Managing Reputation Score© with Higher Education
As enrollment season concludes, colleges and universities are getting clarity on whether they met matriculation goals for their incoming class. While individual enrollment decisions are deeply personal for each student, combined they offer one of many measures of success for the institution: did we meet our targets?
This year, the season feels especially tumultuous as students, families, faculties and staff watch the higher-ed sector grapple with an evolving landscape and growing list of challenges. From the pressures of a complex financial landscape and a looming enrollment cliff to the increasing politicization of education and threats of federal and state funding cuts, colleges and universities across North America face significant volatility and a resulting crisis of confidence about their future.
More than ever, reputation is the make-or-break factor influencing decision-making for both students and parents. It is the proxy for perceived quality, value, and opportunity, not to mention a reflection of how cultural dynamics on campuses are impacting perceptions.
To adequately prepare and respond to the new reality that Higher Ed faces, it is critical to not only understand the threats, but to implement a reputation measurement program that simultaneously gauges the health of your reputation, and offers actionable insight based on peers who have already publicly responded to threats to funding for vital research and academic programs, as well as academic freedom.
Understanding – and influencing – the drivers of reputation
To better understand the how recent challenges are impacting institutions across the sector, our ChangeMakers Data Intelligence team applied our proprietary Reputation Score – a dynamic metric, fueled by multiple publicly available data sources and calculated by a fully proprietary. This is a multi-stakeholder, 360-degree assessment designed to complement traditional brand research — offering a broader view of perceptions that may impact the university’s overall institutional health.
While many Ivy League and leading private research universities saw a drop in their reputation since January 2025, just one in our sample set improved since election day, led by a strong response and continued authentic messaging from the school’s President.
The road ahead poses undeniable reputational risks. Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Learn the tendencies of Higher Ed “detractors” who are laser-focused on changing the sector and are influencing administration policy. Understand their tactics and how they are typically executed. There’s a known playbook – study it and prepare for when you are the target.
- Prepare for the known – and pressure test the response. Learn from peers. Be prepared to engage – with lawmakers and federal agencies, in the courtroom, on campus, through the media and everywhere in between. Affirm now what you still stand for, and if and where you are willing to make concessions that preserve the integrity of your institutional mission.
- Get data to work harder for you. Measure real-time reputational health on an ongoing basis to inform efficient decision-making processes and demonstrate the true value communications delivers for the university.
- Enact a strategy to fortify your reputation for the long-term. Preparing properly will ensure your institution is protected, while avoiding wasted energy that distracts from other important work.
Contact us for more information about how your organization stacks up against the competition.
Stop Surviving Change. Start Operating Within It.
There was a time when change felt episodic — a system implementation, a reorganization, a strategic shift — distinct enough that organizations could prepare, execute, stabilize, and return to normal.
That time is gone and never coming back.
Today, change is a constant and multi-dimensional. Technology evolves, markets shift, leadership turns over, regulations move, and strategic priorities adjust — often all at once. By the time one initiative begins to settle, another is already competing for attention and resources.
In this environment, performance depends on more than managing individual initiatives well. Organizations have to rethink how their people understand change, make decisions, and execute under pressure. Volatility isn’t temporary anymore. So if change is constant, your operating model also has to reflect that new reality.
Five Change Realities
Here are five truths every organization must accept:
1. Change is Unavoidable and Must Be Normalized
Change can no longer be treated as a rare occurrence that surprises the team and eventually passes. Teams need to anticipate change as part of how they operate. This means shifting the mindset from “we’re going through change” to “this is how we do business.” Leaders must not only communicate that expectation clearly and consistently – but create the environment of trust and belonging that enables people to embrace change for what it is.
Competitive advantage today depends less on executing a single change event well and more on sustaining momentum across multiple, overlapping initiatives. When teams understand that adaptation is part of the job, they stop bracing for disruption and start operating within it.
2. Change is a Team Sport
Employees should understand how change management works. Most of the reactions we see during change are predictable: resistance, fatigue, confusion, or slipping back into old habits. When people understand those patterns, they stop personalizing the disruption and start navigating it more intentionally. Instead of reacting impulsively, they can respond strategically. The more your organization understands change management fundamentals, the less disruptive change actually becomes.
3. Agility is the Ultimate Goal
Agility is a buzzword that shows up in frameworks and tools, but its real impact comes from how people think. Resilience is built when teams test assumptions, ask better questions, incorporate feedback, and adjust course when needed. In today’s environment, complete information is rarely available before action is required. Strong organizations are able to make thoughtful decisions anyway and continue moving forward without losing focus on outcomes. Agile minds adapt quickly and deliberately.
4. Leadership Alignment is Essential
People know when senior leaders are aligned, and when they are not. The moment a crack appears, employees notice, and it creates space to question, delay, or ignore the change altogether.
