why institutions struggle to articulate their own value
The Taxpayers’ Alliance’s recent list of allegedly “Mickey Mouse” courses prompted the usual round of institutional responses. Some universities declined to comment. Others offered careful explanations of graduate destinations and industry relevance. A handful attempted the moral high ground, questioning the motives behind the question.
None of this seems to have landed particularly well.
This pattern is familiar. When confronted with scepticism about the value of particular courses, universities tend to reach for two kinds of defence. The first is procedural: we hold our own degree-awarding powers, we are responsible for our own quality and standards, therefore our provision is legitimate by definition. The second is data-driven: graduate employment rates, industry partnerships, outcomes metrics. Both responses are accurate. Neither appears to shift public perception.
Research published by the Higher Education Policy Institute in August 2025 illuminated the scale of this perception gap. The public guesses that 40 per cent of graduates would not go to university if they could choose again. The actual figure, from survey evidence, is 8 per cent. Asked to rank familiar institutions and businesses by revenue, only 6 per cent correctly identified the University of Oxford as larger than Greggs. The public also substantially overestimates the proportion of graduates who report their student debt has negatively affected their lives.
These findings suggest something more troubling than simple ignorance. The sector produces abundant evidence of its economic contribution, its employment outcomes, its completion rates. OECD data confirms the UK’s higher education system performs strongly on most measures that matter. Yet this evidence does not seem to connect with how people actually understand what universities do and why it matters.
The explanation may lie in the gap between what institutions know about themselves and what they can articulate to external audiences.
Quality assurance frameworks, properly understood, represent a sophisticated internal grammar for describing educational value. The QAA’s Quality Code establishes principles around academic standards, learning opportunities, student engagement. TEF metrics capture completion, continuation, progression, graduate outcomes. Institutional review processes examine curriculum design, assessment practices, student support. These mechanisms enable universities to demonstrate accountability to regulators and to themselves.
What they do not readily produce is language that resonates beyond the sector.
When Debbie McVitty examined this question recently on Wonkhe, she observed that institutional knowledge about why courses matter is often “so deeply embedded in the structures and cultures of the institution as to be almost entirely latent and unarticulated.” The people who design and deliver programmes understand their significance. They know the skills students develop, the intellectual challenges they encounter, the ways graduates apply what they have learned. But this knowledge exists primarily as tacit professional understanding rather than as an accessible public narrative.
The consequence is a curious asymmetry. Universities can demonstrate that their courses meet regulatory expectations. They can produce data showing that graduates enter employment. What they struggle to do is explain, in terms that connect with ordinary concerns, why studying fashion or outdoor learning or mental health or e-gaming represents a legitimate and valuable form of higher education.
YouGov polling from October 2025 found that only 22 per cent of respondents believed a performing arts degree would leave graduates better off, compared with 86 per cent for medicine and 83 per cent for law. The public, it seems, has clear intuitions about which subjects confer genuine value. Graduate outcomes research frequently suggests considerable variation within subjects as well as between them, yet the intuitions persist regardless.
Part of the difficulty is that the value propositions that work internally do not translate externally. Phrases like “student-centred learning” and “graduate attributes” and “employability skills” carry meaning within academic discourse. They do not land with the proverbial commuter on the Clapham omnibus who wonders why their taxes should subsidise degrees in surf studies.
Another part of the difficulty is that the most compelling justifications for many courses are fundamentally human rather than economic. The fashion student who develops an eye for how culture shapes what we wear and what we signal through our choices. The outdoor learning graduate who understands how to create educational experiences that work differently from classroom instruction. The mental health professional who can support people through crises that affect millions of families. These are genuine contributions to human flourishing. They do not fit easily into spreadsheets.
There is a risk here that institutions know this but have concluded the effort of translation is not worth the trouble. Why engage with critics whose minds are already made up? Why dignify bad-faith attacks with serious responses? The temptation to retreat behind procedural defences and outcome metrics is understandable.
Yet the alternative may be worse. If universities cannot explain their value in terms that connect with public concerns, they cede that ground to others. The result is that narratives about “hobby courses” and “state-sponsored vanity projects” fill the space where institutional self-description should be.
I do not think the answer lies in better marketing, though communications clearly matter. The deeper challenge is whether institutions can surface and articulate the knowledge that already exists within them about why their provision matters.
This requires time that hard-pressed communications teams rarely have, and access to parts of the institution that marketing functions do not always reach. It requires listening carefully to students and graduates about what they gained that they could not have gained elsewhere. It requires programme teams to reflect on questions they may not have been asked directly: not whether their course meets the Quality Code, but why it exists at all.
These are uncomfortable questions. Some courses may not have good answers. Others may have excellent answers that have never been properly articulated.
The current moment, with its renewed scepticism about higher education participation and its political enthusiasm for skills-focused alternatives, seems to demand that institutions become more fluent in explaining their own value. Whether they can find the language remains an open question.