If you’re one of the many colleges struggling with enrollment, you’re likely facing not one but three core problems. And they range from bad to worse to worst.
But before I explain, a confession: I finally got an ant tattoo.
Why?
Because no one listens to me.
Ever seen Bee Movie? That oddball animated film with Jerry Seinfeld as Barry B. Benson? There’s a moment when Barry, exasperated that no one’s paying attention to his story, blurts out, “I can say anything I want right now. I’m gonna get an ant tattoo!”
Absurd? Sure. But also weirdly relatable. Especially in higher ed, where being unheard often feels like the default. So whether you’re listening now or not—I’ll proceed anyway.
Your First Problem (The Bad One)
Your first problem is that you’ve been fixated on the wrong problems.
You’ve spent enormous amounts of time, money, and energy chasing distractions—fictional rabbits, if you will—around the enrollment track, lap after lap, while the real issues went unaddressed.
It wasn’t your data or your data analysis—even though it’s deeply ironic that institutions that teach research, analytics, and critical thinking are often led by administrators seemingly untrained in any of them. (The prevalence of logical fallacies is staggering.)
It wasn’t your student search strategy or your name-buying process. You’ve spent countless hours tweaking it, expanding it, contracting it, changing vendors, adding geocoding, and burning through your budget in the process.
It wasn’t your website. Not the design, the navigation, nor the SEO. It wasn’t the presence or lack of an “Apply Now” button on your front page. And no, students didn’t abandon your school because they couldn’t easily navigate to the major of their choosing.
It wasn’t your search engine marketing.
It wasn’t your extensive email communication flow.
It wasn’t your customized publications, emails, and videos.
It wasn’t your telemarketing and text messaging plan.
It wasn’t your fonts, or your colors, or your logo, or your tagline, or your brand style guide.
It wasn’t your customer relationship management system.
It wasn’t your content management system.
It wasn’t your choice of social media platforms or your billboards or digital advertising buys.
It wasn’t your admission representatives or your student tour guides.
It wasn’t the consultants you employed to audit your admission department and recruitment activities.
It wasn’t your campus visit opportunities.
It wasn’t your application—however short or simplified you made it to increase your inquiry-to-app conversion.
It wasn’t your use of AI (though it’s surely a better writer than I and a great companion for writing this piece).
These aren’t the reasons your enrollment is flatlining. They’re tools, not solutions. You’ve been focused on tactics instead of inspired strategies.
Your Second Problem (It’s Worse)
While you’ve been committing your limited resources to the tactical activities above, you’ve missed the real problem: Your product (including place and people), packaging, promotion, and price are not nearly attractive enough, and that is wreaking havoc on your efforts to stand out in an overcrowded higher education market.
Product
Your college is special because the college experience is special. But the hard truth is this: your college isn’t exceptionally special. Not in a way that stands out. You offer what nearly every other college offers—happy students, supportive faculty, and graduates who go on to do well. You—and every other college—offer academics, athletics, internships, study abroad, research opportunities, residence halls, a campus coffee shop, time-honored traditions, and so on.
What you lack is a truly distinctive product—programs, experiences, or characteristics that are both rare and powerfully appealing. Until you have that, you’re just another school in a crowded field.
Packaging
The way you package your offerings is just as uninspired as the offerings themselves. If it’s hard to differentiate on product alone, then the bold move is to repackage it in a way that catches the eye of an otherwise indifferent audience.
Take this example: years ago, I was conversing with an academic dean at a college that had decided to phase out its traditional January Term (J-Term) and instead expand summer opportunities. But with no real leadership around positioning, the branding defaulted to “May Term”—a generic label borrowed from other institutions, though most of the programs didn’t start or end in May.
I proposed that the college package these engaged summer learning experiences as the [College Name] Summer Experience—a unified platform that could include internships, research opportunities, and global study programs. It had the potential to feel fresh, intentional, and expansive.
