Towering, Hogwarts-style academic buildings. Carefree young students posing with generic textbooks in their dorm rooms or throwing a Frisbee on the lawn. Racially balanced study groups composed of stunningly attractive students who may not actually be students at all.

Those are the types of stock images that news organizations, policymakers, education and research groups, and institutions often use to visually represent what higher education looks like.

“They have a very specific look and feel,” said Brandon Protas, interim vice president of alliance and engagement, research and innovation at the higher education advocacy group Complete College America. “Students are often posed, looking directly into the camera, and the racial makeup is very intentional.”

While they may provide organizations with quick options to accompany stories, reports, presentations and campaigns, such photos don’t always represent what college life actually looks like on a particular campus. Portas said they can also reinforce misconceptions about higher education, including the widespread notion that it’s only an option for recent high school graduates who can afford to attend a pricey, residential, four-year institution.

Although attending college isn’t without cost, many institutions—especially those rarely pictured in the stock photos that run alongside education-related media—are more affordable than the general public may believe. According to a recent survey from Strada, 77 percent of respondents said college is unaffordable, and the majority significantly overestimated how much it costs.

“When people are saying college is too expensive, they’re probably not thinking about community colleges or states that offer free tuition programs. They’re thinking of really expensive, elite colleges, which aren’t the types of colleges most students are attending,” Protas said. “We want to change how people are seeing and understanding higher education.”

That’s why CCA created the new Complete College Photo Library, which launched Wednesday. The searchable photo library includes nearly 1,000 photographs of college students at a mix of institution types, including historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, community colleges, tribal colleges, and technical schools. The photos are licensed under Creative Commons and are free for media outlets, researchers and education organizations to use for noncommercial purposes.

“We took authentic photos of students, faculty and staff on-site to show the reality of students’ lived experiences,” Protas said. “If we can make this the go-to source that people look at first, then that can slowly influence the ecosystem.”

The library, which is an ongoing project that will be updated with additional images, features photos from seven different campuses across the country, including Bergen Community College, the College of Northern New Mexico, the College of Southern Nevada, Salish Kootenai College, Pasadena City College, Tougaloo College and the University of Indianapolis. At each one, photographer Allison Shelley captured images of actual college students as they balanced their coursework with social lives, jobs and family responsibilities.

Those artistic choices were meant to reflect the reality that for many college students, school is just one part of life. An estimated 20 percent of students are caregivers or parents, while learners over the age of 25 make up about one-third of all postsecondary students.

The collection includes shots of students sitting in traditional lecture halls, meeting with their advisers, playing chess, walking to class, reading to their children and getting hands-on training in a variety of different technical fields.

CCA’s selection of those institutions was designed to reflect a cross-section of geographic locations and institution types.

And the types of institutions students attend also varies: More than 40 percent attend community colleges, which enroll higher numbers of Black and Hispanic students compared to other institutions. Moreover, HBCUs enroll 10 percent of all Black students in the United States, while HSIs enroll more than 65 percent of all Hispanic undergraduates.

In addition to widening representation of institution types and student experiences, CCA’s project could also provide a model for how the higher education sector should portray itself during a moment of political and public scrutiny, said Nathan Willers, director of internal communications at the University of Denver, whose research has focused on authenticity in higher education marketing.

“For a lot of institutions that have limited creative resources, they may be going to something like Shutterstock because they don’t have a lot of other options,” he said. A model like CCA’s library, however, shows how colleges can prioritize using photos that “look like real students in a real classroom with levels of diversity that are appropriate to the institution.”

Over the past decade, colleges have made a dramatic swing from clamoring to portray themselves as bastions of racial and ethnic diversity—some have even been caught doctoring photos to create such an illusions—to dismantling their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to comply with President Trump’s recent orders to root out any mention of DEI in education.

When it comes to promoting a commitment to diversity and inclusion nowadays, “we really have to show and not tell, for better or worse,” Willers said. “This kind of a project helps inform institutions on how to show that effectively.”