Why students pick the schools they do, part 2: The institutional personas shaping students’ college choices

In part one of this series, we explored how expected and unexpected traits—ranging from affordability to campus culture and even regional politics—shape student interest. Now, we’ll take that analysis further by introducing a new taxonomy of schools: nine institutional personas. Each persona represents a distinct combination of traits that influence student attraction. This framework goes beyond traditional segmentation methods (e.g., size, sector, or selectivity) to offer actionable insights that enrollment leaders can use to benchmark their strengths and refine their strategies.

In this blog post, we’ll explore one persona as an example, illustrating how enrollment leaders can use this framework to benchmark against peers, identify regional risks and opportunities, as well as assess competitive threats from other personas.

How to Use the Personas

Step 1: Find your Institutional Persona

To start, you’ll need to identify the persona that best fits your school. Our full report provides detailed profiles of all nine personas, but let’s focus on one as an example: the Quintessential and Accessible College.

Below is a general characterization of schools in this persona, along with some vital statistics for these institutions, including their size, acceptance rate, and so on. You can see that these schools are typically smaller and less selective institutions.

The next graphic continues the profile, giving nutshell assessments of these schools with respect to the five key attractor categories that we highlighted in the previous blog post, from campus community and culture to the schools’ admissions practices. You can see below that these schools typically strike a balance across many traits, combining moderate affordability and accessibility with a strong sense of community and campus life. While their appeal is broad, they’re not without challenges, such as slower population growth in their surrounding areas.

Note that as you complete this step, you may not find a persona that matches your school exactly on each trait. That’s OK. The idea is to find the one that’s the closest fit.

Read about the hidden impact of your student recruitment and influence channels

Step 2: Benchmark against your persona peers

Once you’ve identified your persona, the next step is benchmarking. Compare your institution’s traits to the persona averages to uncover your competitive strengths and limitations.

For instance, does your school offer more majors or a higher median graduate salary than the persona average? Or, on the other hand, are you less affordable or located in a slower-growth region? This analysis allows you to identify areas to highlight in recruitment messaging or opportunities for improvement.

Step 3: Identify regional risks and opportunities

Regional variations create distinct risks and opportunities, and the persona framework helps uncover these opportunities by highlighting how a persona’s traits vary geographically. While significant cross-regional recruitment may be more achievable for some personas than others, schools often have more potential to expand their reach than they assume.

The table below shows various attractor stats for “Quintessential and Accessible” schools, by region. As you can see, there’s considerable variation.

Take the “Quintessential and Accessible Colleges” in the West, for example. Compared to other regions, these schools tend to cost less, offer more majors, and are in dynamic, high-growth locales. Schools in this region can use these advantages to attract students from other regions—or guard against losing them to regional competitors.

Watch the on-demand webinar: Why Students Pick the Schools They Do

Step 4: Assess risks and opportunities in other personas

Finally, while most competition exists within any one persona, it is also important to look beyond your persona to find adjacent or rival personas that might pose competitive threats—or offer inspiration.

For example, “Inclusive Path to Opportunity Colleges” share many similarities with “Quintessential and Accessible Colleges.” In fact, as noted in the graphic below, the two are identical in many traditional respects: both are small, less selective, and above average in terms of the percentage of their students who are low-income and first-gen.

That said, if you look at the charts below, which compare these two personas across the five categories of traits that are key to student appeal, we can see that they do have crucial differences.

Both are highly accessible, but the “Inclusive Path” schools score better on affordability and on their surrounding areas, while the “Quintessential” schools offer a more robust campus life and a richer array of academic offerings. Understanding these differences enables schools to tailor their recruitment messages to highlight their unique value when competing across personas.