A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an episode of the Radio Atlantic podcast titled "Higher Education's Identity Crisis." The guest was Ian Bogost, an Atlantic contributing writer and professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

The conversation was about higher ed. But I kept hearing echoes of conversations I've been having with independent school heads over the last several months.

Not because the situations are identical. They aren't. But the underlying dynamic is close enough to take seriously. You can listen below:

What Bogost Said

Bogost described what he sees on college campuses today: everything has become about professionalization. Students want to know what a course is for, how it connects to a job, and what it will do for their prospects after graduation. He wasn't blaming students. He said they've grown up in a world that never stopped asking what's next, and they absorbed it.

Then he named the driver: price.

When a degree at a private college can cost $75,000 a year in tuition alone, closer to $100,000 once you add housing and fees, the ROI question starts to dominate everything else. The whole-person promise, the idea that college forms character, builds community, and prepares students for citizenship, becomes very difficult to make when the bill is that high.

That argument had real currency when the financial equation was roughly balanced. When the cost-to-value relationship held, families were willing to trust the broader promise. When it broke down, colleges discovered how tenuous that argument had always been. It wasn't being tested in real time. It was just assumed.

Here's the part that stuck with me: Bogost wasn't saying the whole-person promise is wrong. He was saying higher ed never had to defend it very rigorously, and now it does, and most institutions don't know how.

The Independent School Version of This Story

Independent schools are not higher ed. The experience is more personal, the relationships are deeper, and the mission is built around students at a fundamentally different stage of development. Those distinctions matter.

But the pattern is real, and heads of school are describing it more directly now.

Families ask harder questions about outcomes. They want to understand college placement data in more detail. They push on programs that don't have an obvious payoff. They compare options with a level of scrutiny that would have been unusual a generation ago.

Partly, this reflects a more information-rich environment. Families today can research alternatives, read reviews, and benchmark against peer schools in ways that weren't possible before. The days of a school being the default choice because it was the obvious choice are fading.

Partly, it is tuition pressure. Independent school tuition has risen significantly over the past two decades, and the affordability conversation is harder now. Families who are stretching financially to make tuition work are, understandably, paying closer attention to what they're getting for it.

And partly, something subtler is happening.

Families Are Building Around Schools, Not Through Them

This is the part of the conversation I keep returning to.

A few heads have described a pattern I suspect is more widespread than we acknowledge: families are building their education around the school rather than through it. The school handles academics. Club sports handle athletics. Outside enrichment programs handle the arts. Summer intensives handle skill development and college prep.

A generation ago, the school was the center of a child's life outside the home. It was the organizing institution. The community formed there. The friendships formed there. The extracurricular identity formed there.

That is still true for many families. But the balance is shifting in ways that matter.

Independent schools have long differentiated themselves beyond academics. The pitch has never been just "we will teach your child." It has been "we will develop your child, build a community around your family, and give your student an experience that shapes who they become." That is a powerful value proposition. But it depends on families being genuinely invested in and embedded within the school community.

When a meaningful portion of your family base is partially opted out, that proposition becomes harder to deliver and defend. Not because the school is doing anything wrong, but because the conditions that made it work are eroding at the edges.

Why the Value Proposition Is Under More Pressure Than It Looks

Here is what makes Bogost's observation so useful as a frame.

He wasn't describing a sudden collapse. He was describing a slow erosion that institutions didn't notice because everything still looked fine on the surface. Enrollment was holding. Families were showing up. The argument was being made. The crisis wasn't visible until the model started cracking.

Independent schools are in a version of that moment right now. Most schools are not in crisis. But the conditions that made the traditional value proposition easy to sustain are shifting in ways that are hard to measure in real time.

Tuition keeps rising. Families are increasingly building their own educational pathways. Community, one of the great differentiators of independent school education, is something families can increasingly replicate or approximate outside the school. And the ROI question, once something families asked quietly, is now something they ask directly.

The schools that will come through this period well are not the ones that work harder to make the old argument. They are the ones that honestly assess where their value proposition is strong, where it is soft, and what it would take to make it undeniable.

That is a strategy question as much as a communications question.

What "Making the Value Proposition Undeniable" Actually Requires

This is where I see many schools get stuck.

The instinct is to work on marketing: update the website, refresh the messaging, and tell better stories about community and outcomes. That work has value. But it treats the symptom, not the condition.

Making the value proposition undeniable requires two things that are harder than messaging.

First, you have to know what is actually distinctive about the experience your school delivers, not what you wish were distinctive, not what was distinctive ten years ago, but what families experience as genuinely irreplaceable right now. That requires honest listening, not just to families who renew every year, but to families who left, families who chose not to enroll, and families who are enrolled but increasingly supplementing around you.

Second, you have to align the school's resources, programming, and culture to deliver and deepen that distinctiveness. This is where strategy and operations connect. If community is your differentiator, what are you investing in to make your community stronger, more integrated, and harder to replicate? If outcomes are your differentiator, what are you doing to make those outcomes more visible, more credible, and more consistently delivered?

Neither of those is a marketing problem. Both are leadership and business-model problems.

A Practical Exercise for Your Leadership Team

Here's where I'd start if I were sitting down with a leadership team this month.

Set aside 30 minutes in your next meeting. Ask everyone to come prepared with one observation about how family engagement has changed over the last three to five years, specifically around community, extracurriculars, or how families talk about the school's value.

Not a polished analysis. One honest observation.

Put them on the table. Then sit with this question together:

Is our value proposition getting stronger in the minds of families, or are we assuming it is?

Not stronger in your own minds. In theirs.

If the answer is "we're not sure," that is useful data. It means you don't have a strong enough signal yet, and you should get one. Surveys, exit interviews, and honest conversations with current families who are supplementing around you will tell you more than your enrollment numbers alone.

If the answer is "we think it's holding," dig one level deeper. What would it look like if it were softening but not yet visible in retention? That is the question Bogost was really asking about higher ed, and it is worth asking here.

If the answer is "we know it's under pressure," then you are ahead of most of your peers. The schools that are working on this question now, before it becomes a retention and enrollment problem, are the ones that will come through the next decade in a position of strength.

The Opportunity in This Moment

I want to be clear about something.

I am not suggesting independent schools are in trouble. I work with schools across the country, and the depth of what these institutions deliver is real. The relationships, the culture, the quality of teaching, the intentionality of the experience- these things matter in hard ways to replicate anywhere else.

The opportunity is not in defending that. It is in making it impossible to overlook.

That starts with being honest about where the gaps are between what you deliver and what families perceive and value. It continues with leadership teams that are willing to look at the business model and the value proposition together, not as separate conversations, but as one.

The schools doing that work right now are not in crisis mode. They are in strategy mode. And that is exactly where you want to be.