Enrollment Marketing in the Age of AI: What Comes Next?

0:00:12.5 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today, we look at new data on how students are using AI to help them learn about colleges and how those AI-generated search results inform their decisions about where to go and what to study. This stuff matters to admissions teams, and it’s forcing them to adapt the way they recruit students. It’s also forcing web teams to rethink how they present and structure information on their.edu websites. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:47.6 Madeleine Rhyneer: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Madeleine Rhyneer, and I’ve been on the podcast many times, mostly talking about the state of admission and enrollment marketing across higher ed. Like many of you, I’ve watched as artificial intelligence reshapes how we live, learn, and communicate. But what happens when AI becomes the primary way that students discover, evaluate, and choose their colleges? In this episode of Office Hours with EAB, we’re digging into our latest scenario planning on the future of college search. Rather than predicting a single outcome, this work lays out four distinct and equally plausible futures, from AI becoming the dominant force in college discovery to a student-driven backlash that elevates authenticity and human connection. I’m joined today by the lead author of that report, a favorite colleague of mine, who will unpack what we know about how students are using AI in their college exploration and application process today. And even more important for you, how institutions can prepare for future evolution even when the path ahead isn’t fully clear. Michael Koppenheffer, my friend, welcome back to Office Hours with EAB.

0:02:00.3 Michael Koppenheffer: Madeleine, it’s great to be with you today.

0:02:02.7 Madeleine Rhyneer: Awesome. Well, we can’t wait to dive in. Would you mind telling folks about your role at EAB and just a little bit about your paper? Because I think specifically what we all want to know is why this topic and why now?

0:02:16.4 Michael Koppenheffer: Certainly. So to start with, I serve as Vice President for Marketing, Innovation, and AI Strategy here at EAB in our enrollment work, which may be one of the longest titles of any of my colleagues here at EAB. But I’m not complaining because it basically means I get to focus on where the world of higher education marketing is going, what’s new, what’s next, and what matters, and what our partners and our internal teams need to do to respond. So your question, second part of your question was why this paper and why now? So I don’t think I need to convince you or any of our listeners that generative AI is a big deal. It’s changed a lot of things in today’s world already. I think what I do have particular knowledge of right now that I think underlies our work here is that student use of AI to find and choose colleges is increasing at a dizzying rate. I hate to throw numbers out so quick in our conversation, but I just can’t help it because probably nine months ago, we did a survey of high school students and asked them like, “Are you using AI as you’re exploring colleges?”

0:03:39.6 Michael Koppenheffer: About a quarter of them said they were. We did a similar survey just a number of weeks ago, and 46% of high school students said that they’re using AI as one of their primary tools for finding and choosing colleges. And that means that the landscape that we’ve all been dealing with in terms of getting students and families to be aware of colleges, helping them understand what colleges might be the right choice for them, helping guide them and support them through the process, it’s totally transformed. And so we realized that we really need to do some serious work to understand where is all this going and what should colleges and universities be doing as a result.

0:04:25.9 Madeleine Rhyneer: Well, thank you, because I think everyone is thinking about AI and trying to look into their crystal balls, which may be somewhat murky about what the future would hold. So you and your team in this work focused on four possible futures. Could you share which of these futures is already leaking into the present, and how well are universities adapting to the change?

0:04:49.9 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, well, the first thing that I actually wanted to share was why did we develop future scenarios as opposed to just trying to predict where all this is going? And the reason is that there are multiple forces that are, each of them, pretty major and that could swing the future of college search in a number of different directions. So there’s the development of the AI technology, but there’s also social norms, there’s political regulation, there is the perceived value of college and what’s happening with work and early career. A lot of things that are interconnected, but they’re all changing at once. And as a result, I actually might say that each of the scenarios that we developed has one foot in the present day, that there are things that we are seeing today that are happening that could convince you in isolation that we are moving toward one or the other of these scenarios. But I think what is so fascinating is that there are these multiple forces that are working, in some sense, at cross purposes that could lead us in very different places.

0:05:59.9 Madeleine Rhyneer: So do you want to walk us through at a high level the four scenarios? Talk us through so we can understand where each one has their foot in the present.

