Higher Ed Perfected the Language of Prestige. AI Search Throws It Away.

A few months ago, I built an experiment called Blanding. Paste in a university's web address, and it reads the homepage and several key pages, evaluates the writing and positioning, counts the clichés, and returns a score out of 100. When I published the results from the first 250 institutions, the finding was blunt: higher education has a sameness problem, not a writing problem.

People kept submitting schools. The dataset grew to 839 institutions. I expected a larger, more varied sample to soften the result.

It didn't.

The curve didn't move

The median Blanding score across 839 institutions is 48 out of 100. It was 50 when the dataset held 250 schools. Seventy-two percent of the sites score between 40 and 59, and of the 839 evaluated, only six cleared 80. The curve barely shifted when the sample more than tripled.

That matters, because it means this isn't a collection of schools making unrelated writing mistakes. Separate mistakes would scatter. This clusters. Something is holding hundreds of institutions at the same set point, and the score is measuring more than writing quality. It is measuring the force of the system pulling every institution toward the same language.

So the question worth asking isn't why the writing is weak. It's why so much of it is weak in exactly the same direction.

Why every school arrives at the same language

Schools sound alike because nearly every incentive in higher education rewards sounding like a respected peer. A university homepage is not written for one seventeen-year-old. It is negotiated among the president, provost, deans, enrollment, advancement, faculty, athletics, legal, and communications. Every concrete sentence is one someone can object to, and in a consensus process, the things people might challenge get removed. What survives is the language no one will fight about: world-class, academic excellence, a vibrant and diverse community, transformative experiences, preparing tomorrow's leaders.

The language isn't false. That is part of what makes it so hard to cut. It is just too broad to create preference.

Underneath the committee is something harder to escape. Higher education sells prestige, and prestige is one of the few signals all of its audiences read at once. A prospective student, a parent, a donor, a trustee, a legislator, and a faculty recruit want very different things, but they all know what "elite" is supposed to sound like. So institutions reach for the language that signals status to everyone, and those words are, by definition, the words everyone else is already using.

Sociologists named this drift more than forty years ago. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell called it institutional isomorphism: organizations in a field grow more alike because they adopt the conventions and signals of the peers they believe are winning. Rankings sharpened it. When institutions are judged through reputational measures, and peers are asked to rate one another, the safest posture is to resemble a school those peers already respect. The result isn't outright imitation. It is gradual convergence. The same declarations, the same photography, the same proof points, the same visual signals of seriousness and ambition. The same sentence rewritten 839 times.

How feedback turns distinction into beige

The sanding doesn't only happen inside the institution. It comes from everyone the institution thinks to ask. My friend Richard Banfield has written about what he calls the tyranny of feedback: the way accumulating reactions from more and more people gradually makes a piece of work less like itself. Every suggestion sounds reasonable on its own. Make this more inclusive. Add this audience. Soften that phrase. Make sure this department feels represented. But hundreds of reasonable suggestions don't add up to a stronger idea. They average into something no one dislikes and no one remembers. Surveys, focus groups, cabinet reviews, committee markups: each note is defensible alone, and together they are fatal to a point of view.

I'm a painter, and in the studio this is what makes mud: every color mixed together, nothing left out. A bland homepage is an overworked canvas. No one was willing to leave anything out, so everything had to be included, and everything had to carry the same weight. Nothing could dominate, because dominance implies a choice. Nothing could be omitted, because omission feels dangerous. The result isn't fullness. It is the absence of hierarchy. No selective reduction, no constraint, no point of view, just the maladapted belief that more is more accurate, and therefore safer. When every school presents every virtue at equal volume, students are left with a universe of institutions they can't tell apart, and people can't form strong preferences among things they can't distinguish.

AI changes the cost of sounding alike

For years, institutions absorbed the cost of this sameness. Traditional search still produced a list of links. A student could browse several sites, read program pages and student stories, and slowly uncover the distinctions the homepage failed to express. Prestige, reputation, and search visibility reinforced one another: well-known schools accumulated links, press, and authority, and stayed discoverable even when their language was generic.

That environment is changing. Students now start with a question instead of a list. In a 2026 survey of more than 5,000 high school students, EAB found that 46 percent were using AI tools like ChatGPT in the college search, up from 26 percent in spring 2025, and that 18 percent had already removed a college from consideration based on something an AI surfaced.

