Managing our stakeholders’ trust has become one of the most relevant challenges for education leaders today.
For a college or university, a good reputation attracts talented students and excellent faculty members, generates alumni engagement, draws benefits and donations, and builds the trust of the media and the community. But these benefits don’t emerge by chance. How does reputation take shape and grow? Which management area should be responsible for it? Can reputation become a guiding principle for the good governance of universities?
University reputation is defined as the set of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes expressed by all stakeholders. Reputation involves building a university brand of excellence. It is changeable and vulnerable, and it keeps institutions on constant alert.
Trust is sometimes lost and sometimes gained—and it is not controlled by the institution itself but rather by its stakeholders. Knowing how to cultivate reputation has become strategically valuable, with very positive, tangible results for universities. An institution’s reputation is its most valuable intangible asset.
Protecting a university’s reputation is essential for any university’s senior leaders—in fact, it’s one of their most important responsibilities.
Not Competition, but Cultivation
Higher education leaders’ interest in reputation has grown in recent years for complex reasons that include declining trust in social institutions in some parts of the world, high-profile campus controversies, debates about college rankings’ value, and global economic and political shifts. Plus, colleges and universities operate today in a global, dynamic, competitive environment, and we’ve seen stakeholders’ perspectives contributing more to reputation.
Given the level of market standardization, some universities run the risk of turning reputation into a race. They want to stand out, but they end up doing the same things in similar ways. However, reputation isn’t a gold medal awarded for winning a race. Reputation has little to do with comparing different leadership models, speeding up processes, or simply designing marketing strategies.
Instead of the competition metaphor, a better analogy would be cultivation and growth. When established universities are cared for and cultivated, reputation is the fruit of the sowing done to enhance an institution’s position and positively affect its brand image.
So how can reputation be cultivated and properly managed? For my 2022 doctorate from the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, I studied reputation. According to my research—which included a literature review and qualitative research involving 42 university leaders from 35 universities in 17 countries—three things are essential to cultivating university reputation: university performance, stakeholder relations, and the university’s contributions to the community.
