Growing skepticism about the value of a degree, enrollment declines, and exacerbating pressures are not only putting the onus on colleges to think and operate differently, it’s changing the way that media covers them.
So what’s top of mind for higher ed reporters?
At Complete College America’s 2025 Annual Convening, CCA communications director Kate Derrick moderated a panel with Scott Carlson (The Chronicle of Higher Education), Kirk Carapezza (GBH News, College Uncovered Podcast), and Johanna Alonso (Inside Higher Ed) to explore how the higher ed beat is changing.
Top Three Takeaways
Covering Higher Ed in an Era of Distrust
Higher education coverage has shifted dramatically in scope and tone in the last few years. Issues like academic freedom, diversity, and federal policy decisions appear in trade press and in mainstream headlines daily. Questions about return on investment are also top of mind.
As Carlson noted, this focus on the cost of college has been building since the Great Recession. “It’s cyclical to some extent, but there’s this accelerating pattern of that happening more and more,” Carlson said, “Now we’re really questioning ‘what is this thing that we’ve created…what’s it going to be 10 or 20 years from now?’”
Pulling Back the Curtain on How College Works
While major controversies and a handful of elite institutions still capture the spotlight, all three noted that readers want to see more coverage of the issues that impact community colleges, regional publics, and other institutions that actually serve the majority of learners but rarely receive national attention.
Carapezzo recalled a popular episode of the College Uncovered podcast which focused on how to know whether your college might be at risk of shutting down: “I’m writing for a general audience. And so I have to distill it down to its essence,” said Carapezzo. “So I like asking big questions like that…I think approaching the industry that way for the public—pulling back the curtain and explaining how it works and why it works this way—is long overdue.”
Elevating not just the “what” but the “who.”
Coverage of the policy and politics surrounding federal aid performs well. But readers want to understand not just what happened, but why it matters and who it impacts.
One popular story that Alonso highlighted was “The Handwriting Revolution,” published earlier this year, sharing the experiences of professors using handwritten essays to prevent students from relying on ChatGPT and generative AI in their classrooms.
Carlson, Carapezza, and Alonso did touch upon a persistent gap in coverage: the stories of students themselves. Fear of retaliation often prevents students from speaking openly, which can obscure the human consequences of financial instability, program cuts, or administrative decisions.
A Few Tips for Engaging Media
“I always appreciated the media that held us accountable. It was really critical to have reporters asking us very tough questions,” Derrick shared when describing her experience as a communications director over the years. “When we were getting tough questions, it’s because we needed to be asked those questions, and we were grateful for that.”
Looking ahead, the journalists encouraged institutions to rethink how they communicate with the media:
- Clear, timely pitches that connect individual initiatives to broader national trends are far more effective than isolated announcements.
- Matching your announcements and stories to the right reporters—connecting it to their beat quickly rather than bury the lead—helps you stand out from other pitches that fill their inbox.
- Transparency is extremely important: making leaders, faculty, and students accessible and allowing journalists to observe real campus environments rather than highly curated ones.
- Direct outreach and social media—emailing faculty, scanning LinkedIn conversations, monitoring campus, reading through student subreddits, and spending time on campuses—allow them to capture more genuine stories.
Stronger storytelling, deeper trust, and greater openness can help ensure that the full complexity and value of higher education is understood by the audiences who need it most.
Watch the full session from CCA’s 2025 Annual Convening here.