0:06:09.8 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, yeah, I was thinking that might be useful. So we developed these four scenarios after working with dozens and dozens of internal experts, but also enrollment leaders across the country who have been thinking deeply about some of these questions. And we came up with these four scenarios. The first one we called AI Everywhere College Search. And really what we mean by that is that you could imagine a scenario in which students all have ChatGPT-7 on their phones and they use it pretty much for everything in their life, and that includes finding a college. And so when they sit down to figure out, “Hmm, what college might be interesting to me, what fits my criteria, what could I afford?” All of this goes through the lens of a general-purpose AI companion. Very plausible, right? When you look at how behavior is changing. But then the next scenario is in some ways it is the shadow version of this scenario in which, sure, AI continues to develop, but there is political and societal restriction on the use of AI by minors. So we call it AI Limited College Search. The idea there is that for one reason or another, let’s say Congress passes some restrictive regulations about how students, how under-18 people can use AI, and that actually makes it harder for them to have AI be the primary place they go to look for colleges.

0:07:45.9 Michael Koppenheffer: But AI is still gonna be embedded in a lot of other things in their lives, but they may encounter it from a college counseling perspective more in an official capacity. And again, sounds far-fetched, maybe, but really it was just a couple weeks ago that I learned about how Australia is radically restricting social media use for kids who are under 16. It is not inconceivable that the winds of change could blow a different direction and you could see these kinds of limitations. The other two scenarios just really quickly. So we developed the scenario around what we call the AI Accelerated College Opt-Out. So what we’re imagining is that some of what we’ve begun to see around disruption of early career hiring continues further so that there’s not as clear a college-to-career pipeline, that some of the jobs that students typically got out of college are not as much of a sure thing as they were in the past. And at the same point, AI is changing learning and potentially facilitating the development of alternatives to traditional four-year degrees. And so all of that is making it harder to communicate the value of college.

0:08:56.4 Michael Koppenheffer: So that’s the third scenario. And then the fourth scenario we call the AI Saturated Flight to Authenticity. And really what we mean by that is people are getting sick of AI, right? And you could imagine a scenario in which if your presence, your communications, your marketing, your persona is too obviously AI-generated, that actually turns students and families off. And again, not that far-fetched. There’s a decent population of high school students today for whom AI is a dirty word.

0:09:30.7 Madeleine Rhyneer: So I know that you talk to enrollment leaders across the country and IT people and others. Are there any things that you have identified where you think enrollment leaders are underestimating the shift that’s happening? And given the kind of mental reframe that you probably have seen happening, that we’ve all seen happening, especially in all of our use of AI, are there things that colleges or university leadership teams need to do quickly considering how rapidly students are adopting AI in their college search?

0:10:02.4 Michael Koppenheffer: So, great question. So the number one thing that I would actually point to, which we talk about a little in our insight paper, is thinking of AI as one of your core audiences. So for many years we think, well, we’re trying to reach students and their parents or their families, but it is about reaching humans, of course. But if you think about the fact that, again, about half of American high school students are turning to AI when they’re trying to find a college, you need to care a whole lot about what the AI is saying about you. And if any of us have used AI, if you ever type in, “Is, name of college, a good school?” who knows what you’re gonna get and who knows where it’s gonna come from. And that’s because AI is drawing off of publicly available websites, but also social media, Reddit, all these different sources. And we have not really prioritized managing that kind of experience and that kind of information channel, and that’s gotta change now. And when I talk to enrollment leaders, marketing leaders, I don’t think anybody’s arguing with me. I think everyone recognizes that. But nobody really has started this work.

0:11:20.6 Madeleine Rhyneer: Yes, I agree with you. People don’t question the need to do it, but it’s just another thing to add to your to-do list institutionally. And everybody in enrollment and marketing has a pretty long to-do list already.

0:11:32.0 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, that is absolutely true. But I would say that for many years, the website, your.edu, is something that everyone knows is important, and periodically teams get funding and support to improve it or refresh it. This is the most important website project ever, I would say, because not only do you have the opportunity and imperative to make sure that your content on your website is up to date and so forth, but what you do to clean up the publicly available content about you, that is going to flow through to every AI query that someone does about you. So the payoff is higher than it’s ever been before.

