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.

Once institutions understand that brand, marketing, and communications need unified governance, the next question is what that should look like. Part 3 breaks down how to move the conversation from preferences and personalities to evidence, benchmarking, decision rights, and the leadership questions that reveal whether your structure is built for clarity — or just inherited complexity.

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.

If earnings become the primary measure of a degree's worth, what happens to the programs built around calling instead of compensation?

This one is for the cabinet. Every enrollment and marketing team has people on staff who know exactly what's broken. The information exists. It just doesn't travel. Summer is the window to change that — before the next cycle starts carrying the same weight the last one did.

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.

The org chart is never just the org chart. Higher ed institutions can say brand is strategic and marketing is essential, but without clear authority, access, and decision rights, the strategy is mostly decorative. This second post in the series looks at centralization, decentralization, hybrid models, and why goodwill alone cannot carry the weight of brand governance.

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

You can say you’re affordable, inclusive and supportive. But if what students see doesn’t match, they won’t believe you. That disconnect is cognitive dissonance—and it’s quietly driving students away. Here’s how enrollment marketers can align messaging, experience, and behavior to build trust and keep students engaged.

Higher ed loves a blurry line. And one of the blurriest is the line between brand and marketing. The two functions are deeply connected, but they do different jobs. Brand is how an institution becomes known for something. Marketing is how that meaning gets moved into the market. When the distinction gets fuzzy, voice fragments, campaigns drift, and the institution becomes harder to understand. This first post in the series makes the case for clarity before activation.

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.

We spend a lot of time thinking about what students are feeling during yield season. We almost never talk about what's happening to their parents — the financial fear, the grief, the midnight Google searches. That's a significant gap. And it's costing institutions deposits.

If your campus visit feels “off,” it’s probably not your tour—it’s your details. From seating layouts to waiting experiences, the smallest moments shape how students decide if they belong. Here’s how to fix them.

The best campus visits don’t happen by accident — they happen by design. In Part 2 of this series, we dive into how retail and hospitality brands use the five senses to shape emotion and memory, and how your admissions office can do the same. From scent and sound to comfort, taste, and visual identity, discover the small changes that transform your visit experience into something students feel long after they leave your campus.

In this first post of a three-part series, I share how the simple act of watching visitors enter our building changed everything about our campus visit design and why the first five minutes matter more than any tour script.