The Enrollment Conversation Most Universities Are Avoiding

I spent fifteen years inside admissions offices — at SIU, at Florida A&M, and now at Vanderbilt. In that time I’ve watched the enrollment landscape shift in ways most institutions still aren’t ready to talk about.

The shift isn’t the demographic cliff, though that’s real. It isn’t the FAFSA debacle, though that hurt. It isn’t even AI-generated essays, though that conversation is overdue. The shift is something deeper: the students you’re trying to enroll have fundamentally different expectations about how an institution should communicate with them, and most enrollment offices are still operating on a 2015 playbook.

What’s actually changing

First-generation students aren’t waiting for your viewbook. They’re researching you on TikTok before they’re researching you on your website. They’re asking ChatGPT what the difference is between you and your peer institutions. They’re reading Reddit threads from current students before they’re reading your prospective student emails.

Meanwhile, most admissions offices I work with are still measuring success in inquiry-to-applicant conversion rates from email funnels that were designed when “personalization” meant inserting a first name into a template.

The harder conversation

The harder conversation is about who’s actually doing the work. Recruitment is increasingly relational, and most offices have spent the last decade reducing relational labor in favor of CRM efficiency. The result is funnels that feel cold to exactly the students you’re trying to attract — first-gen students, students of color, students from under-resourced high schools who are already wondering whether they belong at your institution.

Fixing this is not a technology problem. It’s an organizational design problem. Who has authority to invest in what kinds of outreach? Who decides which segments get the human touch and which get the automated follow-up? Who’s measuring whether your DEI commitments are showing up in the way prospective students actually experience your office?

What I bring to this work

I sit inside enrollment leadership at a top-25 university every day. I led admissions operations at an HBCU. I built recruitment programs from inside the most diverse public university in Illinois. I’m not a consultant who reads the trade publications — I’m one of the practitioners writing the playbook.

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