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.

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”.

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.

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.

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

Financial aid should open doors, not close them. But for many first-generation families, aid letters, portals, and payment plans read like a foreign language. This post unpacks why the money conversation is so confusing, how that confusion erodes trust, and what colleges can do to make financial aid communication clear, consistent, and genuinely first-gen friendly.

Everyone talks about A/B testing, but most enrollment teams save it for the highest-stakes moments. That’s backwards. Incomplete applicants are the perfect place to test voice, content, and conversion strategy. Here’s how to turn this overlooked segment into your most actionable enrollment lab.

After a year of secret shopping as a student and parent, I uncovered what most colleges get wrong about text messaging. Generic, one-off blasts don’t build trust—thoughtful, timely, personalized texts do. In this episode, we explore what works, what doesn’t, and how to make SMS a real relationship builder.

This year, I gave my cell number to 26 colleges as part of my annual secret shopping experiment. The results? 77% texted me as a student, but none texted me as a parent. In this blog, I share real examples of what colleges are sending, what’s working (and what’s not), and simple rewrites that turn one-way announcements into real conversations.

Instead of urgency, what if colleges used encouragement to help students complete applications? A dedicated “Momentum Week” could work.