‘The Trust Agenda’ sets the mission. Art schools have the methods.

When the American Association of Colleges and Universities released “The Trust Agenda” in June 2026, it traded defense for a plan. Rather than questioning eroding public confidence, AAC&U looked at what is happening inside higher education and offered five concrete strategies to earn trust back.

The agenda is on the right track, but it has left open the question that every college president has to answer: what, specifically, do we need to change?

I’d like to offer a starting point. I operate the country’s oldest independent, continuous degree-granting art and design college, where students are trained in exactly the capacities this moment rewards: creativity, design thinking, a habit of prototyping and revising, comfort working in ambiguity, and the business fluency to turn an idea into a livelihood.

These skills are the material of an AI-proof creative economy.

Embedding ‘The Trust Agenda’

Community engagement is the AAC&U pillar embedded in our coursework. Our students at the Maryland Institute College of Art spend semesters working on community problems like pedestrian safety, public health, food security, and environmental restoration alongside the residents, city agencies, clinicians, and nonprofits living with them.

The method is a disciplined approach to human-centered design: interview the people involved, observe how they actually live, build rough prototypes, test them in a real-world setting, and throw out the first idea when it proves wrong. The results compound into ventures that are both humane and commercial.

One recent graduate turns harmful algae blooms from the Chesapeake Bay into ceramic glaze, bringing awareness to an environmental problem while making something both functional and beautiful. Universities stepping up to solve problems in public is the most persuasive trust-building exercise an institution can undertake.

Then there’s the work of building human judgment: the capability that the AAC&U’s “accelerating innovation” pillar depends on. Art and design colleges approach this via the studio critique.

A student pins up her work and defends it to a room of peers and faculty who offer feedback. Then she revises and does it again, week after week, for years.

Strip away the easels, and it’s a repeatable method for teaching leaders to take a position, own it under scrutiny, and adapt without falling apart. Students learn early that a bad first draft isn’t a verdict but a starting point, the single healthiest relationship with failure any graduate can carry into the workforce.

Most degrees hope students absorb that resilience somewhere between lecture and final exam. Art schools drill it on purpose, just like any program could.

Circling back to art and design

This brings me to the pillar higher ed struggles with most: telling a clear story about the opportunity and economic mobility a degree provides.

In a recent LinkedIn analysis of the most versatile college majors, reported by Forbes, visual and performing arts ranked second, with 68% of recent graduates landing jobs beyond their original field, ahead of business, computer science, and engineering. Versatility equals mobility in an economy shifting underfoot.

The tired caricature of the unemployable art major is both misguided and wrong. Our degree is, in fact, one of the most adaptable credentials a student can hold, because it educates students in judgment, creativity, design thinking, and prototyping and revising, rather than a single, narrow skill.

That adaptability can be taught on purpose. Any student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in any major, can take a five-course sequence in creative entrepreneurship: budgeting, contracts, grant writing, the actual mechanics of turning a skill into a livelihood.

One of our faculty members, Stephen Rueff, describes the goal as giving artists the language of business so they can advocate for their own ideas. His signature course asks students to map probable, possible, and preferred futures, then build a path toward the one they want.

It’s a discipline any campus could adopt: teaching graduates not just to enter the economy, but to imagine their place in one that doesn’t fully exist yet.

To be clear, this is not a pitch for art school, but rather a request that higher education look hard at methods it has long dismissed as decorative. Public trust in higher education will be restored when communities and employers see our students tackling hard problems that require teamwork, judgment, and entrepreneurial thinking to solve.

For decades, many have held the opinion that what art and design schools teach is peripheral to the economy. But today, the serious business of the economy has now circled back to art and design schools, which have never stopped teaching.

The image above was created by AI.