The Graduate Enrollment Playbook Has Changed

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0:00:11.5 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we dig into the biggest changes, both political and technological, that are impacting how adult learners explore graduate programs and where they decide to apply. Our experts share tips for graduate enrollment teams on where to devote their budgets and energies to improve lead generation and ultimately boost enrollment. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

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0:00:44.0 Beth Donaldson: So, hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. I’m Beth Donaldson and I’m the managing director with Adult Learner Consulting Services. And in my work at the firm, I’m focused on enrollment management. I’ve spent probably over 30 years researching how prospective students search, how they compare colleges, and ultimately how they decide where to apply and most importantly, enroll. So today we’re gonna talk about how AI is impacting that process for would-be graduate students as we’ve seen a strong competition for domestic graduate students as it intensifies while institution budgets however have remained pretty much flat. So unfortunately, some of the many early signals that institutions have relied on for years in enrollment management to project future enrollments are becoming less reliable for us. I would love to spend some time today really unpacking EAB’s latest research into how enrollment marketing leaders are thinking about these issues, how their teams are currently trying to adjust, and why they are more focused on lead generation more than ever before. To help us make sense of all of this, I’m really excited to be joined by my colleague Anne Dodson, who brings a valuable frontline perspective on how institutions are adapting.

0:02:14.3 Beth Donaldson: So, hello and welcome, Anne. I don’t know if you realize it, but we’ve known each other for 20 years and so I’m excited to have this conversation with you and have everyone else learn from you today.

0:02:28.7 Ann Dodson: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Beth.

0:02:30.8 Beth Donaldson: So, can you tell us a little bit about your role at EAB and how you got into this line of work?

0:02:36.9 Ann Dodson: Sure. I’m a senior director of research and program analysis and what that means is I manage our survey research team, which we focus on primary data collection. So my colleague, Pam Royal and I, we actually started this survey research team in 2002 at that time at Royall & Company. And between that time and now, we’ve surveyed millions of students and key stakeholders just on behalf of institution partners as well as we designed surveys for what we call landscape research, which is helpful to all of our partners and prospects. And when we first started, we were really focusing on undergraduate enrollment, but that has grown so much. Now we’ve been surveying adult learners. We survey parents, alumni, current students, faculty and staff, administrators, community members, runs the gamut. So over this time, we have supported hundreds of institutions with individual research and provided the basis for a lot of the thought leadership within our EAB services. So very excited to be here to chat with you.

0:03:49.1 Beth Donaldson: Awesome. And I’ve always relied on your research and you’ve touched so much of the research that we do here at EAB. I’d like to spend a little bit of time today talking with you though because you’ve closely been involved with a couple of recent survey projects that have been able to shed a light on how the approach and also the mechanisms of the college search process has changed with today’s adult learners. So let’s start with our most recent survey of university enrollment marketing leaders. Can you tell us a little bit about that survey and what really stood out to you and your team from that research?

0:04:26.4 Ann Dodson: Yeah. Every year we do a survey of enrollment leaders on a variety of topics related to the higher education landscape. And this past year we focused on marketing leaders. So we were surveying specifically CMOs, VPs of marketing, executive directors, and that survey focused on their strategic priorities, their budget allocations, the structure of their marketing team and their staffing, and then how also they’re using AI in their marketing programs. We received responses from more than 120 of these leaders, and the overarching theme was, they’re expected to do more with less or with about the same. Their budgets are flat, their teams are shrinking, but they’re still expected to support the enrollment goals and also amplify the institution’s brand. When we asked the leaders the main barriers for achieving their enrollment goals, 80% said it was their limited budget and 47% indicated it was the limited staffing, as their main barriers for achieving their goals. We also asked them about their priorities for enrollment marketing. Not surprisingly, enrollment growth was noted most frequently. 68% indicated that growing their undergraduate and or graduate programs was a top priority. Brand amplification was the next top priority, followed by… What was really interesting to me is that about a third indicated lead generation was also a top priority. And while lead generation was kind of further down for those who were really focused on undergraduate enrollment, it was the second highest priority for those who are focused on supporting graduate programs. So, Beth, I know that your work brings you in close contact with these university leaders charged with lead generation activities. So I’m wondering from your perspective, what’s driving that urgency right now and why does it feel more challenging than ever?

