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.
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.