The Dispatch
Put your positive hat on
Why higher education needs advocates more than ever
Higher education continues to be under sustained attacks from media, leading to lowering public trust. How can universities fight back and demonstrate their worth?
By Viggo Stacey
"It's no secret that various outlets can be right-leaning or left-leaning"
"I don’t buy that [digital skills] are distinct from the humanities."
"If you talk in a human language, there's more chance of people actually listening to what you're going to say."
In Brief
- Public trust higher education is falling globally. Sustained media attacks and pervasive negative narratives are eroding faith in higher education's value, demanding urgent and effective advocacy from institutions worldwide.
- Although the sector faces broad criticism, professors and scientists retain high public trust (up to 85% in the UK). Institutions must leverage their researchers to counter negative narratives like "Mickey Mouse" degrees.
- Universities need to be authentic and emotional. Move beyond administrative language. Institutions must tell powerful, human stories of research impact and students' changed lives to demonstrate real social value and paint a positive future.
An old adage in newsrooms, attributed sometimes to George Orwell, other times to William Randolph Hearst or Lord Northcliffe, states that news is something somebody doesn't want printed.
Real journalists seek truth. They drive towards transparency, ask uncomfortable questions and seek to highlight failings or uncover injustice or wrongdoing. Sound familiar? In many ways, higher education and journalism are either side of the same coin.
Other times journalism can be about something else – a topic some might consider unserious, a media pile on, or merely entertainment.
Power of the papers
The UK’s tabloids, historically some of the most scathing publications about higher education, are losing their print readership with the meteoric rise of digital media.
The Sun, one of a number of publications that has now stopped publishing its circulation figures, saw its daily average print readership fall from 3.59 million in March 2000 to around 1.2 million in March 2020.
But while print readership has declined, online audiences have surged. Despite being found as the most untrustworthy news outlet (with 59 percent of Britons saying so), The Sun still attracts audience of 25.1m in the UK per month, slightly behind the Mail Online with 25.3m.
A quick search for university coverage on The Sun’s website shows a story about the egging of a student’s by classmates, Oxford Union “slammed” for inviting Kevin Spacey for a talk and jobs that earn up to £60k a year without the need for a degree. Not exactly the most supportive messaging for higher education – and probably headlines the sector doesn’t want peddled.
Conservative media publications elsewhere question the premise of international education’s mission, conflating overseas students with crises such as the housing situation in Canada or international students with immigration.
And while it may be easy to dismiss the coverage as politically motivated and unserious (another outlet, Spectator, described SOAS in London as “one of the county’s worst universities”, in stark contrast to its international reputation in both the QS and Times Higher Education rankings), media’s low opinion appears to be pervasive. A 2021 Education Writers Association survey found that half of the US K-12 journalists thought public elementary, middle and high schools were going in the right direction and the other half said the opposite. But among journalists covering higher education, answers were more negative. Almost 60 percent said it was heading in the wrong direction.
A more recent Pew survey found 70 percent of Americans think higher education in the country is generally “going in the wrong direction”, up from the 56 percent in 2020. Ipsos Canada research recently found that only 48 percent of Canadians believe a university of college diploma is worth the investment. In Australia, public confidence in universities dropped from 81.1 percent in 2008 to just 67.9 percent in 2023.
In the 18 months since QS Insights last highlighted this issue (Issue 17, March 2024), it appears that little has been achieved to turn the tide against the hostile narrative.
“It's no secret that various outlets can be right-leaning or left-leaning,” says Nick Anderson, now at the American Council on Education (ACE) and a former education correspondent at Washington Post for close to two decades.
“Frankly, we assume that news reporters in the mainstream media are making their best effort, in good faith, to understand all sides of the issues that they cover.”
How to get ahead with the public
For all the criticism, it is clear how dependent journalists interested in balanced, evidence-based expertise are on the work of universities.
On just one day in November, Canada’s The Globe and Mail spoke with a University of Sussex professor in the UK for a story on elections in Tanzania, The New York Times looked to University of Colorado School of Law for insights on the business situation at Tesla and, The Australian quoted Queensland University of Technology professor, Lidia Morawska, on her concerns about the “age of anti-science”.
For many, the rise of anti-science goes hand in hand with the increasing denunciation of higher education.
However, the Veracity Index from 2024 by Ipsos found that trust in professors and teachers among Brits was at 85 percent each (an increase of nine and seven points since 2023, respectively). Some 79 percent of people trusted scientists to tell the truth, a rise from 74 percent in 2023.
Another survey from the UCL Policy Lab in October found that 63 percent of Britons say universities have a positive impact against only 6 percent who say negative. The public clearly favours one of higher education’s great assets – its researchers and academics.
But satisfaction with higher education is lower among non-graduates. In the UCL research, 81 percent of grads say universities are good for the country, while among non-grads this drops to 55 percent.
Surveys like this chime with the findings of the Education Writers Association half a decade ago; it is more difficult to convince non-degree holders about the value of higher education.
The UCL survey also found that while only 23 percent would like to see a reduction in the number of international students, half of Britons think universities offer too many ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. The term, used first by higher education minister Margaret Hodge in 2003, has become the bane of the life of any professional advocate of UK higher education.
Earlier this year, Radio 4’s Today presenter, Justin Webb, used it to describe media studies, which hit a nerve with Amelia Fairney, Head of Strategy and Communications at Shout Out UK, a social enterprise seeking to counter disinformation through political & media literacy.
