How AI is reshaping graduate enrollment

I spend most of my time thinking about how to help universities generate more revenue—often through adult, graduate, and online program growth—and recently, it feels like much of my day involves discussing (and using) AI.

I’m not the only one. More than half of graduate enrollment leaders say they are experimenting with AI, but rarely do they say they have the system needed to integrate AI fully into their recruitment and enrollment practices. At EAB, we’ve been testing, and helping our Adult Learner Recruitment partners stay ahead of the curve and use AI to help find and enroll more students.

This blog post explores three areas where we see especially high potential for AI in graduate enrollment marketing: search, outreach, and real-time engagement.

Use case #1: Search enhancements to improve visibility

The student search process is changing, and fast. Sure, traditional search engine optimization (SEO) still matters. But if you stop there, you’re missing the fact that one in four Gen Z students are already using AI in their college search.

AI summaries like AEO (answer engine optimization) and Google’s “AI Overviews” are making it easy for AI tools and search engines to find and understand your online content—and reshaping how students discover programs. Instead of clicking through .edu sites to compare program options, student see synthesized answers drawn from across the web in AI-generated summaries. That creates both risks and opportunities for your enrollment pipeline:

• Risk: With the rise of AI-generated summaries, students are getting the answers they need without ever leaving search platforms. If your content isn’t visible in AI search tools, it’s invisible to prospects—who now apply to just 3.79 schools on average.
• Opportunity: Institutions that audit and strengthen their digital presence increase their chances of appearing in AI-driven search responses, creating more opportunities for prospective students to find and consider your programs.

It’s one thing to say you’re doing SEO, it’s another to actually know if students can find you when they type their questions into Google—or, increasingly, into ChatGPT. That’s where our Search Visibility Audit can help. Our analysts look at both traditional and AI-based search visibility, identify gaps, and recommend steps to boost relevance. This includes everything from technical SEO fixes to content strategy—ensuring program pages are structured to answer student questions clearly, highlight faculty expertise, and signal authority in the field.

In this era of AI search, content matters more than ever. Universities need to move from passively warehousing information on their websites to creating content that AI tools can find, trust, and prioritize.

Use case #2: Hyper-personalized outreach

It feels like just yesterday that I was talking with enrollment leaders who wanted to “customize” outreach by addressing prospect students by name in the subject line of emails. Fast forward to today, and customization is a thing of the past. Now, it’s all about “hyper-personalization.” The same way that my wife and I expect UberEats to anticipate our weekly dinner needs (we will want a large pizza with banana peppers and sausages on Fridays, and green curry with chicken on Sundays), prospective students expect universities to meet them where they are. This is what they get from their favorite brands—and it’s what they expect from you, too. In fact, 93% of surveyed students say personalized outreach would make them more likely to consider a school.

See How Hyper-Personalized Outreach Supports Northeastern’s Graduate Enrollment Goals

That’s the promise of hyper-personalization. Instead of using a “set-it and forget-it” drip campaign with generic messaging on a pre-determined schedule, schools can use AI to help generate the right content, in the right tone, with the right imagery, at the right time. Take, for example, a student who visited the engineering building during a virtual tour. They might receive a follow-up email highlighting faculty research and alumni outcomes in mechanical engineering. Meanwhile, a potential applicant who asks a chatbot about scholarship deadlines could receive a reminder message ahead of the deadline with a tailored link to the application form.

These aren’t abstract scenarios. In pilot tests with EAB partners, hyper-personalized campaigns have produced promising lifts in email engagement. The key is orchestration. Achieving personalization at scale requires connecting data, content, and campaign logic across systems. EAB’s integrated marketing ecosystem is built to do just that—ingesting behavioral and demographic data, then orchestrating personalized outreach across email, text, social, and direct mail. The result is that every student’s enrollment journey feels like a one-on-one conversation, even when schools are engaging with thousands of prospects simultaneously.

Use case #3: Real-time engagement through chatbots

Even the best marketing strategy will fall short if students can’t get quick answers to their questions. In a recent conversation with a graduate enrollment leader, they shared that 75% of their student queries occur outside of normal business hours—and many of these questions could be answered with better information available on their website.

As I’m sure you know all too well, keeping students engaged every minute they are on your website is critical. EAB’s new AI Chat Agent is designed specifically for higher ed. It aims to minimize funnel leak by answering prospects’ questions in real-time through conversational, two-way messaging, freeing up staff time to focus on the tasks that require their unique expertise. Unlike clunky bots that sound like they were programmed a decade ago (‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your question…’), our Chat Agent can ingest documents, scrape websites, and update its knowledge base dynamically. The result is a more natural, accurate, and scalable student experience.

The pace of change in AI is dizzying—every time I have a conversation with a co-worker or get my weekly round-up of AI news in my inbox, I’m hearing about a new tool or update. We’ve got teams who spend their days tracking the latest AI shifts and, more importantly, figuring out what they actually mean for student recruitment. So, when we talk about hyper-personalization, AI search audits, or AI-powered chatbots, it’s not theory. We’ve already tested them in the field.

AI won’t replace the fundamentals of your enrollment strategy, but it allows you and your team to execute those fundamentals—personalization, visibility, and responsiveness—at a level of sophistication and scale that wasn’t possible even a few years ago. For enrollment leaders willing to embrace this shift, the payoff is pretty clear: stronger applicant pools, more engaged prospects, and a student experience that actually feels student-centric.