Position, Not Perception

A brand’s job is to deliver outcomes. Higher ed has been asking it to deliver impressions.

Ask a room of higher ed leaders what their brand says, and you’ll get an hour of answers: it’s more than a logo, it’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Ask what their brand earns, and the room gets quiet (or you find the people you really want to hang out with).

Today’s higher education brands have one job: produce the outcomes the institution needs to survive and advance. Applications in the right programs and places. Yield you can budget on. Net revenue holds. Employers who call, alumni who give, research that gets funded, patients who choose your medical center by default, and public support that shows up when it counts. Everything else a brand does serves those outcomes, or it’s decoration.

Those outcomes come from position, not perception. And certainly not from telling the story better. Your position is what you verifiably occupy in the market: who you serve, what they achieve, what it costs, plus the position you’re deliberately moving toward. Perception lags position by years, and higher education has spent a decade marketing to the lagging indicator while the position underneath eroded.

The bill is arriving on both sides of the Atlantic: a trust crisis at home, a pricing war abroad.

The map exists now

The first change happened quietly: the market can see the map. Visual Capitalist mapped College Board data on what public college costs in every state; in-state tuition varies nearly threefold, from about $6,400 in Florida to more than $18,000 at the top. Strada mapped the other axis: where a degree pays off. Nationally, 69% of bachelor’s degree holders out-earn their high-school-educated peers ten years out, but the range runs from 82% in the strongest market to the mid-50s in the weakest.

Put the maps together, and every institution occupies a coordinate: what students pay on one axis, what the degree delivers on the other. It’s a classic positioning grid, not a reputation. And families can look up both numbers before you’ve said a word. “Is college worth it?” is an incoherent question. The answerable one is “is this degree, in this place, at this price, worth it for this student?” Families are already asking the second question. Most institutions are still answering the first.

One nuance: the price map shows sticker, not net, and the net cost of a public four-year degree has actually fallen 21% since 2014-15. That sharpens the argument. The most-cited cost number in America is one almost nobody pays, by design. And that deserves clarity.

What the map did to trust

Public confidence in higher education sits at 38%, down from nearly 60% a decade ago, the steepest drop Gallup has recorded for any American institution, and it’s bipartisan. The standard diagnosis is politics. The mechanism is simpler and more uncomfortable.

In national polling presented by Ken Goldstein and Jack Martin at CASE’s Summit this July, 40% of Americans named the cost of living as their single greatest personal concern. Higher ed’s cost problem now sits inside the country’s cost problem, and the public grades universities inside that frame: affordability came in as colleges’ worst-rated performance area (8% say excellent).

Then the number that should reorganize every marketing plan: 78% of Americans call the degree valuable, but only 19% say it’s valuable and affordable. Even among graduates, 71% land on “valuable, but not affordable.” The public hasn’t rejected the value of a degree. It has rejected a price, and the price it’s rejecting is the sticker most students never pay.

How did that happen? Fifty years of deliberate work.

The pricing war we invented

We’ve come full circle. This week’s news hit of the schools in the UK offering tuition discounts to international students, demonstrating internationally what a pricing war for global students looks like. American higher education was built on the legacies of Oxford and Cambridge and has operated that way for nearly two centuries. And, now, UK schools are running the American playbook of discounting and merit aid we’ve run for half a century.

Private colleges built the model. From the 1970s through the merit-aid arms race of the ’80s and ’90s, enrollment management turned financial aid from charity into pricing strategy: raise the sticker to signal quality (the industry unapologetically called it the Chivas Regal effect), then discount student by student. The sticker stopped being a price decades ago; it’s an anchor for a negotiation most families don’t know they’re in. NACUBO now puts the average first-year discount rate at private nonprofits above 56%: colleges collect less than half the price they publish.

Publics ran their own version: out-of-state and international full-pays recruited at multiples of the in-state rate as appropriations fell, and graduate programs as the cash flow that covered everything else. None of it was hidden, exactly. But none of it was legible. The model depended on most payers not knowing what other payers paid.

Every leg is giving way at once. The demographic cliff is shrinking the pool, and discounting was invented to fight over. Discount rates past 56% leave nowhere left to go, and some privates are cutting the sticker itself: the University of Tulsa is the latest, cutting tuition by more than half; a reset that is less a strategy than a confession. The full-pay international pipeline is contracting under visa politics. And Washington just capped graduate lending ($50,000 a year, $200,000 lifetime for most professional programs) and attached an earnings test: programs whose graduates can’t out-earn the baseline lose federal loans entirely. The outcomes map isn’t just public anymore. It’s becoming law.