“In 2025, with the digital environment already on the verge of being overrun with AI slop, misinformation and divisive and harmful messaging, what possible value could people trained in the critical analysis of media messaging, its production and dissemination via the digital media environment and the impact of this on our wider society, bring to the future workplaces of the UK,” she asked ironically in a message on LinkedIn.
Speaking with QS Insights, Fairney notes, “There's a lot of language around digital skills and the skills that are needed for the digital economy. I don’t buy that those are distinct from the humanities because the skills that are needed more and more are critical thinking, the ability to evaluate different information and its integrity, and how much it's worth paying attention to certain kinds of information.”
The humanities, she adds, instils these skills.
“We may not be able to code, we may not be engineers, but we still have digital skills and the skills that we have, as people trained in those disciplines, are just as important for the future of our country and employers. And it would be great to see universities using that language a bit more.”
A separate survey by YouGov in October found that almost half of Britons think too many young people go to university. It is this type of messaging that it appears higher education is not able to effectively counter.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about the best ways to get our message across, and connecting with education writers in American newsrooms remains a vital way to inform the public,” Anderson offers.
“We know that reporters at local and regional media outlets (digital, print, TV, and radio) are stretched very thin. Many of them have to cover lots of subjects, including general news, so education at all levels (K12 to higher ed) gets less in-depth attention from these outlets than it once did.”
Others note that academics in the UK consider that the Today programme is the place to be covered. For Hasan Salim Patel, former journalist and comms professional working with universities, other publications are just as good at reaching target audiences.
“I just always try to be honest and make [university leaders or academics] understand that, if you talk in a human language, there's more chance of people actually listening to what you're going to say,” he adds.
Both Patel and Anderson note the importance of digital media and utilising owned channels to tell stories.
“The digital media space is evolving rapidly,” Anderson continues. “We are always on the lookout for new outlets that reach local, regional or specialised national audiences.”
Saskatchewan Polytechnic President Larry Rosia recently told the Toronto Star that Canada’s “position now as a global leader is rapidly diminishing”, ahead of the Canadian Bureau for International Education launching a campaign to restore the country’s brand as a destination.
“If you keep talking about massage parlours and substandard education, diploma mills… all of that language undermines the perceived quality of a country whose education system continues to be world-class in quality,” Larissa Bezo, the CBIE president and CEO, said at the time.
The same could be said of Australia’s education minister’s ‘shonks and crooks’ comments in recent years.
“You leave the impression that there are no opportunities,” Bezo adds. “There’s a lot of these myths that need to be busted, like international talent are taking the spaces of Canadian students. There are a lot of these false narratives out there.”
For Patel, combatting these narratives is about getting on the front foot.
“I think there's something about the current political, academic and media class have a problem with – they don’t come across as authentic,” he says.
“Universities have to understand that they have to now fight what is their purpose and what is their demonstration of value to society because now you've got populists, the thinktanks and everybody attacking universities because these institutions do not subscribe to their point of view.
“People don't connect with strategy documents and boring taglines.
“Tell the stories of students whose lives have changed, or a community project that solved a massive problem [or how] research has saved lives or time or money. It's about flipping the script, being less administrative, being more emotional.”
The ACE is doing just this in its #HigherEdBuildsAmerica, which seeks to emphasise that the sector is an essential engine of innovation and opportunity and “an asset that sets the United States apart from all other nations”.
It is also about finding the right partners who can advocate for higher education. Universities have long utilised honorary doctorates to promote their missions and impact on the world.
Despite the criticism honorary doctorates might receive, for Patel, if used effectively they can make a positive impact for institutions. He points to the honorary doctorate that University of Manchester recently gave Man City manager Pep Guardiola.
“He used his speech to talk about what's happening in the world and how we need to be more empathetic.
“That was clipped up and became a viral piece, not just in this confines of Manchester or the UK or football fans, but throughout the world. Al Jazeera did a video on it, TRT did a video on it, local media did a video on it. That helped the brand of the university.”
Patel adds that “academics [and university leaders] need to be nimble and understand that they are not only communicating with other academics”.
“It’s about communicating with Dave down the road,” Patel posits.
Fairney also notes the importance of finding advocates in the press and policy and cultivating relationships with them.
The power of the traditional press is evolving, and social media has given voice to the voiceless, but it has also created echo chambers.
Appearing in the national press is more important than ever, “even vital”, Anderson adds. These national publications allow ACE to help the public understand the impact of an executive action or policy but also to break out of their echo chambers.
“At the same time, as advocates, we must be mindful that people are getting news in all kinds of ways,” he continues.
This means expanding focus on social media and delivering policy news directly to college and university leaders.
“The colleges and universities themselves play an essential role in expanding the reach of pro-higher education messages. So do other higher education associations and allies,” he says.
For Fairney, it is about positive messaging, “envisioning the bright future, being able to paint a picture for people of what tomorrow will look like”.
“We're faced with a lot of negative messaging at the moment. And obviously you have to present people with facts, but when it comes to advocacy, I think it's really showing what the possible positive outcomes are rather than warnings of what might happen,” she says.
“You've got to just paint the future that you'd like to see and try and engage people with that.”
In a 1952 essay that George Orwell wrote about his years at a preparatory school in Eastbourne 30 years earlier, he reflected 30 years after the experience that the “present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane and sensible than that of the past”.
“The snobbishness that was an integral part of my own education would be almost unthinkable today, because the society that nourished it is dead,” he wrote. So too, can be said of the problems that have previously plagued higher education.
Only it is easy for society to overlook the great steps forward made by higher education every day. There are positive messages that need to continue to be spread – only it is up to leaders to find them.