Instead, the dean opted for Summer Term—a term even more generic than May Term. When I questioned it, I was told, with a touch of academic disdain, “… after all, we are an educational institution.”
That’s the problem. Summer Term sounds like required or remedial classes in overheated classrooms—nothing aspirational, nothing distinctive, nothing memorable. And certainly nothing that would excite a prospective student or set the college apart.
Promotion
You are gawd-awful boring. And the people making the marketing decisions have no real understanding of the challenges at the top of the enrollment funnel. They haven’t sat across from prospective students and families, walked the halls of high schools, built relationships with counselors, or stood for hours at college fairs watching disinterested students drift past on their way to the big-name booths—flagship universities and highly ranked, well-endowed colleges.
Yet somehow, they’re brimming with confidence about how things should be done. “If only admission did a better job of telling our story,” they say … without ever asking whether the story is worth telling.
A vice president once argued that marketing should report to advancement because, as he put it, “We’re the only office that works with an external audience.” The irony, of course, is that advancement deals almost exclusively with loyal alumni—the most internal of external audiences. Admissions, meanwhile, is out there every day trying to capture the attention of people who don’t know you, don’t care about you, and may never even look your way.
If your story isn’t truly distinctive, then how you tell it had better be. You need metaphor, humor, surprise, imagination—anything that breaks through the noise and makes the indifferent care, even for a moment.
(Note: A vice president once told me that the president’s cabinet members “don’t like your stuff.” I’ll hold on to that as a compliment and contrast it with the praise I received from prospective students, parents, and high school counselors. A large and well-known higher education vendor even passed one of my brochures around the company as an example of a great marketing piece.)
Price
Without the other three differentiators, you’re left competing on price—and that’s a losing game. No new discount matrix, tuition reset, or rebranded scholarship will fix the problem. No one cares what your college costs if they’re not interested in it to begin with. And even if they are interested, you probably can’t afford to lower the price enough to convert that interest into real commitment.
Your Third Problem (It’s the Worst )
It might be too late.
You saw the demographic cliff coming. Everyone did. And yet your enrollment struggles began before the downturn. Still, your confidence—and your unshakable belief in the high quality of your product—led you to dismiss the warnings.
You hired the new VP of enrollment, and then the new VP of marketing. Then you replaced them. And then you replaced those replacements. They wrangled a bigger marketing budget, swapped vendors, tested new tactics, added billboards, removed billboards, and redesigned the website (again).
None of it worked. You’ve now settled into the “new normal enrollment,” which might soon be replaced by the “even newer normal enrollment.”
Why?
Because none of those were the real problem.
The real problem—the one you’ve avoided all along—is that your product, packaging, promotion, and price simply aren’t compelling enough to attract students. And no amount of tactical shuffling can cover for that.
So What Now?
If you’ve made it this far, either you’re listening—or you’ve got an ant tattoo, too. So here’s what to do about it:
1. Rethink Your Product
Stop assuming your core offering is good enough. Conduct a brutally honest audit of your academic programs, student experiences, outcomes, and differentiators. What do you offer that’s:
- Rare?
- High-value?
- Undeniably attractive?
If the answer is “not much,” invest in creating or elevating programs that are. That might mean launching a high-demand academic pathway, embedding guaranteed internships (see Northeastern University, where my daughter is a senior, for something extraordinary), or building unique experiential learning that aligns with what students and employers care about.
2. Repackage with Intention
If your product can’t be radically different, then the packaging must be. Design matters. So does naming, framing, and storytelling. Your goal is to make even familiar things feel new, intentional, and impossible to ignore.
Ask these questions:
- Does this offering look and sound exciting?
- Would a 17-year-old care?
- Would a parent get it without explanation?
- If not, start over. Use the language of possibility, not process.
- Quit packaging yourself as an academic institution. You are so much more than that! Read the Atlantic article, “America will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience.”
