This article is Part Three of a three-part series about innovation in higher education. Part One introduces the innovation framework and explains how most schools get it wrong. Part Two discusses the 10 types of innovation that universities should be using.
Yale published its Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Ten faculty members spent a year on it — interviewing critics and supporters, reading hundreds of public comments — before producing 20 recommendations for rebuilding public confidence in higher education.
The word anchoring the whole document is trust. President McInnis says it plainly: trust must always be earned.
In the first post of this series, I argued institutions default to the moves they already know how to evaluate, and Yale’s recommendations show the pattern at the highest level: affordability, admissions, grading. The visible levers. Now ask the question the report leaves open. Who on a campus does the earning?
Trust is soft until applications stall. Channel strategy is “just marketing” until the pipeline shrinks. Alumni engagement is a nice-to-have until giving flattens. Then everyone looks at marcomm.
Marcomm Sits Closest to the Consequences
The clearest reason marcomm carries institutional survival is its proximity to consequences.
Marcomm is usually the first function to feel something break. You see it when message resonance weakens, when inquiry-to-application conversion drops, or when support resources exist and students keep missing them. The old “support function” framing collapses right here. Support functions rarely sit at the point where trust, demand, and institutional credibility become visible. Marcomm does.
And this market forgives less every year. Public confidence is weaker, competition is louder, and attention is fragmented. The Ten Types framework makes the stakes concrete: of the ten innovation types, five run directly through marketing and communications — including the levers where trust gets earned.
Three Levers Marcomm Owns
Brand. Brand is carrying more than recognition now, it’s carrying belief. If your institution claims to be student-centered, workforce-ready, or accessible, marcomm is the function tasked with translating the claim into something people believe — and belief is harder now, because words are easy to steal. HBCUs show what Brand innovation looks like at full power: an identity rooted in belonging and historic mission, beyond the reach of any curriculum comparison. That work happens on marcomm’s desk.
Channel. Higher ed still talks about Channel like a distribution decision. Channel is how people experience the path to yes. Many enrollment problems get diagnosed as awareness problems or demand problems when the real issue is friction: the right program is hard to find, the next step is buried, the handoff between interest and action breaks momentum. Direct admissions programs and ASU’s majority-online model are Channel innovations, and they’re reshaping who enrolls where.
Customer Engagement. The touchpoints, the asks, the signals of belonging, and the reasons someone stays connected after graduation. Weak alumni engagement means a fragile long-term relationship with your institution’s own value — visible in giving, referrals, advocacy, and whether graduates keep reinforcing your relevance after they leave. Treat engagement as a revenue strategy. Institutions have underinvested in the systems that build durable loyalty for too long.
Two Levers Marcomm Holds Together
Service. Advising, emergency aid, and counseling sit outside marcomm’s org chart. Students still miss what they never learn exists, and a support system nobody finds is a broken system from the student’s point of view. Marcomm sees the friction first and translates those resources into something students find and use. When Georgia State pairs proactive advising with micro-grants, the communication layer decides whether students act on the intervention.
Network. A signed employer agreement or transfer pathway is a press release until someone makes it understandable, credible, and easy to act on. That translation work falls to marcomm. Florida already guarantees associate degree graduates admission to a public university. DirectConnect to UCF (and other partner state colleges) works because Valencia and UCF named it, branded it, and made it a box students check on their application. This is one of the most under-recognized forms of institutional labor: converting internal complexity into external meaning. Done well, partnerships become recruitable and strategy becomes visible to the people it’s supposed to serve.
The Real Risk Is Misdiagnosis
If leaders think marcomm exists to promote decisions made elsewhere, they’ll keep underusing the team that sees trust break, friction build, and narratives fail before the rest of the institution catches up. They’ll measure outputs when they should measure behavior. They’ll celebrate activity without compounding value. They’ll assign marcomm responsibility for outcomes while withholding the access and authority required to shape those outcomes upstream.
That’s how institutions end up asking marketing teams to solve structural problems with campaigns.
How to Bring Smarter Innovation to your Campus
None of the following requires a new budget line.
Run the audit. Take one team meeting this month. List everything your team shipped last semester and map each item against the five types. Most marcomm teams discover they’re already doing innovation work in three or four of them, filed under “marketing” and funded like a cost center. Renaming the work matters. What gets named gets measured, and what gets measured gets resourced.
Pick one lever and build the case. Choose the type where your institution is weakest and your team is strongest. Attach a real KPI — brand consideration rate, or channel-level yield — and report it the way advancement reports dollars. The fastest way to change how marcomm is funded is to change what marcomm proves.
Bring the framework to the cabinet. The Ten Types does its best work in rooms where marcomm has historically been the last agenda item. When the conversation shifts from “we need a campaign” to “we’re underinvested in two of the three trust-building innovation types,” the seat at the table changes shape.
The Discipline Argument
Your marcomm team holds five of the ten levers your institution has for earning back public trust, including the three strongest ones. It sits where trust becomes visible, where friction becomes measurable, and where external audiences decide what your institution means.
Innovation isn’t a department. It’s a discipline. And the team best positioned to practice it has been sitting in the room the whole time, waiting for someone to hand it the vocabulary.
Consider it handed.