The student no longer types "best engineering colleges" into Google and opens ten tabs. She asks: what are some smaller colleges with strong engineering programs, close faculty relationships, access to nature, and a collaborative rather than competitive culture? The system then has to decide which institutions fit, and to do that it needs evidence.

Read your homepage the way that system reads it. "World-class academic excellence" signals prestige to an internal audience and carries almost no usable evidence. There is no distinctive fact to match against the student's question, nothing concrete to extract, nothing specific to repeat back.

This doesn't mean reputation has stopped mattering. AI can still encounter a famous institution's reputation through rankings, Wikipedia, news, and decades of accumulated authority. Prestige still travels. Generic language does not. That is the inversion. Sounding prestigious and being discoverable used to be the same move, and AI-mediated discovery pulls them apart. The language many institutions spent a generation perfecting is the language least able to establish a specific match. In the old environment, blandness made you forgettable. In the new one, it keeps you out of the conversation entirely.

What happens when the distinction is real but the language is blurry

You can watch this happen even when an institution has exactly what a student wants. In February, a reporter at Inside Higher Ed posed as a prospective student and asked ChatGPT to recommend Christian colleges in the South, then narrowed the request to a student interested in music business. Belmont University's largest academic program is music business. Belmont did not appear. When the reporter tried Claude, Belmont surfaced only after the system asked several follow-up questions, which tells you how uneven this environment still is.

Belmont's own marketing team pointed to one issue: their materials use "Christian" and "Christ-centered" interchangeably. The program existed. The fit existed. The language around the identity was blurry, and blur is hard for a person or a machine to hold. The student who never encounters the school can't report that she failed to find it. There is no abandoned form, no falling conversion rate, no clean analytics trail. The school simply never enters the consideration set.

Your homepage can't be an internal consensus document

Most institutions still manage the homepage by making sure everyone inside is reasonably satisfied. The page is reviewed, negotiated, expanded, and approved, which is exactly why so many homepages become collections of vision statements no one can object to. But the homepage is also one of the most visible, most linked, most authoritative things the institution controls. It shouldn't try to contain everything. It should establish a clear enough sense of the place that a prospective student, or a system trying to help one, can begin to answer: what is this school, what is especially true here, and who is likely to thrive here.

The homepage doesn't determine an institution's entire AI identity. Models also draw on program pages, rankings, news, structured data, and third-party sources. That makes consistency more important, not less. The pages a school controls should tell one coherent, specific, defensible story about what it is.

Specificity has to live in two places

Specificity has to live deep in the site: on the page about the lab devoted to one unusual line of research, the program with a requirement few competitors have, the faculty doing something genuinely distinctive, the traditions and places that make the institution itself. And it has to live at the top, in language clear and consistent enough that a student can remember it and a machine can summarize it.

Consider Swarthmore. It scores a 39 on Blanding and leads with "a vision of a future where our values are lived," a sentence that could appear on almost any college site in the country. But Swarthmore also runs an honors program in which more than a hundred outside scholars travel to campus each spring to give seniors oral examinations, a model drawn from Oxford and almost unheard of in American higher education. One sentence is a universally agreeable aspiration. The other tells you what Swarthmore is actually like, and the kind of student who will thrive there. Specificity isn't a cleverer tagline. It is uncovering the facts that make the institution genuinely different.

Specificity is now infrastructure

The work is to make the decisions institutions have spent decades avoiding. What are we, specifically, that no one else can credibly claim? Who are we especially right for? What happens here that wouldn't happen the same way anywhere else? What are we willing to emphasize, and what are we willing to leave out? Those answers have to live everywhere, in academic pages, faculty stories, outcomes, admissions language, metadata, and the homepage itself: concrete enough for a student to remember, consistent enough for a machine to recognize, true enough for the institution to defend.

This isn't only a higher education problem. Every field has its "world-class." Technology has "AI-powered solutions," law has "trusted advisors," healthcare has "patient-centered care," agencies have "full-service." Reach for the language that makes you sound like everyone else, and the systems now deciding what deserves attention will have less reason to believe you are different. In the old search environment, blandness made a brand forgettable. In the new one, it can keep the brand out of the conversation altogether.

You can run your institution's website through Blanding in about thirty seconds. The score isn't the answer. It is evidence of how much real decision-making is left to do.