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 describes a documentary about two women in their mid-twenties who left jobs at Subway for a nursing home and found work they say they will never leave. His team asked how a single clip could reach two audiences. “It’s with the caption and it’s with your call to action.” One version tells a teenager to consider becoming a CNA. The identical footage asks an adult to tag a young person with a big heart. Same asset, no second production cost.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Why have perception and reality drifted so far apart?
A: Peter gives three reasons. Higher education has been politicized by loud voices on both the right and the left. Social media rewards the extremes, because that is what gets clicked. And the sector is behind on channels, still printing catalogs for high school seniors when it could have embraced TikTok and YouTube.
Q: Who is the institution actually marketing to?
A: Dr McNaughton asks whether the customer is the student, the parents or society. Peter answers all three, and says each needs its own channel or handle: one for the 55-year-old who shapes opinion but is not sending anyone to college, one for parents like him, one for 15 to 20-year-olds.
Q: How would you deal with the “woke” question?
A: At association level, with a documentary. Film an 18-year-old who arrives conservative, studies the subjects people assume are political, and leaves with mentors rather than a new ideology. Show two students who disagree becoming friends. What changes, he says, is how they talk to each other, not what they think.
Q: How do you rewrite the story about cost?
A: Do not defend the price. Show the scholarships that go unclaimed, what trades are paying, and the degrees with strong salaries attached. Peter offers his own case on the episode: he left college earning $8,000 more than his supervisor in social work because he had studied Spanish.
Q: Is this one documentary, or something bigger?
A: An evergreen campaign rather than a film. The documentary is the core asset, then it is cut into 30, 60 and 90-second clips for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, organically, so different audiences enter at the top of the funnel and move down it.
What This Means for College Presidents and Enrollment Leaders
If you run communications or enrollment, the first move is subtraction. The things institutions habitually lead with, the campus, the enrollment figures, the endowment, the technology, are not wrong. They are simply not what a family is thinking about on a visit. Peter names what is: AI, politics on campus, and debt with no job at the end of it. Saying those out loud, on camera, before anyone else does, is the whole of the first step.
The second move is to stop guessing at the objection. An afternoon inside Reddit threads and YouTube comments will hand you the actual language people use about your institution and your price, and that language becomes the brief. Then find the person who is the living counterexample and film them, because the showing does the work that a statistic will not. That sequence, from objection to lived proof, is what Strategic Pete’s documentary storytelling practice is built to run.
Third, the production problem is smaller than it looks. Peter’s point about students is not a cost-saving trick. An 18-year-old already knows the channel, the format and the pace, and the framework for thinking clearly is the thing faculty can supply. Give one cohort five days and five myths; give the next cohort the job of distributing what they made. The same instinct, ordinary people rather than executives on camera, runs through the People Worth Caring About docuseries he directs.
Finally, pace. The three takeaways he leaves with presidents and boards are to talk about the elephant in the room, to talk about it through a story rather than data, and to eat that elephant one bite at a time, starting tomorrow with a cell phone or an intern. His evidence that narrative can move an entire market is Formula One: he says on the episode that Netflix’s Drive to Survive took a sport few Americans followed and helped turn it into a billion dollar business in the United States. Somebody is going to write the story either way.
Listen to the Full Episode
Peter Murphy Lewis joined Dr Drumm McNaughton on the Changing Higher Ed® podcast in an episode published on 25 November 2025. Dr McNaughton is CEO of The Change Leader and makes the show for presidents, trustees and senior campus leaders, and this conversation covers the CARE framework, the enrollment funnel and student-made content in more detail than a summary can carry. Listen to the full episode on the Changing Higher Ed site.