0:12:16.3 Madeleine Rhyneer: Exactly. So one of the things that you identified is across all of the scenarios that you and your team created, human interaction continues to matter deeply. And why do you think human connection becomes more important and not less as AI scales?

0:12:33.6 Michael Koppenheffer: So one of the interesting things we are seeing, and I think this is a generalization you can make broadly about AI, is that AI is not replacing people. It is replacing certain tasks and creating certain opportunities that then leave space for people to do things that people do uniquely well. Among other things, the product of the four-year college is an extremely human product. You are buying into a community, you are buying into eminent faculty, you are buying into your peers. And there is not a world in which AI is going to be able to authentically make those connections and authentically represent that very human product. But by the same token, if what you really want to know is, “Is the application deadline next week?” you could ask a chatbot that, and the chatbot is probably going to give you a decent answer. And what’s more, the chatbot is going to respond to you at 11:00 PM when you are on your phone in your pajamas, whereas hopefully the admissions team is in their own pajamas enjoying a good night of rest. So I think there is a lot of place for AI tools and AI capabilities in the world of admissions, the world of enrollment and marketing.

0:13:56.5 Michael Koppenheffer: And yet there are so many places where the humanness of what we all do in higher education actually is going to be the distinguishing factor. And if anything, it is even more important.

0:14:10.8 Madeleine Rhyneer: I love that because the people really do matter in the entire recruitment relationship over time. So it’s good to hear that that continues to be a strong interest. In one of the scenarios, you actually talked about it. Imagine students actively pushing back against AI-generated content. What signals are you seeing that convince you that this isn’t just a romantic counter-narrative to AI over all of us, but is actually a plausible future that enrollment leaders need to take seriously?

0:14:43.5 Michael Koppenheffer: Well, I do love romantic counter-narratives, but I actually have some data here to back it up. So when we recently did a fairly large-scale survey of high school students about their AI usage and their AI attitudes, we asked them about their feelings with regard to AI, not just their usage patterns and their perceptions. And interestingly, the top adjective that students provided when we asked them about their AI perceptions was “skeptical.” And then after that, if I’m recalling the data right, I’m not looking at it at this moment, is then it’s “curious,” then it’s “concerned.” And if you go through the responses further and deeper, what you find is a mix of engaged and hopeful and optimistic, but then also skeptical, concerned, worried, and even suspicious. And I think that tracks with qualitative sentiment that we have seen in focus groups and verbatim notes. And I have to say, even in my own household where I have a 20-year-old daughter who yells at me every time I mention AI because she thinks that it’s evil and ruining the world, that is not an uncommon sentiment among today’s teens and young people.

0:16:00.6 Michael Koppenheffer: It’s not the prevailing one, but it’s one that we have to be aware of. And I think part of the value of these scenarios is not that this is exactly what’s going to come to pass. I think the reality is that the future is going to contain pieces of each of these phenomena. And really what we should take away from these is that we need to think about each of these directions and think about what we’re going to do to maximize the opportunities they present and manage the risks that they pose.

0:16:34.1 Madeleine Rhyneer: I think that’s… Really, these are very interesting observations. And I also think, you know, from my experience as an enrollment leader, different individual students, different parents or sets of family supporters actually need and want different things.

0:16:47.6 Michael Koppenheffer: Very different.

0:16:48.8 Madeleine Rhyneer: Yeah. And so as you talk about that all of these things are likely to happen, they may not all happen in one student and one family, but they’re very likely to happen across all of the students with whom an institution might potentially be working. So sort of figuring out how to tease out what the student wants and needs from the experience and then how to best deliver that that’s authentic to your institution feels really important to me.

