It’s an indisputable fact that reputation matters.

For individuals a good reputation helps establish relationships and trust, builds notoriety and opportunity, and can travel far and wide.

Unfortunately, a bad reputation can also travel far and wide, providing notoriety for all the wrong reasons.

And, for those who’ve found themselves in such circumstances, they’ll know that a bad reputation – whether deserved or not - can also be hard to shake off.

For educational institutions the same is true. To compel students to put their faith in your brand and your offering, to reach and establish interest in new markets, and to continue to attract notice from those who are already aware of what you can offer, building and maintaining a good reputation is vital.

So how is it done?

It is far too easy, and even naïve, to think that a reputation can or should be built only on elements like rankings, accreditations, awards or individuals.

Whilst in the moment all of the above can provide value, there is often little long-term security.

Rankings change year on year (and often deliver surprising, contradictory results), accreditations can be taken away, awards have a limited shelf-life, and when individuals leave your campus they tend to take their admirable qualities with them. Worse, if an individual’s image suffers a knock, there can be ripple effects for those individuals and institutions in their orbit.

To avoid your reputation crumbling at the first knock it needs to be built on elements with a little more depth and regularity. A good reputation should not be something that happens to you or to your institution – a result of good fortune or a complimentary label – it should be something you actively build, shape and reinforce over time.

A solid PR strategy sits right at the heart of that process.

Here are five things business schools should be doing right now to build, enhance and safeguard a good reputation.

1.  Bring your faculty’s expertise to the fore 
2. Build a crisis-ready response before you need it
3. Use rankings strategically
4. Invest in the dean's personal brand
5. Tell better stories, and tell them consistently

Bring Your Faculty’s Expertise To The Fore

Your academics are arguably your most valuable reputational asset — and yet many business schools leave that expertise sitting in journal articles that only a handful of specialists will ever read.

When your business school is preaching about its industry impact, making claims about its ability to shape the next generation of business leaders, or doubling down on the wider societal issues that matter, it helps to have evidence of action in these areas to improve the credibility of those claims.

And, this should not just be done solely on the backs of alumni success, high profile hires, or the data that stems from league tables.

The schools that stand out are those that offer more than soundbites – acting to translate complex research into commentary that the wider world can engage with, learn from and even apply to their own lives.

This matters because prospective students, corporate partners, graduate employers and accreditation bodies all form opinions based on what they can see and read.

An institution whose faculty share their evidence and provide expert quotes in global titles like Reuters or Bloomberg, author op-eds for the FT, analysis pieces in Harvard Business Review, or trade presses like The HRDirector can actively display how they are creating a positive, progressive impact in the world around them.

Prospective students can be assured their education will be current and applicable, employers get a sense of a graduate’s potential, corporates can be inspired to form partnerships and make investments, and accreditation bodies have an additional wealth of evidence to consider.

This carries a very different weight to those whose faculty are only present as a profile on the school's own website. If a school wants to shout about its commitment to sustainability – and more importantly, if their shouting ever comes under scrutiny, being backed by a body of work and actions helps to quiet any criticism.

Where PR fits in: Working with faculty to identify news-worthy angles within their existing research, or advise on events and stories happening already within the media where their expertise could provide a well-informed perspective can build solid relationships with journalists, helping to bring their work to a wider audience in a more accessible way.

Focusing on securing such content across top-tier international titles as well as targeted sector publications provides a wealth of opportunity to be both a voice within a body of experts and to provide a deep dive to those invested enough to learn more.

A robust media strategy (and talented PR support to enact it) will know not only what your institution can offer and what it seeks to accomplish by doing so, but also what editors and their readers want, creating the vital bridge between the two.

Build A Crisis-Ready Response Before You Need It

Nobody expects a reputational crisis. That's precisely why so many institutions are unprepared for one when it arrives, and struggle to both react and recover as a result.

Whether it's a controversial research finding, a staff or student issue that gets picked up by the press, a rankings drop or a complaint that pulls in wider attention, business schools can often find themselves in the media spotlight without warning.

Once this happens, it only takes a poorly worded statement in response to any of these things to go viral for all the wrong reasons and make the situation worse.

The institutions that can come through these moments with their reputations intact – if a little bruised – are the ones with the foresight to prepare well in advance.

You can’t always know what the crisis will be, but you can establish a series of steps to follow to keep everyone on the same page and to ensure everyone within your community is well cared for when the crisis happens.

Doing this gives you the opportunity to be more organised and deliberate in your response. Some crises might not benefit from fighting fire with fire, but for those accusations that place your institution in an unfair or inaccurate light and need correcting publicly, having a body of publicly visible work and actions that back up your institution’s values, can help to diffuse anything that opposes it.

Where PR fits in: A PR team can devise a clear internal protocol for how any crisis should be addressed, decide the actions to take (or crucially not take), identify who should speak and when and, most importantly, train them in doing so in a collected and confident manner.

For unexpected oversights, following a crisis, an intelligent PR strategy can also help to correct or dispel an unwanted narrative by seeking opportunities for spokespeople or institutions to build a more positive public image through authentic engagement and action.

Use Rankings Strategically

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, rankings remain a significant factor in how business schools are perceived, and that is unlikely to ever change. However, many schools underutilise the reputational opportunity that rankings present.

An all too common mistake is simply announcing an institution’s position (even a top one) and moving on, rather than using this accomplishment as a springboard for building a broader narrative.

