Spend enough time around podcasting and it’s easy to think the conversation begins and ends with celebrity hosts, YouTube strategy, advertising, and Top 100 charts. After spending two days at Higher Ed PodCon in Cleveland last week, I was reminded that some of podcasting’s most interesting work happens far from those headlines. Often, it’s about smart niches.
Podcasting is quietly flourishing across higher education. It’s a sector built not around fame, but around purpose. Most of the shows will never top Apple’s charts, yet together these shows represent one of podcasting’s fastest growing and most mission-driven communities.
Higher Ed PodCon’s Vision
Higher Ed PodCon is the brainchild of Neil McPhedran, who is the founder of Podium Podcast Co. and a talented, dedicated team who recognized that colleges and universities producing podcasts needed a place to learn from one another. Neil and much of his crew are based in Vancouver, Canada, a place where so many great podcast stories seem to originate. They created a two-day conference for the people using podcasts to advance their institutions. It is collaborative, practical and remarkably generous.
The conference brought together podcasters, producers, and storytellers to exchange ideas, share lessons, and celebrate outstanding work. I was fortunate to present there and left energized by how thoughtfully schools are using podcasting to connect with prospective and current students, alumni, faculty, and their communities.
From MIT to Goshen College
Universities have certainly produced breakout hits, including The Happiness Lab with Laurie Santos (Yale), WorkLife with Adam Grant (Wharton), Huberman Lab (Stanford Medicine), and The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway (NYU Stern). Those are the names most of us know, but they’re only the visible tip of a much larger movement.
One of the joys of the conference was seeing the breadth of institutions represented—from MIT, Wharton and NYU to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Ohio University, Clemson, Purdue and Goshen College in Indiana.
The depth is remarkable. Wharton alone produces five major institutional podcasts, before you even count influential faculty shows from Adam Grant, Jeremy Siegel and others. Brigham Young has 17 podcast titles, Cornell comes in with 16, Indiana has 11, and SUNY Oswego and William & Mary four each. Multiply that across hundreds of campuses and you begin to appreciate the scale of this world.
According to HigherEdPods, the community includes roughly 214 members, representing 293 colleges and universities and more than 1,600 podcasts. That includes 193 focused on medicine, 177 on humanities, 78 on law, and 41 on environmental studies.
A Different Scorecard
Commercial podcasting often measures success by audience scale. Universities optimize for mission: recruiting students, engaging alumni, supporting fundraising, showcasing faculty expertise, sharing research, and building community. Success is often measured by influence rather than reach.
Musonomics is a great example. Its host, Larry Miller—my NYU colleague and the longtime head of Steinhardt’s music business program—was both the inspiration and the champion for my Business of Podcasting course at NYU, helping me shape it from the beginning. Larry’s podcast explores the forces reshaping the music business.
Another is Below the Line, hosted by USC Upstate Chancellor Bennie L. Harris, uses conversations with regional leaders to raise both his profile and the university’s.
Every mature industry eventually develops media that talks about itself and higher education has clearly reached that point. There’s a distinct sub-genre of shows that are not simply promoting an institution but grappling with higher education’s own existential pressures like rising costs, shrinking enrollment pools, demographic shifts, AI, student debt, and questions about the value of a degree.
The conference also highlighted podcasting as an academic discipline. Brett Spencer, a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Podcasting Excellence at City St George’s, University of London, described the UK’s first master’s degree in Podcasting. Spencer noted the students work on professional productions with real-world organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund.
Why Liquid Content Matters Here
One reason I wanted to be at Higher Ed PodCon was its direct connection to what I teach in The Business of Podcasting at NYU. Many colleges are trying to reach Gen Z students whose media habits bear little resemblance to traditional content discovery. Gen Z finds ideas, personalities, and communities across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and an ever-changing mix of platforms.
That is why Neil and his team wanted liquid content to be part of the conversation. Today, a podcast isn’t simply an audio program distributed through an RSS feed. Its ideas move across platforms—in full episodes, video, clips, posts and conversations—meeting audiences wherever they are. For university podcasters, this is not an abstract trend. It’s central to finding and connecting with the people they most want to reach.
Let’s be honest, not every university podcast is riveting. Many are highly specialized by design. But what impressed me wasn’t every individual show. It was the sophistication of the people creating them.
Many don’t come from traditional media backgrounds, yet they think like media professionals. They understand audience, storytelling, distribution, marketing, and, increasingly, video.
The Lesson
Similar approaches to podcasting are emerging in healthcare, museums, nonprofits, foundations, and government organizations. Like higher education, they’re using podcasting not simply to attract audiences, but to strengthen relationships, share expertise, and advance their missions.
That’s why I found Higher Ed PodCon so encouraging. It wasn’t a conference about chasing charts or celebrity. It was about organizations using podcasting intentionally and getting smarter together.
The healthiest parts of podcasting aren’t always the loudest. They’re often the ones focused less on viral moments and more on creating value for a specific audience. Those shows may never dominate the charts. But they could influence the future of the medium in ways the charts never measure.
Sometimes the most interesting developments in podcasting aren’t happening where the spotlight is brightest.
