Can higher ed leaders prove their institution's relevance at every level--to students, employers, and the public?
Sustainability

Higher ed’s 2026 blockbuster moment: Why relevance now outranks reputation


Can you prove your institution's relevance at every level--to students, employers, and the public?

Key points:

When Blockbuster executives dismissed Netflix as a niche player, they weren’t wrong about its operational excellence–but they were fatally wrong about whether Netflix’s model still mattered to consumers. Blockbuster mastered late fees and inventory management. The problem? Consumers no longer cared.

As 2026 approaches, higher education faces its Blockbuster moment, a crisis of relevance at every level. The degree. The academic program. The skills within individual courses. How consumers perceive institutional value. How the public views higher education’s role in society. Institutions can’t afford to be relevant at one level while failing at others. Full stop.

When a consumer asks Alexa for restaurant recommendations, they instantly get personalized suggestions based on their preferences, location, and past behavior. When they open Instagram, an algorithm serves content so precisely matched to their interests that hours disappear. Yet when consumers research college programs, they encounter websites emphasizing 150-year histories, campus beauty, and vague promises about “preparing leaders for tomorrow.”

Here’s the thing: History matters. A 150-year legacy represents generations of graduates who transformed their communities, weathered economic shifts, and built institutions worth preserving. The problem isn’t the tradition—it’s that tradition alone no longer answers the questions prospective students are asking. They want to know: “Will this program prepare me for the economy I’m entering?” and “Can I afford the investment relative to outcomes?”

Relevance revelation: The institutions that will thrive in 2026 are those that understand relevance means leveraging tradition as a foundation for innovation, not an excuse to avoid it.

The multi-layered relevance crisis

Here’s what’s happening: Institutions across the country are making brutal decisions about what stays and what goes. Legacy institutions are making the same hard choices as small colleges, cutting programs and jobs, while responding to decreased enrollment, reductions in funding, or both.

The pattern is unmistakable: When forced to choose, institutions are abandoning humanities, arts, languages, and liberal studies in favor of business, nursing, and career-focused programs. According to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ 2024 analysis, degrees awarded in most humanities disciplines have fallen by more than 25 percent over the past 15 years, while nursing program enrollment grew 4.9 percent in 2024 alone–marking 21 consecutive years of expansion. Administrators are not making these decisions because they suddenly stopped valuing intellectual breadth–they’re making them because relevance, as perceived by students and the market, now determines survival.

Meanwhile, the some-college-no-credential population continues growing, now exceeding 37 million working-age Americans who started degrees but stopped–not because they couldn’t handle the work, but because the value proposition stopped making sense at some point in their journey. Public confidence in higher education remains weak:  According to Gallup, only 42 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the sector, up slightly from a low of 36 percent in 2024, but still dramatically down from 57 percent in 2015.

Today’s prospective students can earn professional certificates in weeks, access skills training through countless alternative providers, and increasingly find employers willing to hire based on demonstrated competencies rather than traditional degrees. By 2027, the World Economic Forum expects nearly half of all job skills to change.

Relevance revelation: Institutions maintaining curricula designed for a pre-AI economy aren’t just behind–they’re teaching toward irrelevance.

Where relevance breaks down

The relevance crisis manifests distinctly at each level:

  • Degree relevance vs. alternative credentials: Traditional four-year degrees face competition from certificates, bootcamps, and competency-based pathways that offer faster time-to-employment and lower costs. When employers accept alternatives, the degree’s relevance depends entirely on demonstrable ROI—which many institutions struggle to prove.
  • Program relevance vs. market velocity: Academic programs, slowed by lengthy approval processes, often can’t keep pace as industries such as technology, healthcare, and business transform continuously, leaving curriculum outdated before students graduate. Relevance requires matching curriculum evolution to market pace.
  • Perceived institutional relevance vs. student priorities: Students prioritize outcomes, flexibility, and affordability. Institutions historically emphasize tradition, rankings, and campus amenities. When institutional messaging fails to address consumer priorities, students perceive the institution as irrelevant to their needs–regardless of actual quality.
  • Public perception vs. sector performance: Widespread program cuts, financial exigency declarations, and questionable value propositions erode public confidence. When higher education can’t articulate its relevance to societal needs, workforce development, social mobility, and holistic education–the entire sector suffers reputational damage.

Relevance revelation: Inputs vs. Outputs: 2026 brings the “death of the paper.”  No longer can learning be measured by the traditional essay when A.I. programs can create them in seconds.  The assessment of learning is shifting to the inputs as a student considers the tools, prompts, critiques, and sources used to create the output.

The relevance imperative

Proving relevance across all dimensions requires institutions to operate with unprecedented transparency and responsiveness.  Higher education leaders face a defining choice in 2026: Continue operating as if relevance is assumed or recognize that relevance must be proven continuously at every level–course, program, credential, institutional viability, technology, return on investment, and public trust.

The institutions that thrive will understand that these dimensions of relevance are interconnected. A relevant degree loses value if the program is outdated. A relevant program fails if courses teach obsolete skills. Relevant skills don’t matter if consumers don’t perceive the institution as credible. And institutional credibility suffers when the entire sector faces public skepticism.

Here’s the question every leader should be asking in 2026: Can you prove your institution’s relevance at every level–to the student weighing alternatives, to the employer considering your graduates, to the public questioning higher education’s value? Because in 2026, relevance isn’t a marketing message, it’s the only path to survival.

References:

Program cuts and financial exigency data: Inside Higher Ed, Bryan Alexander’s research, CBS News (2024-2025 reports)

Humanities degree decline: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “The Academic Humanities Today: Findings from the 2024 Department Survey” (April 2025)

Nursing enrollment growth: American Association of Colleges of Nursing, “2024-2025 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing” (June 2025)

Some-college-no-credential population: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (June 2025)

Public confidence data: Gallup-Lumina Foundation State of Higher Education Study (July 2025)

Skills disruption projections: World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2023

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