essential.

Failures in higher education carry lifelong consequences for individuals, not merely short-term dissatisfaction. Reputational recovery is slow, costly, and uncertain.

Yet higher education continues to rely on rankings as a proxy for reputation, rather than managing reputation as a living system grounded in trust, outcomes, and long-term value creation.

WHAT HIGHER EDUCATION IS MISSING

Despite growing academic interest in reputation, higher education still lacks several critical elements.

First, a shared conceptual framework. There is no widely accepted model tailored to the multi-mission nature of universities.

Second, stakeholder-specific reputation metrics. Students, employers, alumni, faculty, and society experience institutions differently, yet these perspectives are rarely measured in a coherent and integrated way.

Third, brand-led or mission-led differentiation. Reputation should reflect distinctive value, not generic excellence.

Fourth, continuous monitoring and feedback loops. Reputation should be sensed, not guessed. Annual rankings provide snapshots, not signals.

Fifth, behavior-based reputation management. Reputation is shaped by decisions, policies, teaching quality, governance, career support, and fairness, not by communications alone.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR RANKINGS?

Much of the information underpinning rankings is self-reported, and based on definitions that may be interpreted differently by different institutions.  There is limited opportunity for uneven verification, and institutions have strong incentives to present themselves in the most favorable light and to align reporting practices with ranking methodologies rather than with reality. This leads to a perception of a lack of transparency.

Reputation – as measured by rankings organisations – is biased to specific stakeholders, and is limited by participation. The challenge isn’t that it is subjective, it is that it is only a narrow version of what it should be.

And this is critical, because the reputation measures used by rankings tend to form the anchor of consistency that holds the ship in place.

As a result, the rankings data ecosystem is not neutral. It is structurally biased toward self-presentation, comparability theater, and metric optimization. 

There are signs that rankings agencies are starting to address these concerns:

• involving universities in the process of design and review of rankings to strengthen the underpinning data frameworks,
• developing new rankings that address other missions such as sustainability, or region specific concerns

However, even with these changes rankings – by themselves – do not address the key challenges around reputation. Nor, despite the other value they provide, do they give institutions a road-map for reputational improvement.

REPUTATION AS STRATEGIC CAPITAL

Reputation in higher education is not about being admired by peers. It is about being trusted by stakeholders, especially by students who invest time, money, and future opportunity with the expectation that their institution will help them build a career.

Rankings tell us who is visible within elite academic networks. They do not tell us who delivers value, earns trust, or fulfills their mission in the eyes of those they serve.

If universities continue to outsource reputation to rankings alone, they risk optimizing for prestige rather than purpose. Treating reputation as strategic capital, earned through consistent behavior, aligned identity, and demonstrable outcomes, would mark a fundamental shift.

It is a shift higher education can no longer afford to postpone.

Benjamin Stevenin is the former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Duncan Ross is Global Head of Research for Newsweek and former Chief Data Officer for Times Higher Education. Edouard Fillias is co-founder and CEO of JIN, an independent public relations group founded in 2012.

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