0:17:13.6 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that’s true at the level of individual students and families, and I think it’s true at scale. And I was actually thinking of a specific example as you were asking me about that one romantic counter-narrative, which is that elsewhere in our research recently, we’ve seen two things that are very much in opposition. On the one hand, students very clearly say they want communications that are super relevant to them, hyper-personalized, extremely timely, all these things that basically are only possible with advanced technologies and AI and machine learning and all this stuff. On the other hand, they say, “If I can tell a message was written by AI, I’m gonna feel very negatively about it, and I’m gonna feel negatively about the school,” even though I’m gonna feel positively about the school if I get stuff that’s more personalized. And so I think it speaks to the fact that different people want different things, but also the same people want different things in a way. They want things that are in opposition to each other. And so I think our job as leaders here is to figure out, how do you strike the balance?

0:18:21.2 Michael Koppenheffer: So how do you use these technologies in this new context for good, to help students and families get what they want and need without tipping over the line into something that feels inauthentic, that feels exploitive, that feels wrong, that’s inaccurate? And really, like, how do you balance those things? I think that is one of the biggest tasks before us.

0:18:44.1 Madeleine Rhyneer: I think that’s really a super helpful insight. But I want to ask you a little bit about the workforce disruption scenario, because of course, there’s been a lot of media coverage about AI greatly changing jobs, changing the workforce, the composition of the workforce, and what kind of skills people who are thinking about college now might need four or five years from now when they graduate. So if students are actually using AI to compare degrees, credentials, and their personal alternatives side by side, how do you think that will fundamentally change the way that colleges and universities need to talk about value?

0:19:20.7 Michael Koppenheffer: That’s a great question. So on the one hand, you can imagine that AI is going to facilitate greater transparency, right? So all other things being equal, if the student types in, “What is my computer science degree from X college gonna get me? What’s my chance of getting a job?” all these things, if there are good publicly available sources of information about job outcomes, about salaries, about case studies, about placements and placement rates and hiring employers, those are all gonna get returned by the AI. And you actually have a better chance of making a value case in that world than you would today, I might argue. So that’s actually good for institutions and good for students. Where you run into problems is when the value case itself starts to erode. And that’s why, as with so many things, this is not just a marketing question, this is a strategy question for the institution. You need to make sure that the programs and the offerings and the constructs are tracking with what’s happening in the larger market and that you’re able to communicate about those in a clear, comprehensible, and interpretable way, such that when a student is saying, “Well, shouldn’t I just go to a coding bootcamp and learn to vibe code prototypes?” or whatever they’re gonna be doing in the year 2028, that there is a counter-narrative that the AIs can see and know about and that students can see and know about, if that makes sense.

0:20:57.3 Madeleine Rhyneer: No, it does. I think, you know, when you talk about colleges and universities thinking of AI as an audience, one of the audiences that they need to optimize for, I think that one of the sort of weaknesses that some of the federal challenges that have occurred over the last multiple years have really gotten at is what is return on investment and what is value. And at EAB, because of the research our teams do, we have a pretty good idea of how families define value, how students define it, and how parents define it. But some of the information is frankly not easy for colleges and universities to gather. And so actually getting that information and then putting it in a way where AI can search for it and find that data, you’re quite correct, they will help make your case for you, but they actually need your raw input so that they’ll be able to do that. And I think the focus on that, this I think kind of double-clicks on the imperative to have good data about student outcomes and especially early-in-career student outcomes, first job out, so that people feel persuaded that it really will be worth their investment of time and money to earn the baccalaureate degree.

0:22:04.8 Madeleine Rhyneer: And of course, not everyone will choose a baccalaureate degree, but we don’t want that to happen in the absence of good information where you feel clear about the choices that are in front of you, that baccalaureate degrees, at least at some institutions, don’t languish because they haven’t been able to gather data that AI thinks is important enough to bring forward.

0:22:24.3 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, that’s such a great point. And I think you are elaborating on why AI is such an important audience right now and certainly into the future. Of course, we all know that it’s important to make a value case for your college, and every enrollment leader knows that intellectually. But if you just think about the difference between having a lackluster or a negative or a disappointing answer when a student is asking a value question to AI versus what could happen if you actually made quantifiable, trustworthy information public, it just shows you how important that work is gonna be in the future.

0:23:07.2 Madeleine Rhyneer: It is. Well, maybe this is actually leading into the same question and you would just say ditto. But what would you say is the most urgent, no-regrets move or moves that college or university leaders could make right now to prepare themselves for this world as it’s evolving so rapidly?