3. Tell a Story Worth Hearing
Your promotion isn’t failing because you don’t have good people—it’s failing because you’re playing it safe. Safe is invisible. You think promotion is about persuading and informing, when it’s initially and most importantly about inspiring and engaging.
Effective marketing in higher ed requires:
- Bold storytelling
- Real emotion
- Humor (yes, humor!) and metaphor
- Visual punch (Ogilvy on Advertising is still relevant)
- And enough surprise to earn a second look (that’s a big and growing challenge)
- Invest in people who know how to reach an indifferent audience—marketers who think like creatives, not committee chairs. And empower them to take smart risks.
You need to create a buzz. Buzz marketing matters because it grabs attention in a way traditional strategies often can’t. Like Barry in Bee Movie, who had to do something unexpected to be noticed, colleges must break out of their predictable patterns. In a crowded market, safe and standard won’t generate interest—or applications. Buzz marketing creates curiosity, conversation, and shareability. It turns a college from just another booth at the fair into something people are compelled to talk about.
You need your hive—your community—spreading the word like pollen. Dig deeper into your incoming class to uncover what truly sparked their interest. How did they first hear about you? What made them care enough to learn more? Without the built-in advantage of brand recognition (flagship universities) or brand reputation (highly ranked colleges), genuine interest likely began with a personal connection. While your CRM may point to “first source” or “first inquiry,” don’t over-credit your search campaigns or email blasts. The spark almost always comes from something more human—word-of-mouth, a trusted recommendation, or a meaningful experience.
4. Compete on Price and Value—But Do It Strategically
Affordability matters, especially for cost-conscious students and families navigating a crowded, overpriced market. If your price point is a strength, absolutely make it known. But don’t let discounting be your only move. Price may open the door, but value closes the deal. Show prospective students what they get for that price: meaningful academic and personal growth, strong outcomes, access to opportunity, and a community they want to join. Yes, cost comparisons have a place—but only after you’ve made someone care enough to compare. So lead with a compelling reason to look closer, then reinforce your case with affordability that feels like a smart investment.
See my Think Again publication for an example of a brochure that speaks to affordability and value.
5. Build a Culture of Market Awareness
Your leadership team must stay connected to what’s actually happening at the top of the funnel.
That means:
- Reading inquiry emails.
- Attending high school visits and college fairs.
- Listening to focus groups with students who didn’t enroll.
- Talking to admissions counselors about what they’re hearing.
- Getting outside your echo chamber.
- Come to the conversation with modesty and recognize the expertise of your front-line employees.
6. Be Urgent, But Strategic
No, you can’t fix this overnight. But you also can’t afford another year of surface-level changes and rearranged org charts.
Start with these questions:
- What college would we want to attend if we were 17?
- What’s one bold move we could make this year to shift perception?
- What would it look like if we marketed with conviction instead of consensus?
- Then move quickly. The longer you wait, the fewer options you’ll have.
Final Thoughts
The enrollment cliff isn’t just a demographic dip—it’s an extinction event for institutions that lack brand recognition, brand reputation, and large endowments, and refuse to adapt. But for those willing to change, differentiate, and market with courage, there could still be hope.
Begin by watching the Bee Movie. Yes, really. Barry B. Benson offers valuable lessons about resilience and creative problem-solving in the face of seemingly impossible odds. He challenged assumptions, refused to accept “that’s just how things are,” questioned authority, broke rules when necessary, and found innovative solutions by thinking outside conventional boundaries.
When everyone told Barry that bees couldn’t talk to humans, he talked anyway. When they said bees couldn’t sue humans, he sued anyway. When they said the natural order couldn’t be changed, he changed it anyway.
Most importantly, Barry understood that extinction isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice. The choice to keep doing what isn’t working. The choice to play it safe when safety itself has become dangerous. The choice to remain comfortable while the world changes around you.
Your college’s survival depends on making different choices. The question is: will you make them in time?