Inside The Adult Learner Mindset

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0:00:11.1 Val Fox: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today, we’re joined by EAB’s Val Fox and Todd Heilman to unpack the adult learner mindset. Drawing on EAB’s latest adult learner survey, we explore how anonymous research, cost sensitivity, and changing enrollment patterns are shaping how adult learners choose programs and why an institution’s website now plays a central role in the enrollment journey. It’s a timely conversation with lots of practical insights, so I hope you sit back and enjoy.

0:00:46.3 Val Fox: Welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Val Fox. I’m a Senior Director and principal on EAB’s adult learner recruitment team. And today, we’re giving you a front row seat into the findings from EAB’s most recent Adult Learner Survey, where more than 8,000 current and prospective students told us how they search, evaluate, and make enrollment decisions with regard to graduate and degree completion programs. And we dedicate resources to running this survey annually because understanding adult learners’ motivations and needs is really how institutions achieve relevance today. When you know exactly what drives a student’s decision, you can craft messaging and experiences that speak directly to their goals and drivers. So, to help us unpack these research findings, I am joined by my esteemed colleague, Todd Heilman. Todd, thank you so much for joining me today. Do you want to give us a little introduction?

0:01:43.5 Todd Heilman: Sure. Hey Val, I am so excited to dig into this with you today. As Val said, I am Todd Heilman. I have the pleasure of serving as principal and senior consultant here in our Adult Learner division. Primarily, what that means is I work with our partners to ensure that we are meeting their strategic enrollment management goals, delivering the latest research to them, including these findings. I am also a former practitioner. I have been on the campus side for 20 plus years, serving in roles such as VP of Student Success and Engagement, VP of Enrollment, VP of Marketing, VP of Student Affairs. I’ve kind of run the gamut of administrative positions, all in the New York City region, which is where I am based out of. And during my time on campus, I always look forward to these types of survey results. They were so insightful and so impactful and allowed us to understand what is front and center to today’s adult and graduate students. And as I’m on campus week after week and talking with our partners, I can tell you they cannot get enough of this data. It is just so impactful to understand what needs to be done on campus in order to nurture and ultimately yield today’s adult learners. So, really excited to dig in with you today, Val. As you can tell, I’m really excited about this.

0:02:57.6 Val Fox: Thank you. I know the energy is palpable. Well, it could be that or the sugar cookies are all inhaling at this time of year. But I’m thrilled. Let’s dive into… I know that we theme things around four key themes, but I think the major headline takeaways and one of the clearest themes is that a majority of students, these adult learners today, are really researching anonymously rather than sharing personal information. And it tracks to the visits and meetings I have with campus leaders today. They see that and observe that in their data. And so we’d like to call this the stealth era. I’d say it’s here to stay. And by stealth, just to clarify, when we say stealth, we mean students who are first making themselves known to an institution at the point of application. And so, Todd, with this increasing anonymous search behavior, stealth behavior, why is this shift so important for leaders and what can they do about it?

0:04:02.0 Todd Heilman: Yeah, so critically important. And you know, historically we have called this the stealth era. I think now we are calling it the mega stealth era with 80% of the population really choosing not to interact with marketing campaigns or submit their information until they’re ready to apply. Today’s adult learner is really highly pragmatic. They intend to do their own research. They do not want to be tracked. Matter of fact, if you’re sending them a link, they’re probably not clicking it in the email and opening up a separate browser and reviewing the information that way. I could tell you, I’d love your take on this as well because we hear more times than not… Well, let me back up. I always ask when I’m on campus, who does your EDU serve? Who’s the primary audience of your website? And over the years we’ve gone through this variation. It used to be, I’d always hear on campus, well, it serves alumni and current students. They are the primary consumers of our website, as well as their employees. So that’s still true. Those three areas are probably still true. But what everyone needs to understand is that your EDU site is really the front door to your institution.

0:05:20.4 Todd Heilman: And it’s critically important that you are optimizing your EDU site to not only ensure that prospective students can find what they need easily and quickly, and probably we typically say within 90 seconds, but the reality is it’s probably within 45 seconds. And they’re really searching on three primary things. It’s cost, speed to completion, and outcomes. But that EDU site is your primary marketing tool. So I’d love to hear your take on that, Val, because I know that you’re always on campus and you’re doing these talks as well and to get your insight on my perception.