A rise — even a modest one — can be an effective hook for a proactive media push, but it cannot be the sole focus of any public campaign if you wish to build any real reputational benefit from the result. Rankings can lend weight to a proposed idea or perspective but that cannot and should not be the main focus of the story.

Make that mistake, and you may find that 12 months later, a drop – even a modest one – can have a much bigger consequence than climbing a few spots the year before.

Instead, use rankings to help highlight the elements that have led to your institution performance in key areas. Did your institution do well on graduate employability? If so, source opportunities for your careers teams to share their wisdom with a wider audience through the media, work with alumni relations to find graduates who can share their lived experiences of study and career success to help inspire new applicants, and build on your positive perception by creating opportunities for others to benefit from your institution’s expertise.

Looking at rankings overall can provide some reinforcement when individual tables or years provide underwhelming or unexpectedly disappointing results. A maintained ranking position over several years can be framed as a reliable indicator for a consistently high-quality education, showing resilience in an often turbulent sector, and opening the door for discussions on how such resilience can be achieved.

Even a drop, when handled well, is an opportunity to communicate what the school is doing and where it is headed, putting a positive light on a troubling circumstance.

Where PR fits in: Planning for rankings communications well in advance, and as part of a wider strategy beyond individual tables can establish not only a sensible, proportionate response to results when they’re announced but also identify avenues for better storytelling where individual results can complement one another.

Analysing results for all, not just your own institution, can also open up the opportunity for important discussions and analysis that matters to applicants. PR can not only do this but also prepare your spokespeople to take such discussions on, displaying a deep knowledge of what matters to applicants and an awareness of what is happening beyond their own institutions walls. All of this builds credibility, enhancing a positive public image.

Invest In The Dean's Personal Brand

The Dean is the public face of a business school. But that does not necessarily mean they’re the most in-demand or compelling person for wider spokespeople to engage with and especially so if their public brand begins and ends with their job title.

Deans needs to be more than a figurehead. Deans need to not only be seen, but be seen to be saying something. In 2026, that means something very different to what it did a decade ago. Audiences increasingly want to understand not just what an institution stands for, but who leads it and what they believe.

A strong Dean's voice — whether on LinkedIn, in the press or at industry events, can be a direct reputational signal to everyone from prospective MBAs to potential corporate partners.

So, it’s important that such figures not only have a platform to say something, but also something to say.

A Dean who can engage directly and thoughtfully with the big questions; whether the role of AI in education and industry, tackling sustainability effectively, student global mobility, the ROI and additional value of studies can be an invaluable asset on contributing directly to raising a school's profile and credibility.

But, there is a balance to be achieved. A Dean cannot be a jack-of-all-trades. Commenting on every topic can have the opposite effect of eroding credibility with audiences. Instead, care should be taken to define a selection of topics in which the Dean has a solid foothold, knowledge and capability of discussing, leaving other areas to other valuable voices within the institution.

Speaking on focus topics repeatedly over time builds public recognition and appreciation of expertise, turning the Dean from an available commentator into a sought-after voice, benefitting the institution as a result.

Where PR fits in: Aside of supporting the Dean with public engagement – from ghost-writing comment pieces to identifying the right platforms and pitching opinion articles to editors, PR professionals can also help to set out those topics which can build a personal brand, and devise the pathways through which to enhance them over time.

Tell Better Stories, And Tell Them Consistently

The instinct in institutional communications is often to reach for statistics, accreditations and factual programme features when attempting to garner public appeal.

These matter of course, but they don't move people. Stories do.

A business school’s website and brochure can provide the nuts and bolts of an education programme – what’s on offer and how an applicant might apply for it. Where a school can stand out from its competitors and turn those data points into positive leverage is by also investing in sharing how those elements impact those that pass through its doors.

The alumni  who built a social enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa, the international student who successfully overcame the challenge of thriving academically, socially and culturally in a new environment, the local industry partner who benefitted from direct student engagement and ingenuity… all these stories can resonate with audiences far more strongly than a statistic can.

The faculty research that is changing how governments think about trade policy. The careers advisors that can support MBA students in successfully navigating a “triple jump”… the list goes on. Those institutions that can share a consistent stream of such successes build an undeniable body of evidence of its value.

These are the stories that lodge in the minds of prospective students, that give journalists something to write about, and that build a genuine emotional connection. In a year when AI is generating generic content at scale, authentic, human storytelling is cutting through the noise.

Where PR fits in: Investing in a robust PR support system and the practitioners to carry it out can accomplish all of the above and more, connecting such stories with an ever-widening net of audiences and helping to shape messages in a way that links directly back to the core values your institution’s reputation is built on.

Reputation Matters

Good reputations are not built on one-off wins – and if that’s your strategy you’ll likely find yourself in hot water before long, with no real means of getting out.

Instead, the reputations that endure are built upon the ordinary moments – all the small actions that build toward a bigger goal, in holding the right values at heart and, crucially, in displaying them well.

Reputations can’t be built, and can’t grow, unless people are talking about you. That’s what PR does, and that’s why, if you’re not already talking to us, you should be.

Hopefully, our reputation speaks for itself.

Let's work together

Author: Kerry Ruffle

Kerry is the Strategic Communications and Editorial Lead at BlueSky Education and a former BBC journalist. Recognised in the graduate management education arena as a leading authority on communications for the industry, Kerry has more than a decade of experience in the media and public relations.