0:06:53.7 Beth Donaldson: Yeah, no, that’s such a great question. And if you would have asked me a year ago if the angst that university leaders were feeling would intensify, I would have said no, it couldn’t. But the reality is there are so many more challenges that university leaders are really facing. I think at this time last year, everyone was very proactive and aware of the fact that we would have fewer traditional age undergraduate students, that unfortunately, we continue to see that decrease in the college going rate of high school students that were graduating. And then we also had a sense, just due to market surveys showing that 32% of Americans have little to no confidence in higher education, that prospective students are tending to be more cautious in making their decisions, both in pursuing undergraduate and graduate programs. But what we didn’t anticipate was the reduction of research funding as well as just shifts in our administration policies regarding international student visa processing and enrollment in US academic programs. And so, as we’ve seen with all of those changes, it’s really caused a major disruption in higher education and the work that we currently do, so with those changes we unfortunately saw a softening in our graduate enrollment.

0:08:25.2 Beth Donaldson: Fall 2025 graduate total enrollment decreased at 0.3%. And unfortunately, we saw a sharper decline with our new international students, in that we decreased about 15% in new international students enrolled in our graduate programs this past fall. And so, right now, university leaders are really feeling the financial constraints and pressures that’s really been amplified for them. And so they’re really strategically thinking about how can they increase their graduate enrollment and how can they increase it very quickly so that they can really balance revenue deficits that they’re seeing across the board right now. I can definitely say in doubling down, that they are hyper focused on growing their domestic student pipeline, which means that they have to be really focused on lead generation. And in our marketing work, we definitely know that this is an important tactic that students… Or institutions would be considering to get more students. But we really want institutions to be thoughtful about how they approach lead generation strategy, how they think about how they promote their brand, and really how they recruit and onboard their students in their programs.

0:09:53.3 Ann Dodson: Yeah, that’s interesting. One of the other things that we found in the survey was talking about increasing search visibility. So it’s not just about SEO and SEM. It’s that search visibility now. And that was a priority that we saw in the survey results too. And I know institutions, they’re still heavily investing in paid search and in paid social, but the AI generated search results, the organic preferences that are kind of reducing visibility. So at what point does optimizing paid media stop being enough?

0:10:31.8 Beth Donaldson: You’re right. I mean, paid search has been a great strategy for institutions to build the top of the funnel and throw out that wide net to catch more students. But we’ve continually to see competition really in the digital ad space. I mean, we’ve seen over just the last 12 to 24 months that some markets like MBA are so highly saturated that there’s a high cost of enrollment in that space. And now more institutions are going to continue to use paid search and or paid social really to gain audiences across their academic portfolio. And so as we think about this, this means that every dollar that they’re currently spending on paid search really has to work harder. I mean, I remember where we would create a paid search strategy. Just create it, leave it, not monitor it at all, and see results. But now really, teams have to think strategically about how long they leave the paid search campaign and strategy in the market because they will start to see diminishing returns. I think as we think about this, it’s important for them to really be aware and constantly looking at their keywords and selection, as you mentioned, how they are coming up in the search process. And strategically which programs that they should really be focused on and the dollars that they’re spending.

0:12:04.0 Beth Donaldson: I mean, I’ve talked to so many marketing teams that say, “We really haven’t tracked our cost per lead or cost to enrollment.” And that’s really important to understand the efficacy of their marketing dollar spends, to understand where they should be reallocating money within the budget. And really, as we think about this strategy, our research has said really relying solely on paid search cannot be enough for you if you want to really outpace and still market share and grow your enrollment higher than what we saw as that, you know, negative 3%. And so institutions really need to be thoughtful about how they diversify the top of the funnel. As we know, adult learners are moving in and out of consideration and really focus on generating what we refer to as high intent leads in addition to inquiries from a variety of different sources right now.

0:13:05.6 Ann Dodson: Well, and how should institutions rethink what quote, “interest” actually looks like in this kind of changing environment? And what does… What actually distinguishes a high lead or high intent lead from like a traditional inquiry? And why does that matter more now than ever?

0:13:29.7 Beth Donaldson: Yeah, well, I’ll totally date myself with this answer, but when I started as an admissions counselor, we really relied heavily on capturing inquiries. We had that inquiry card where we were asking students, and they gave it to us; their name, their address, their phone, their email address, what term they were considering. And I know this is so apropos and not the norm, but even their Social Security security number, I remember like getting that from them on that inquiry card. But you know, and you’ve seen this too in our research, that in today’s climate, a quarter of adult learners say that I’m not willing to give an institution any personal information before I apply. And almost 60% of them have said, like, “I prefer to do my research on my own before giving any personal information to an institution.” And so getting a traditional inquiry has become harder and harder. We know that stealth students are there. We’re not finding out who they are until they submit an application to us. And they’re not willing to give us that inquiry. And so as we are trying to reach those stealth shoppers, it’s important for, for marketing teams and admission teams to be able to cast a wider net as they’re thinking about how they are able to increase their lead and have an effective audience generation strategy. And I think most importantly, just being able to track how a stealth student and a lead is engaging with the marketing strategy that we’ve put it out there so that you can determine who are the higher intent leads that are more likely to submit an application and to enroll in your academic programming.

