This opinion piece is the first in a series on trust and transparency in higher education.
Higher education runs on trust. A family commits four years and a significant sum of money on faith that the credential earned will hold value, that the institution has their student’s interests at heart and that the promises made during admissions will hold up long after enrollment.
That foundation of trust is getting harder to maintain.
A college can no longer count on being the only voice explaining its value. Prospective students can find firsthand student perspectives and check public data on cost and outcomes. The question for colleges is no longer simply what they say about themselves, but whether that account holds up when families look elsewhere.
Schools that once controlled their own narratives now compete with thousands of data points they didn’t create and can’t manage. The institutions that earn trust in this environment will be the ones willing to show what they deliver and build the systems that can prove it. Marketing alone won’t carry that weight anymore.
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Most institutions are transparent about the front end of the student experience and far less transparent about the back end. Admissions pages are detailed. Program pages spell out courses and faculty. What happens after enrollment, especially after graduation, gets much less light.
That asymmetry reflects what institutions have historically been asked to measure. Accreditors and state agencies focus on completion rates and first-year placement. Marketing teams focus on what drives enrollment.
This is a trust problem wearing a data problem’s clothes. A family can’t evaluate a claim an institution is unwilling or unable to back up. When an institution says its program leads to strong career outcomes, that claim is only as credible as the evidence behind it. Building the connective institutional systems to show that evidence openly and consistently is how colleges can keep a family’s confidence after enrollment, not just before it.
Transparency isn’t just a content problem. It requires an institution to know things about itself that most don’t currently track: where graduates land three to five years out, and whether their credentials changed their trajectories. Income growth and career mobility show up on that timeline, not the day after commencement.
Institutions can bridge this knowledge gap by auditing postgraduation tracking systems, publishing multiyear career data and connecting admissions, career services and alumni networks. By moving beyond selective success stories, colleges and universities can deliver verified, actionable transparency for every student.
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Collecting such data is only the first step. The harder part is sharing it — even when it isn’t flattering. Publishing only the flattering numbers is a marketing exercise dressed up as transparency.
Genuine transparency means showing families results they can compare across schools and explaining the limits of that data. Publicly available, consistently defined data gives people a way to check institutional claims; context helps them understand what those numbers actually say.
The trust relationship between institutions, students and families too often ends at graduation. Alumni relations and career services usually run on separate tracks, and continuing education often sits apart from both.
A graduate looking for support five years into their career is unlikely to find a clear path through that structure, and that disconnect sends its own message about how far the institution’s promises were meant to reach.
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Maintaining relationships with alumni and tracking their professional progression provide higher education institutions with solid evidence to demonstrate the lasting worth of their degrees. That ongoing engagement takes shape when universities establish clear routes for stackable qualifications as industries transform and when they build employer networks that offer verifiable proof of student outcomes.
Community colleges and regional universities often have an edge here. Their proximity to local employers gives them direct visibility into whether graduates keep advancing in their careers, not simply whether they got hired — helping those institutions answer the core cost and career outcome questions prospective students are increasingly asking.
An institution that lacks the systems to back its claims with evidence loses the benefit of the doubt it used to get by default.
Brand strength alone (historic prestige and name recognition) won’t be what sets institutions apart over the next decade. Having the right systems to track student outcomes will.
That starts with breaking down data silos so that student outcome data moves freely across the offices that use it instead of staying locked in whichever one gathered it first.
Accountability to graduates has to survive well past the day tuition is paid.
Building institutional systems that hold up to scrutiny is a higher bar than most institutions set for themselves today. It’s also the only foundation that will hold as families keep asking sharper questions.
Stephen Green is the chief partnerships officer at Noodle, where he oversees all of Noodle’s university partnerships focusing on their evolving needs and growth, along with Noodle’s corporate marketing efforts.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about higher education and trust was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
The post OPINION: Higher education has a trust problem, and families are right to demand transparency and candor appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