Meanwhile, families learned to compare aid letters, look up outcomes, and negotiate. That’s not cynicism. It’s literacy, and a pricing model built on information asymmetry doesn’t survive it.

“Trust us” became “show us,” and explaining harder just confirms the suspicion that vagueness is the strategy.

The endgame, already visible

Where does that road end? As noted above, the University of Nottingham, a Russell Group institution, replaced its merit-based “postgraduate excellence” scholarship with a flat £3,000 discount. Automatic. No application, no criteria. At least 22 of 90 UK institutions reviewed now offer blanket discounts to international postgraduates, up to £8,000, while postgraduate enrollment is down 17% in two years. Zeenat Fayaz, a UK-based brand consultant, warned that institutions are now competing “on the basis of a degree’s cost rather than their own strengths.” Her correct verdict: “a race to the bottom.”

The Nottingham detail is the whole argument in miniature. A merit scholarship is a signal: we know what excellence looks like, and we’ll invest in it. A blanket discount is also a signal: we need volume, and price is the only lever we have left.

International students were higher education’s purest brand-premium market: full price, across borders, on reputation. If brand really were a story, this market (the most storied institutions on earth) would be the safest in the sector. Instead, it’s the first to be repriced. When your position on outcomes isn’t legible or defensible, the premium decays into discounting, and discounting is a race with no floor. The UK is running our old playbook in public. We run ours behind the aid office door.

The brief has to change

If a brand’s job is to deliver outcomes, and outcomes come from position, then brand strategy’s real work is orienting the institution’s incentives around the outcomes that define the position it wants. Which programs, which markets, which student types, at what price, with what proof. And not just enrollment: the research you’re known for, the workforce gaps you close, the ways your region is better because you exist. That’s a portfolio decision, not a messaging architecture. Marketing cannot fix what leadership won’t face.

The word for what’s usually missing is alignment. A position is claimed at the institutional level, but it’s delivered area by area, and every area already has its own scoreboard. Admissions is paid to fill the class. Financial aid is paid to hit the net revenue. Athletics is paid to win and be seen. Advancement is paid to hit the campaign number. Each is rational on its own terms. But when the area-level incentives don’t add up to the desired position, the areas win, and the position loses. Nobody in higher education ever decided athletics should be the sector’s strongest brand attribute. The incentives are decided, one scoreboard at a time. Alignment is the real work: resetting what each area is measured on until the sum of the scoreboards is the position.

The scoreboard changes, too. Favorability and awareness measure sentiment, which lags. The leading indicators measure movement: can a prospective student find program-level earnings in one click? Do families in your market know your actual net price? Can your region name what it gets from you: the nurses, the teachers, the research behind the local hospital?

Legibility isn’t just accountability anymore. Legibility is the brand.

The public already reads the position. And sees through the storytelling. Asked what colleges should prioritize, Americans put affordable education first, at 53%; only 20% believe colleges currently focus on it, while athletics runs in the opposite direction. The public has read the sector’s incentives and concluded they point to the wrong outcomes. That’s a position diagnosis, delivered free of charge.

What to do about it

Find your coordinate: program by program, market by market. If you don’t know your position, the market is deciding it for you. Pick a position you can defend, and align every area’s scoreboard to it. Premium works when selectivity, experience, and outcomes back the price; value works when price, support, and outcomes back the promise. What gets repriced is the undefended, unaligned middle. And make it legible before you make it aspirational: your three strongest programs, real earnings, real employers, and the impact only you can claim (the county’s nurses, the research behind the local hospital).

Then go back to that quiet room and change the question. Stop asking what the brand says. Start asking what it earns.

A coordinate is not a destiny; position can be moved, and demand is holding: three-quarters of employers say degrees will matter as much or more in five years. The institutions that move first won’t win on impressions. They’ll win on outcomes: applications, yield, revenue, research that reaches the community, graduates, a region can’t run without, and support that shows up when it counts.

Position, not perception. That’s where our focus should be.

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Follow the discussion on Jason’s LinkedIn, where this piece first ran.