The first time I sat in a room to build a communication flow, someone asked: "What do we want students to know?" I raised my hand and said: "shouldn't we be asking what they want to know?" Nobody had an answer. Because nobody had asked.

Most admissions websites are built for one student: the traditional freshman with college-educated parents who knows what a FAFSA is. After auditing more than 100 admissions sites, a clear pattern emerged: five student populations that are either missing entirely or handled as an afterthought, from first-gen students getting retention content instead of recruitment help to a homeschool pipeline that has doubled with almost no institutional response.

May 1 has come and gone. For a lot of enrollment teams, the class still isn't settled. Students are taking longer to commit than ever before — and the communication strategies that worked during yield season are not the ones that will move them now.

I audited nearly 40 college and university Parent & Family pages. What I found was consistent across almost all of them: a page built to check a box, not to speak to a parent.

Loss aversion — the Nobel Prize-winning insight that losses hurt twice as much as equivalent gains feel good — is reshaping how families read your financial aid package. Here's why that matters, and what you can do about it.

Every yield season, someone writes a 'Last Chance to Secure Your Spot' email. But urgency applied to an undecided student doesn't create a decision — it creates pressure.

Kentucky’s proactive admissions law is officially on the books — and it raises questions that go well beyond policy. Who’s already in your pipeline? How do you sort a new population you’ve never recruited before? And is your CRM actually ready? Here’s where to start.

Hotels solved the 'almost booked' problem years ago. Here's what enrollment teams can steal from hospitality to move students toward “yes”.

This regional public university had no real admitted student campaign. For a campus where many students would be first-generation college-goers, that silence carried real risk. The campaign Square One built drove 21.7% deposit growth year over year.

We talk about “clarity” all the time in higher ed. But clarity isn’t bold text or better branding. It’s design. It’s structure. It’s how information meets someone else’s brain. Newspaper infographics have mastered this for decades. Here’s what enrollment marketers can learn about reducing friction, guiding attention, and helping students actually understand what to do next.

After nearly two decades in higher education, I realized the biggest barrier for first-generation students is not access, it is understanding. The words we use, the tone we take, and the way we ask shape whether a student feels college is for them. The TRUST Messaging Framework — Teach, Respond, Understand, Simplify, Talk, was born from thousands of real emails and conversations. It is a tool any campus communicator can use to build clarity, compassion, and connection across

This time of year, someone is going to pull up last year's messaging and ask: are we still saying this? Before you answer, it's worth understanding the patterns that show up again and again in higher ed enrollment marketing — what makes them tempting, what they unintentionally signal, and how to make them work harder without starting over.