Peter Murphy Lewis names three things he believes every parent is turning over while they walk a campus for the first time: that AI might replace the degree, that their child will come out “woke and political”, and that they will leave with $140,000 of debt and no job. Most admissions marketing, he argues, answers none of them. It talks about the beautiful campus, the enrollment numbers, the endowment and the technology.
That exchange comes from an episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, hosted by Dr Drumm McNaughton, CEO of the consultancy The Change Leader, whose audience is university and college presidents, board members and senior administrators. The conversation was billed as reclaiming the narrative, and it turned into something more operational than that: a four-step design sequence Peter calls CARE, an instruction to go and read Reddit before writing a word, a plan to turn freshman orientation into a film crew, and a worked example of one clip serving two audiences.
The framing Dr McNaughton offers early on is that higher education does not have a value problem, it has a perception problem. Peter’s working hypothesis from documentary work is that the wider the gap between reality and public belief, the better the film that closes it. The stakes he puts on it are simple. If the institution does not write the story, somebody on Reddit, YouTube or a group text is writing it instead. There is a written companion to this episode in our article on how to market a school.
Key Takeaways
1. Higher Ed Has a Perception Problem, Not a Value Problem
Dr McNaughton sets the terms early: the sector is not struggling to be worth the money, it is struggling with how it is seen. Peter agrees and brings a rule from his documentary practice. “The further the gap between what true reality is… and what everyone thinks, the bigger that gap, the better the documentary.” He points at his own case. Born in 1980 to parents who did not attend college, he found that perception and reality lined up closely. The way people talk about higher education now, he says, sits a long way from what it actually delivers.
2. The CARE Framework Turns Narrative Work Into Four Steps
Peter has packaged the approach as an acronym he calls CARE, named for the year and a half he spent making documentaries in healthcare. Confront, amplify, reshape, evergreen. “Confront is confront the negative perception of what everyone talks about us when we’re not there,” he says, and evergreen is the marketing word for endure. It reads as a design order rather than a campaign brief: decide what the institution is avoiding, find the story that answers it, then build something that keeps working after launch week.
3. The Research Starts in Reddit Threads, Not a Focus Group
Asked how he would take on the cost narrative, Peter describes spending a couple of hours inside the Reddit threads and communities carrying the most negativity about the price of a degree, then repeating the sweep across YouTube comments and Google. He pulls out the recurring themes, then writes the accurate opposite as a hypothesis to go and prove on camera. The reason is blunt: if you do not confront it, “they’re going to tell that story on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook groups, text threads.” The audit becomes the creative brief.
4. The Student Is the Protagonist and the College Is the Vehicle
Most enrollment marketing casts the institution as the hero. Peter inverts it. On cost, he would not argue from the college’s point of view at all. He would show what is going unused, the scholarships nobody claims, what tradespeople are earning, which degrees lead to strong salaries. Only then does the school enter the frame. “The university is not the protagonist in this story. It is the student.” The college is the vehicle that turns that student into the hero. Most 18-year-olds follow what is trending, so show them the life first.
5. Freshman Orientation Can Double as the Production Crew
Peter takes two things he did as a freshman and turns them into capacity. The two-week team-building trip becomes a five-day documentary sprint: split the incoming class into groups, hand them five myths about higher education, supply editing software and a freelance editor, and set the challenge to “combat one of these myths in your documentary.” The freshman seminar becomes a mastermind where students interview faculty about what they have learned. This year’s intake then distributes what last year’s intake filmed. You can start tomorrow, he says, with a phone or an intern.
6. One Clip Can Serve Two Audiences If the Caption Changes
The most practical moment comes from Peter’s long-term care work. He desc