0:15:27.7 Ann Dodson: Yeah, that’s interesting.

0:15:31.6 Beth Donaldson: So now I know that, Anne, you’ve really been involved in our research survey of the adult learner mindset where we were able to survey over 8,000 students. And so this is really great for us in terms of our intel. Can you talk a little bit about how the research really was able to identify the rise of self-shopping and really what indications we saw in terms of how students are comparing programs without the traditional inquiry signals that we’re really been used to. And as you mentioned before, how AI is really changing the game as students are using ChatGPT or Gemini to really discover which programs they’re interested in, which schools they may want to apply to because I really want to learn a little bit more about how that discovery process is changing for prospective students.

0:16:26.7 Ann Dodson: Yeah, absolutely. What you were mentioning is our survey of adult learners, and those include those who are currently enrolled in a graduate professional or a degree completion program, and those who are also considering enrolling in a program. And you know, while we’ve been surveying adult learners since the mid-2000s, this study that you’re talking about is we’ve been doing on a pretty consistent basis since 2016, so we’ve got this 10 years of data that we can look at. And it allows us to look across the trends and to see what’s… How things are changing. And one of the things that we always ask is, what sources of information current students, prospective students used when gathering information about programs. And the sources that, for this past year that were most frequently used were online sources, which includes the institution’s.edu site, graduate search programs. And so that was selected by, 66% of participants. 57% said they’re also using search engines. So like Google, which that’s kind of a tangential to AI as well. 40% are using communications from schools, so like email messages, text messages, and then you’ve got a third order using, like, personal resources.

0:18:00.8 Ann Dodson: So what you can see is that participants are using sources that can be controlled or even influenced by an institution. But they’re also still pretty stealth. So if they’re going to the website, unless you’re tracking your web traffic, you may not know about their interest. You know, they’re going to the college search sites as well. Interestingly, in terms of AI, they’re starting to use that a little bit more. So that’s starting to grow. And we even asked, thinking about the web searches, we asked our participants, when you’re doing a Google search, how are you kind of using that information? And less than a quarter saying that they’re reading the AI generated results. So that’s interesting to track, and that’s going to be interesting to track to see how that changes over the coming years with just AI becoming more and more prevalent. But the other interesting thing when we survey adult learners is that, you know, unlike an undergraduate prospect, they have this non-linear path to enrollment. So in our survey, we saw about a third had been actively searching programs for over a year, but then we had 45% that indicated they had been searching for six months or less.

0:19:37.2 Ann Dodson: So I think as the environment shifts, so does maybe the timelines for searching for programs shifts. So, for example, in 2021, we had 14% of our participants that were searching for 18 plus months, compared to last year, where that was only 6%. So what this shows us is that those who are recruiting adult learners need to be nimble in terms of their recruitment efforts. They need to be marketing through a variety of channels. They need to continue to market prospective students past the time you might think that they’ve already enrolled. When we do market perception studies for individual institutions, we survey their last three years of inquiries. So those are still active. So it’s just, it shows that you kind of need to be there anytime and… Anytime, everywhere, all at once, if that’s the right way to say it. You know, just be there when they are ready to be reached out to.

0:20:46.1 Beth Donaldson: That is so true. I loved it. It’s so interesting, the insights on both AI and the timing of search with that survey. So how did the ALR mindset survey align with any learnings that you were able to glean from the recent survey that you had in collaboration with NAGAP? Because I know that we’ve been doing that for a few years and I love see kind of what you were able to make us connections.

0:21:18.4 Ann Dodson: Sure. Yeah, we started partnering with NAGAP, which is the National Association of Graduate Enrollment Managers. We started that partnership in 2020. And as part of that partnership, we conduct these flash polls every year. And so we do three different ones. And the surveys allow us to hear directly from the GEM professionals. We learned about their priorities and their challenges in the graduate enrollment space. And I think what’s exciting about this research is that we can kind of track these trends over time, some of these more traditional metrics, but then we can also add in questions that are more kind of results of environmental change, so like COVID-19, as well as technology changes like AI. So we started asking specifically about AI. We started asking about that in 2023 and that’s fascinating just to compare the responses year over year. So first you saw like this very slow adoption in 2023 where 19% were saying that they were using AI in their enrollment marketing. And then the next year it was 23% and then this past year it’s 42%. We also present at the NAGAP summit and it’s interesting to hear people there talk about the slow adoption sometimes with graduate enrollment and even with enrollment in general, and that this is something like the Internet, like you’ve got to get on board with and you’ve got to be thinking about AI and being AI forward.

