With more students applying to universities than ever before, schools are vying to attract the best students. As a result, many universities are embracing the authentic, entertaining, and educational medium of podcasting to recruit new students, retain current ones, entice alumni to donate, and spotlight their faculty’s research. Podcasting for universities can help build a school’s reputation even if listeners aren’t directly interested in attending or donating.

As a university, you have a major advantage over other podcasters. Most podcasts struggle to find experts to feature on their show, but your university has dozens of professionals available at your fingertips.

In addition, professors must to promote their work and interact with the community, so why not encourage them to fulfill their requirements in a fun, engaging, and evergreen format?

Anyway you slice it, podcasting benefits universities. But should you start your own podcast, or get your professors to guest on others? Let’s dig in.

Table of Contents

• How Universities Should Use Podcasts
  • Start Your Own Official Podcast
  • Examples of Official University Podcasts
• Encourage Your Professors to Start Their Own Podcasts
  • Examples of Professor-hosted Podcasts
• Book Your Experts as Guests on Other Podcasts
  • Examples of Podcast Episodes Featuring Professors as Guests
• Podcasting for Universities: How to Start
  • Making Your Own Official Podcast
  • Getting Your Experts Booked on Other Podcasts
• Final Thoughts on Podcasting for Universities

How Universities Should Use Podcasts

To get the most out of podcasting, your university should start one (or more) in-house podcasts AND book your professors as guests on non-affiliated podcasts. Here’s why.

Start Your Own Official Podcast

Starting an official university podcast benefits you twofold. First, your podcast highlights the internal developments at your university, like social events, official announcements, sports results, and your students’ extracurricular achievements.

Reminding the world of your multifaceted, lively campus attracts new students to apply, enthuses current students and alumni about their school, and builds your reputation as a stand-out university.

There are two huge caveats with this option:

First, many universities underestimate the amount of work it takes to run their own podcast, eventually leading to burnout and podfade.

Second, popularity doesn’t come overnight. It may take years for your podcast to become successful, and many university run podcasts never find their footing. For example, the average reach of this list of university-run podcasts is around 600 listeners a month, with the School’s In and UConn 360 leading the pack with 3,000 monthly listeners each.

Examples of Official University Podcasts

Rhymes With Orange by Campbell University

Every episode features a new topic related to university life, from interviewing professors, to student athletes, and even broader topics like managing stress as a student. The range of topics presents Campbell University as a diverse institution that can accommodate people of all interests and disciplines. The Rhymes with Orange podcast also reinforces the feeling of a close-knit community that comes with attending a small school.

Notre Dame Stories by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Stories draws from their field of experts to help explain current events (like the war in Ukraine), as well as explaining the history of the university. Certain episodes highlight the student body, like in this interview with 2022’s valedictorian. As well as being entertaining for their current students, Notre Dame Stories helps to cement Notre Dame’s reputation as an elite university by spotlighting their world-class experts on a weekly basis.

10 Podcasts Created By Universities

Encourage Your Professors to Start Their Own Podcasts

Highlighting your experts on your institution’s podcast is just the beginning.

The next step is to encourage professors to start their own podcasts, wherein they discuss their work at your university. 74% of listeners tune in to podcasts to learn new things, signaling a huge appetite for deep knowledge of specific topics among podcast listeners.

Imagine a high school student looking for podcasts about topics that interest them. If they come across yours and grow to love the host, they suddenly become interested in applying to your university.

Examples of Professor-hosted Podcasts

The Happiness Lab

The Happiness Lab is a podcast by Dr. Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. The podcast began as a humble extension of her popular class, “Psychology and the Good Life”. Now, The Happiness Lab has turned Dr. Santos into a celebrity in her own right, which has brought more attention to her work, and ultimately to the psychology department at Yale.

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, as well as an author of several productivity self-help books. On Deep Questions, Newport answers listener questions, boiling down years of academic research into bitesize wisdom. By positioning himself as a trusted expert, Newport has brought even more credibility to his work and to Georgetown.

11 Podcasts Hosted by Professors

Book Your Experts as Guests on Other Podcasts

Once your faculty has been on your podcast, and have started their own show, now the final piece of the puzzle is to get them booked as guests on other podcasts. We’ve written a whole article about the benefits of being a guest on other podcasts that we recommend you read, but in short, the name of the game is promotion!

By guesting on podcasts, your professor exposes their expertise to a whole new audience who may have never heard of your university. Wowed by the episode, they will continue to explore the expert’s work, including their appearance on your podcast, episodes of their own show, and their published work.

Examples of Podcast Episodes Featuring Professors as Guests

Ologies Episode: “Procyonology (RACCOONS) with Suzanne MacDonald”

Ologies is a very popular podcast where host Alie Ward interviews science experts about their area of expertise. She’s hosted hundreds of academics from various universities over the years, including Dr. Suzanne Mcdonald, a raccoon expert. Because of the specificity of her research, Dr. Mcdonald usually has a hard time promoting her work to a wider audience, but podcasts thrive in niches, giving her the perfect platform to present her work in a fun and informal way.

StarTalk Radio Episode: “Cosmic Queries – Fixing Physics with Sabine Hossenfelder”

StarTalk Radio is another popular science podcast, albeit with a more specific range of topics. Neil Degrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice interview experts about astronomy and physics. Many of these experts are working academics, like Sabine Hossenfelder, who is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.

9 Podcast Episodes Featuring Professors as Guests

Podcasting for Universities: How to Start

Making Your Own Official Podcast

We’ve written several articles about how to get started making your own podcast, including equipment, editing software, and self promotion. Podchaser is built for podcasters to grow their shows, and we’re built to help advertisers find podcasts to work with. So you’ll want to claim your podcast on Podchaser to get started on the right foot.

Read More Articles For New Podcasters

Getting Your Experts Booked on Other Podcasts

Booking your professors onto other podcasts isn’t quite as easy to do on your own. You need to find podcasts you’d like to guest on, then reach out, and hopefully record a great episode. You first have to decide if a podcast is a good fit, then you have to send dozens, perhaps hundreds of emails before landing a single guest appearance.

Final Thoughts on Podcasting for Universities

In the competitive world of higher education, universities need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
Through podcasting, universities can recruit new students, retain current ones, entice alumni to donate, and promote their faculty.

To make the most of podcasting, universities should start their own podcast to highlight student life and faculty expertise. They should also encourage their professors to host their own shows, and book their faculty as guests on other podcasts.