Imagine a world where like 73% of people just inherently trust the federal government to do what is right. I mean that sounds like complete fiction. It's hard to imagine. But that was actually the reality in 1958. But if you fast forward to 2025, that number has just absolutely plummeted to 17%. It's a complete collapse of institutional trust. Today we are exploring what I think is a genuinely fascinating set of insights. We're basically unpacking the total collapse of institutional trust and more importantly, providing a blueprint for how you actually build it. The stakes here are existential for any organization. We aren't just talking about a cynical public anymore. We're looking at a fundamental reorganization of society, really driven by this pervasive, downright tribal distrust. It feels like it's everywhere. To fully grasp the severity of this, you have to look at how low trust is plaguing other sectors too, like the media. Today, more Americans report having absolutely zero trust in the media than the combined number of people whose trust ranges from fair to a great deal. I know you're probably like, wait, really? Yes, really. The zero trust group is that big. The group with absolute zero faith is larger than the entire spectrum of people who retain even a mild amount of confidence in the press. The traditional gatekeepers of information have almost completely lost their grip. I will never forget my intro to American politics professor Gary Miller, giving us this gold standard for staying informed, which was basically read the New York Times and the Washington Post every single day. That was the unquestioned playbook for decades. You subscribe to the papers, you trust the editorial process, and boom, you are officially an informed citizen. But then you fast forward 20 years later, and I'm sitting at home when my son just runs into the room, holding up his phone showing a TikTok video, and announces to us that Russia just invaded Ukraine. He's seen a video of an attack. I was incredulous. I immediately opened up my major news apps, and there's nothing. Zero mention of an invasion anywhere. I actually reprimanded my son and told him to beware of fake news and online tricks. The very next morning I woke up to find the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the top banner story across every major traditional paper. The TikTok video from some random user the day before was entirely accurate. That's wild, and I think it helps reveal our modern information crisis. It's like the modern news cycle is running on a high frequency, quickly changing algorithm with millions of microtransactions per second, and our traditional institutions are trying to keep their grip on historical ways of processing and sharing information. Our institutions, not just in higher ed, are struggling because they are no longer moving at the speed of trust. That speed has accelerated. By the time a traditional organization verifies, packages, and delivers reality, the public has already experienced the event, formed a consensus, and just moved on. What's fascinating here is how this collapse of trust creates this massive wave of impact for specific sectors like higher ed. When the big players like government, national media, when they fail to maintain their authority, that skepticism just trickles down. And higher education is sitting right in the center because eroding public trust is really the root cause of significant challenges and opportunities colleges and universities face today. We see it in the loss of crucial research funding, which is fueled by deep doubts about whether universities are actually driving American prominence anymore. And on the flip side, we see it in growing state workforce development funds, which is rooted in this legislative lack of faith that institutions will pursue innovation unless they are financially incentivized. But because our higher ed leaders feel like victims of a culture shift, our first instinct is entirely wrong. How many of your institutions immediately reached for a PR band-aid last year? It's like we viewed this climate of mistrust as like a sudden weather event passing over us, rather than accepting it as the permanent climate we are actively operating within. Last year I caught up with a colleague who works as a higher ed marketing consultant. He noted that while universities were completely terrified about losing federal funding and plummeting enrollment, business was absolutely booming for him. Anxious institutions were flooding his phone, just desperate for new public relations storytelling campaigns to address public perception of their institution. I think we should be concerned about that approach. I think it's like trying to fix a failing, problematic relationship today, just by reminiscing about the good times you had years ago. It simply doesn't work. Public distrust is a foundational operational concern, as I'll explain later, yet we're quite literally trying to storytell our way out of it. I think the issue is that we're treating trust like it's a vibe, like it's a temperature we could just check with a survey, or we conflate it entirely as quote unquote public perception, but perception and trust operate entirely differently. This is a distinction that I believe a lot of leaders completely fail to make. They use perception and trust interchangeably. But I mean think about the closest long-term relationship you have. I have been married to my husband for almost 20 years. I can have a day or days where I am utterly dissatisfied with him. I'm annoyed by his habits, frustrated by an argument, my general perception of him in that moment is highly negative. We could say that my PR score for him is exactly zero. Yet if a major life crisis hit that afternoon, I would have complete unwavering trust that he would have my back, that he won't cause me or our family harm. Trust, not perception, is the bedrock. Sociologists and organizational psychologists, they define trust as the belief that the other party will not cause harm and that you can genuinely rely on them to act in ways that are fair, honest, and reliable. But the absolute core of this definition, the engine that makes trust actually work, is that trust means feeling safe enough to be vulnerable. I think that when you look at higher education through that specific lens of vulnerability, the dynamic is staggering. Investment in higher ed represents perhaps the most asymmetrical risk a consumer takes in their life. We ask students to shoulder 100% of the financial and temporal risk. For traditional age undergraduates, we demand years of their prime youth, give them avenues to take on massive amounts of debt if necessary, and in return, the institution guarantees absolutely zero outcome. We actually take pride in saying that we can't guarantee any outcome. Not a grade, not a job or career, not a graduate school acceptance. It's baked into the very nature of who we are. Now, I'm not saying that we necessarily should issue this guarantee, not at all. But this lopsided relationship is the apex of a vulnerability that we must acknowledge. That vulnerability isn't just limited to the financial gamble either. The daily mechanics of navigating a university are steeped in it, taking required courses that dictate your GPA, sitting down with an academic advisor whose guidance can facilitate timely degree completion. Or not. Applying for internships and jobs, the list goes on. Our students' very existence on our campuses is an inherently vulnerable act with steep costs in time, money, and opportunity. I think organizations spend way too much time obsessing over the cloud of public perception instead of addressing the actual web