0:22:59.4 Ann Dodson: But we also see… In terms of AI, we’re seeing some similar progressions just about institutions making it a strategic priority. So, you know, in 2023 it was 8% of institutions, and then it doubled to 19%, more than double to 19% in 2024. And then it was 39% last year. So I also… I’m dating myself as well because when we first started talking about social media and it was my space was all the rage. And then you saw Facebook creep up and then Facebook creep down. So it’s akin to that where you’re seeing this new technology and you’ve gotta kind of get on board with it. But thinking about like some of the other metrics that we would track within that survey, so maybe some of the more traditional metrics, similar to what we saw with the CMOs, the GeM professionals are also, they’re tasked with. Their main priorities are increasing enrollment along with increasing their net tuition revenue. And again, they’re asked to do more with less. We asked the GeM professionals what their priorities are for the next enrollment cycle. And we saw that they want to really start communicating like value.

0:24:26.6 Ann Dodson: So cost is always an issue. Focusing on their website, focusing on email recruitment. But in not on… It was not one of the top ones, but more than a quarter said that they wanted to focus on acquiring prospect lists. So getting back to that inquiry generation and having different options in terms of lead generation and for outreach. But I think we also heard from the GeM leaders, you know, like I said, that they’re asked to be doing a lot more with less staffing. And so when you think about kind of that and budgets, what do you think, Beth, in terms of how leaders should think about reallocating and not just adding dollars to protect kind of the top of the funnel, but how do they reallocate resources?

0:25:22.4 Beth Donaldson: Yeah, and that’s such a good ask because I find that most institutions put all of their eggs in one basket and they’ve said paid search works, so let’s put all of our money in paid search. And they haven’t really thought about diversifying their approach to mitigate loss. And so it’s so important, just as we have diversity with our retirement portfolio, as I’m thinking about that in the future, near future for myself, hopefully. Institutions must also have a diversified approach to building the top of the funnel. In addition to paid search and paid social dollars, I think it’s important for them to think about using test takers. I know that that’s a smaller population and adult learners are very reticent about taking the exam. But test takers with GRE and GMAT can be very helpful in diversifying your lead generation. I also think institutions should strategically think about the student search platforms such as Niche and [0:26:29.1] [inaudible] Appily Advance that will give you students that are really in that beginning stages of the consideration and really would potentially be right fit for your programs and as we think about other sources, institutions really need to be thoughtful about their website so that they can be able to capture more organic leads.

0:26:49.8 Beth Donaldson: They really can recruit their own internal students. So it’s not too early to look at sophomores on the undergraduate side and juniors that could definitely come into your graduate programs and then really being thoughtful about young alums or older alums who might want to change their career and so will consider graduate school to be able to do that. And I think just lastly, another great approach as you’re thinking about really protecting that funnel, is thinking about strategically how you’re outreaching to four year institutions that don’t offer a graduate program to be able to build that pipeline and leads of students who may be interested in pursuing a graduate degree at your institution.

0:27:39.6 Ann Dodson: That’s really interesting. So. Well, I’m going to ask you a question that put you in a hot seat. So if you are advising a graduate enrollment leader planning out for the next 12 to 18 months, what’s one strategic shift that you think they should have prioritized now? Kind of to avoid being caught off guard when there’s… By where their student search behavior is kind of headed?

0:28:05.5 Beth Donaldson: Oh wow. And that is really throwing me like a curveball right at the end of our conversation. I think there are so many strategies that I would recommend, and as you know, I spend love doing strategy with partners, but if you force me to, I could narrow it down to just as we’re thinking about one particular thing to prioritize in the next 12 to 18 months is really, I think strategically thinking about dedicating resources to other lead generations. And so I think a big bet right now is the student search platform such as, you know, aptly advanced that we mentioned before at EAB. And also really being thoughtful about extending the communication plan to those intent leads because as you mentioned, students are taking longer in the search phase, spending more than 18 months before they actually searching before they enroll in a program. And so we know that finding the right leads, having the right messaging is really important. Now I know that you could tell I cheated because I did throw in like an extra one with the [0:29:17.0] [Inaudible] Comp Plan. But I think it’s really important as we’re thinking about how you find the right students and really be able to meet the needs of adult learners who we know want the information from the website in a short amount of time, want the right academic program to meet their needs and flexibility.

0:29:39.1 Beth Donaldson: And unfortunately, unlike traditional age students, where we know where they are and where they’re going to graduate, adult learners could be everywhere. And so really being able to use those student platforms are just so key and important. So with that long-winded answer, I think we are out of time. So Anne, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been really insightful to hear your perspective on our research and what institutions should really be focused on right now.

0:30:08.3 Ann Dodson: Thank you. I enjoyed it and I always love talking to you.

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