0:23:30.9 Michael Koppenheffer: Other than what we’ve already talked about, and this seems maybe self-serving and trite, and yet I believe it very much, the first step to dealing with a big problem is acknowledging it. And I do think we are at a point right now where enrollment teams, admissions teams, colleges in general have been thinking about how is AI gonna affect teaching and learning, how’s AI gonna affect the administrative parts of my job? But they’ve not really been thinking about how it’s gonna transform the very essence of how students find and choose them. And I think where it starts is by having a real conversation inside your team, on campus with key stakeholders about where the future is moving and what you need to prioritize as a result. I don’t think there’s a single right answer for every institution. I think there are considerations that every institution should evaluate. But I think that really, if I were on campus and I were an enrollment leader, I would be convening a group for a strategy discussion or a workshop. And conveniently, and this is the self-serving part, in the insight paper we wrote, we actually have some materials that are intended as a starter for teams that want to have that kind of conversation.

0:24:55.6 Michael Koppenheffer: So sort of some suggested activities and agenda and some tear-out resources and so forth. But the reason we created those is that I think this is a momentous time for the world of enrollment. And of course, you know, if you’re thinking strategically, every year is important. Every year big changes are happening. But really, this is a bigger change than the internet. This is a bigger change than social media. And I think we need to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

0:25:28.6 Madeleine Rhyneer: Well, I love that. And I love that the insight paper contains sort of a helpful starting point for people. At least it’s a lexicon of, “These are the questions that we think you should be thinking about.” And then of course, enrollment people are very smart and will think of their own questions that will be totally institutionally specific, related to us and our culture and where we are developmentally on this kind of scale. But I think it is really important, and enrollment leaders can play a pivotal role because there are so many conversations about AI going on on college and university campuses, and many people are not really thinking about its impact on recruitment and long-term enrollment impact. And I think for enrollment leaders, because they can bring the outside in, they have the ability to try and convene those conversations and talk with their colleagues. Because in many cases, what I see for institutions is their greatest risk is not action, it’s inaction. In almost any set of strategic priorities or choices that they’re looking at, one can be risk-averse, but being risk-averse creates its own risk as opposed to, it doesn’t eliminate risk.

0:26:34.7 Madeleine Rhyneer: We’re gonna stay chill, we’re not gonna move forward. Well, alrighty, we’re getting to the end of our time together. So brass tacks, what is the one strategic insight that you hope sticks with our listeners as they plan for the future of their institution’s college search?

0:26:53.3 Michael Koppenheffer: Not to be a broken record, but I think the strategic insight that I would love our listeners to take away from today’s conversation is that students’ pathway to college and learning about college and choosing a college has been pretty decisively transformed. And the next couple years are gonna bring further and even more profound transformation in how they get information and how they make choices. And it is incumbent on us as enrollment leaders and marketing leaders to figure out how do we position ourselves for success in this new environment, because it really is gonna be a new environment.

0:27:38.0 Madeleine Rhyneer: It’s a new world, right?

0:27:39.3 Michael Koppenheffer: It really is. It really is.

0:27:42.2 Madeleine Rhyneer: Well, Michael, thank you so much. Our profound thanks to you and your team for this work that you did and for the immense thought that went into creating these four scenarios, which I think are thought-provoking and are great conversation starters as we try to imagine what our future would look like. I really appreciate you being here. Will you repeat one more time the name of the paper for our listeners?

0:28:07.9 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, thank you for having me. And the name of this paper is College Search in the Age of AI. I encourage you guys to Google it, find it. I think there’s gonna be a link in the show notes.

0:28:19.3 Madeleine Rhyneer: Outstanding. Thank you listeners for joining us. Many thanks to you again, Michael. I’m deeply grateful on a personal level for the work that you and your team have done because it’s helping us have conversations with people whose primary goal is to open doors of college opportunity and the work that they do matters and your information is gonna help them be more effective. So thank you very much.

0:28:41.1 Michael Koppenheffer: No, thank you. And thanks for having me, and we will talk again soon.