Leaders must agree on the direction, commit to championing the change, and reinforce it consistently as a team. If leaders send mixed signals, operate in silos, or quietly disagree, the organization will feel it immediately. Alignment isn’t a one-time conversation. It requires visible commitment and the willingness to hold one another accountable. When leadership is unified, change gains traction. When it isn’t, even strong strategies stall.
5. Failure is Not an Option
With so many priorities shifting at once, leaders can’t afford to treat change management as optional or informal. You can’t wing it with a well-written email and expect alignment to follow. Today’s environment requires an enterprise-level change structure that provides clarity, accountability, and consistency across initiatives. Leadership behavior, decision-making, incentives, and performance expectations all need to reinforce the direction of the change. When that structure is in place, execution holds and momentum builds. Without it, even strong strategies lose traction.
The Results of Getting This Right
When organizations normalize change, build change capability across the business, and reinforce adaptability through their systems, performance becomes steadier, even in volatile conditions. Resistance decreases, adoption speeds, execution holds, and initiatives deliver the value they were designed to produce. That consistency protects ROI and strengthens confidence at every level of the organization.
At ChangeMakers, we recognize that change management and agility are not separate disciplines, but integrated capabilities that determine whether strategy performs under pressure. In an environment where change is constant, organizations that build this capability don’t just manage disruption — they operate effectively within it.
The Risk That’s Invisible – Until It’s Costly
Too often, organizational change is treated like a project to be managed — rolled out through frameworks, timelines, and checklists, even when it’s labeled “agile.” What gets missed is that change isn’t just an initiative to execute; it’s a source of risk to be actively monitored. Because change is risk.
That lesson is clear in Boeing’s story. Its challenges didn’t begin with a single failure, they began with a shift.
After Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas, the company gradually moved from an engineering-led culture to one driven by finance culture. Leadership drifted farther from frontline teams, internal dissent was discouraged, and critical warnings were treated as obstacles rather than signals. What looked like operational efficiency on paper quietly degraded decision quality, accountability, and trust — until the organization was forced into costly correction by crisis under public and regulatory scrutiny.
The risk wasn’t invisible because it didn’t exist; it was invisible because no one was actively looking for it.
This is how change risk most often manifests. Not as an instant crisis or failure — but as subtle strain inside the system. Before performance metrics register a decline, decisions slow, workarounds proliferate, and managers struggle to translate shifting priorities. These signals are easy to rationalize in isolation, but together, they reveal that unorganized change is negatively reshaping the system, posing innumerable risks to strategy and value.
The solution? Embedding change management within enterprise risk management.
Unlike change management, risk management is inherently adaptive. It’s a continuous, iterative process embedded in daily activities, using sprints to constantly identify, assess, and mitigate risks. It considers financial performance, legal risks, business operations and interruptions, people and culture, and reputation.
The Risk Most Dashboards Don’t Capture
Most organizations are disciplined about tracking financial, legal, and operational risk. These risks are visible, measurable, and embedded in dashboards and governance processes. Change risk behaves differently. It emerges through employee, partner, and customer behavior, interpretation, and decision-making—areas that are harder to quantify because they require deliberate intention. But they are no less consequential.
Organizations experiencing change-related decline rarely notice it at the starting point. We’d argue that in today’s environment, most organizations are already in a state of decline driven by disorganized change, with systems absorbing the strain. Small degradations in clarity, alignment, and decision quality are normalized. The organization adapts to friction rather than correcting it.
This is organizational drift: the slow, often unnoticed, gradual shift of a company’s practices, culture, or goals away from its intended path, values, or formal procedures—driven by internal shortcuts or external pressures such as competition and technology.
And it is extremely costly – to financials, people, operations and reputation – if not recognized and addressed early and with urgency.
Diagnosing and Reversing Organizational Drift
Leaders often sense that something is off before they can point to a specific failure — but by then, the drift is already underway. Because it develops gradually, leaders often hear organizational drift before they see it in metrics. It comes in the form of:
- “We’re not sure what to prioritize right now.”
- “This process keeps changing – what is the correct way now?”
- “I don’t understand why we’re doing this.”
- “Our team is overextended.”
- “Managers don’t have an answer either.”
- “No one told us about this.”
These statements signal that people are spending more time trying to understand what’s happening than getting work done. When the same questions, frustrations, or workarounds keep coming up, it’s a sign the organization needs to recalibrate before those issues become entrenched. This is where our change experts help leaders diagnose what’s happening beneath the surface and realign the organization before value erosion takes hold.
Turning Change Risk into Agility
Early attention to change risk strengthens both resilience and agility. Leaders who monitor how change is landing across the organization maintain alignment between intent and experience, even in periods of disruption. Organizations must build their internal capacity to respond, change, and move without losing coherence; this is where true agility lives.
The question leaders must ask is whether they have adequate visibility into how change is affecting their organization—and whether they are prepared to act on what they discover. In ideal circumstances, this visibility is built into the change campaign before it starts. However, it’s never too late to get a pulse on how internal and external changes are impacting your organization. You just have to know where to look.