Writing and Insights

  • The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest #72

    The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest Your roundup of the best content and thought leadership for higher ed marketing and enrollment. This is issue is sponsored by Manaferra. Is AI recommending your school? Manaferra AI Index is a FREE platform that lets you instantly check your institution’s performance in AI Search. Go to AI.manaferra.com, search for…

  • Everyone Has an Opinion on Higher Education Marketing. That’s Not Going to Change.

    If you work in higher education marketing, you’ve experienced it. A faculty member emails with a headline they think would work better. A vice president has opinions about the homepage. A board member suggests a new logo. Someone who hasn’t spoken to a prospective student in ten years is convinced they know exactly what Gen…

  • The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest #71

    The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest Your roundup of the best content and thought leadership for higher ed marketing and enrollment. This issue is sponsored by Net Natives, producers of the Higher Education Marketing Survey (HEMS). his annual global study, created in partnership with U.S. News & World Report, is the leading benchmark for CMOs, Marketing…

  • The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest #70

    The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest Your roundup of the best content and thought leadership for higher ed marketing and enrollment. This issue is sponsored by Net Natives, now part of EducationDynamics. They surveyed 1,500 US student prospects across every state to find out exactly who owns their attention and who they trust in a polarized…

  • The College Search Doesn’t Look Like a Funnel Anymore

    Awareness to Inquiry to Visit to Application to Enrollment. Sigh. The good ol’ days. We didn’t know how good we had it! What’s not to love about simple, predictable and easy to put on your board slide deck? Today’s students move through the college search process very differently. They may discover a college on Instagram,…

  • The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest #69

    The Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest Your roundup of the best content and thought leadership for higher ed marketing and enrollment. This issue is sponsored by Net Natives, producers of the Higher Education Marketing Survey (HEMS). his annual global study, created in partnership with U.S. News & World Report, is the leading benchmark for CMOs, Marketing…

  • The First Step to Being Student-Centered: Aligning Your Goals with Theirs

    Here’s a question most higher ed marketing teams rarely ask first: What does success look like for our students? Not for our enrollment numbers. Not for our campaign dashboards. For our students. Putting student success at the front of the room before institutional metrics  is what separates truly student-centered marketing from marketing that merely claims…

  • Why didn’t higher education as an industry fully see the perception challenges coming? 

    Lungile Tshuma and Tim Brandt asked me this yesterday during an interview for their Architects of Belonging series. It’s a good question. I didn’t have a great answer other than perhaps we weren’t staying in tune enough with the audience we were serving. The truth is that society has come to view higher education less…

  • A Rant About Direct Admissions

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the The Chronicle of Higher Education piece on Hampshire College by Taylor Swaak. Not because Hampshire’s situation is unique, but because it highlights a mistake we’re still making across the industry: treating Direct Admissions like “real” admissions. It’s not. Direct Admissions is inquiry generation not an admissions process. Full…