of vulnerability they sit at the center of. You cannot talk about student confidence, engagement, or revenue if you haven't first met the vulnerability that sits between your institution and the people you serve. To build real trust and the revenue that follows it, an institution has to prove every single day that it is worthy of the profound vulnerability it demands, and worthiness isn't a feeling. So you can't just survey your way out of public perception. You can't retrofit trust by sending out a student satisfaction survey. You have to honor the vulnerability first and then engineer your entire operation to safeguard it. Deloitte Digital actually built this massive data-driven tool called the Human Experience Trust ID to measure exactly this. It's a tool with 350,000 survey responses across nearly 500 major brands combined with focus groups, executive conversations, and deep dive case studies on the exact moments that trust was either won or lost, and the financial stakes they uncovered absolutely demolish the idea that trust is just a flavor of the day in higher ed. According to Deloitte's data, trusted companies can outperform their peers by up to 400%. Furthermore, customers who actually trust a brand are 88% more likely to buy again. As an aside, one day we're going to talk about how we need to talk more about recurring revenue in higher ed. But trust is the foundation of that business model. The data also revealed a massive, incredibly dangerous blind spot among leadership. Organizational leaders routinely overestimate their customers' trust in them by over 50%. I bet they're getting it wrong because of insider bias. When you're sitting in team meetings day after day, you see the sweat equity. You see the agonizing committee meetings, the endless whiteboard sessions, the genuine desire to build a good program. And because leaders witness their own intense effort, they automatically assume the students feel that effort too. But the students don't see the sweat. They only experience the level of friction in the final outcome. Leaders are trapped by confusing their internal sweat equity with external trust. So to bridge that massive 50% gap, Deloitte breaks down the operational execution of trust into four distinct pillars: humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability. We need to unpack how each of these actually functions as a mechanism. The first pillar is humanity. Operationally, this means demonstrating empathy, kindness, and fairness in your processes, not just your marketing. So if a university claims to care about student mental health, but their drop ad policy requires a student experiencing a family tragedy to navigate this impossible maze of bureaucracy just to withdraw without a financial penalty. The humanity is zero. The process completely contradicts the marketing. Now the second pillar is transparency. This is about sharing information, motives, and choices in straightforward, plain language. I personally think transparency is the pillar leaders misunderstand the most. They hear transparency and they just panic thinking, it means total exposure. But think of transparency like an open kitchen in a high-end restaurant. Transparency does not mean the customer needs the security code to rummage through walk and freezer. It just means they need the waiter to ask about allergies or explain the process of cooking tonight's special. They need an acknowledgement of the vulnerability so they feel confident eating at the restaurant. The third pillar is capability. This is simple to say but incredibly difficult to execute. You must actually deliver quality experiences and outcomes. Capability is the mechanism that proves to the learner that their vulnerability wasn't misplaced. If a university promises a world-class, cutting-edge education, but the dorm internet constantly crashes, and the online advising portal is a relic from 2008, the institution's capability is fundamentally compromised. The student or their family immediately questions, what else is broken? Which feeds directly into the fourth pillar. Reliability is doing it right. Once reliability is the cadence of kept promises, it's consistently delivering the experience people were led to expect without them having to brace for impact every time they interact with your systems. So how does a leader actually take humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability and implement them without it turning into just another hollow PR exercise? How do we actually do this? There's a clear three-step operational play. First, assess your organization's value statements. Do your stated values actually reflect these four pillars? The concepts of humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability must be baked into the DNA of what you claim to value. And the second step is to drill down operationally and map those pillars to actual touch points. You have to interrogate your own systems. Where do our students or partners actually experience humanity when they are confused or frustrated? Where do they actually need to see transparency regarding how our decisions are made? And how are we failing to show them exactly where we are capable and reliable in the daily interactions and systems they depend on? And the final step is to make this inescapable. You bake these values into your ongoing unit planning and program reviews by requiring unit leaders to describe exactly how they're operationalizing humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability, using whatever terms your institution uses to describe these four values. You ensure that the ultimate overriding question for your entire leadership team becomes, what would it look like to run this organization so that trust becomes the only logical conclusion? So what does this all mean for you listening right now? The public hasn't suffered some collective amnesia. They haven't thought that institutions, whether they are universities, massive media conglomerates, or federal agencies, absolutely don't matter. There's no deception or ignorance on their part. They know these systems are a valuable, necessary part of the societal framework. The staggering distrust we are seeing today exists because people can no longer figure out how to navigate these complex systems. They can't depend on the outcomes, they can't afford them, they don't feel understood by the people running them. They are being asked to be deeply vulnerable in systems that refuse to prove they are worthy of that vulnerability. So back to my marketing consultant friend. PR and marketing are essential tools. Absolutely. But you have to proceed their external messaging by actually operating your organization in a fair, transparent, capable, viable way. You cannot retrofit trust with a shiny new ad campaign or post-interaction survey. You have to design your operations for it from the ground up. This raises an important question, and it's the exact thought I want to leave you with. Today we talked about how the Deloitte data shows organizational leaders consistently overestimating the public's trust in them by 50%, largely because those leaders are blinded by their own sweat equity. If that bias exists across 500 major brands and hundreds of thousands of data points, how might your own insider bias be blinding you right now? It's a tough question. How might your hyper-awareness of your own good intentions, your long hours, and your hard work be preventing you from seeing the subtle operational ways you are inadvertently breaking the trust of the very people who rely on you the most? Thanks for looking beyond the Ivory Tower with me. Looking forward to learning more with you about the world around us.