0:05:58.5 Val Fox: Yeah, I love that you asked that question point blank. Like, who’s the audience for your website? Because that often, sometimes that is where the money and the budgets sit as well. So that might determine. But if the savvier schools are able to isolate for the content on their pages that are generating the most traffic and even maybe they’ve got some tags on their web analytics where they can really unpack and understand are these returning visitors, new visitors, that sort of thing. But to hear you say and underscore that today’s stealth students are pragmatic and predominantly using the website, it is very much in keeping with the data we’re seeing out of the survey as well, which is that the traditional sources of information that adult learners used to go to 10 years ago when I was on a campus, look very different today. It used to be that students, similar to undergraduate students who still lean to reaching out to admission counselors or maybe faculty on a campus. We still see that those are relevant in the, let’s say, top five sources of information that prospective adult learners seek.

0:07:23.4 Val Fox: But what ranks higher than than those one-on-one relationships or conversations are digital sources that speak directly to the fact that these are students who are busy, they’re working adults, they have job and work responsibilities, they have family responsibilities. They don’t have the time or frankly the luxury or patience to have these conversations until you’re on their short list as an institution. And so they’re winnowing their list really by leveraging these digital sources. And so, I just want to underscore a couple things here. That students really… Your website needs to be a very well organized, and clear source of information for students from the point at which they’re searching leveraging, traditional search engines to the time at which they go to your site and really need to find specific information. And adults are different from undergrad students. They’re not really looking for vibes, as we say. They’re looking for specific information on admission requirements, the programs you’re offering, the cost to attend, and scholarships and financial aid. So I like to say that your website is really the first and sometimes the only impression that you’ll have a chance to make with these prospective students. So, when you put it in that perspective, Todd, how do your campus… How do leaders hear that information and process that? Because I think oftentimes they feel like the website’s out of their control.

0:09:07.3 Todd Heilman: I think that’s exactly right, Val. I think we have these competing priorities on campuses and historically the website has been held in a centralized marketing area that may not have been involved in recruitment and enrollment functions. And more and more we’re now seeing those functions being moved into the enrollment area because they work hand in hand together. And when you think about how enrollment managers are tasked with achieving the net tuition revenue goals of an institution, you really can’t handcuff them to achieve those goals without giving them input on the website to ensure that the website is optimized. As we’re moving through this process and we know that prospective students roughly 90% of them will form an opinion on your institution based on their experience on your EDU site. So they’re either adding you to their list or removing you from their list based on their experience on your EDU site. I think once you start leveraging those things and I know you do this as well, but when we’re on campus, we do these scavenger hunts typically with leaders on campus and we ask them and we give them a list of things that say, “Here are what your prospective students are looking for your website. Here’s 90 seconds. Can you find these things on your EDU?” 99.9% of the time every institution fails that scavenger hunt. But it’s usually a really good eye-opening exercise so that they understand where they are meeting or not meeting the needs of today’s prospective student.

0:10:39.4 Val Fox: I know that exercise is a fan favorite for sure. Doesn’t always bear the results they want to hear, but it does create. You’re right, it level sets the folks around the table to these need to be priorities. And we’re all shaking hands on that today. So I love that. So I think we’ve covered off on the importance of your digital presence, specifically your enrollment critical web pages in serving these predominantly stealth adult learners. Let’s talk about how cost has risen as a top decision factor. This year’s survey results, cost was the factor that more than any other eliminated schools from a student’s consideration set from the very start. You don’t even wind up on that short list if they look at your tuition and feel that this isn’t going to bear the ROI that they need to see. We’ve been tracking how students are increasingly over time have been relying on outside sources over personal or household income and savings to fund their education. So how do these factors that, cost is the new litmus test, if you will, in the increasing reliance on external funding sources, how do those reshape the way institutions need to think about pricing and then communicate value? Especially when the website just your primary source of information. How do schools really manage and thread that needle?

0:12:14.7 Todd Heilman: Yeah, such an important point. And yes we always said that there was price sensitivity in the marketplace today, I mean historically. But today I would say we have extreme price sensitivity in the marketplace. And a couple of things stand out to me from our survey findings that we look at. And one is when we asked our prospective and current adult learners what sources of financial support will you have for continuing your education? The one that really jumps out to me is six years ago, 58% of surveyed students were willing to use their personal household income to fund their education. We fast forward to this year’s survey and that’s all the way down to 25%. So that’s head scratching data that only 25% of adult learners are willing to utilize their personal household income to fund their education. Now conversely to that, six years ago, 40% of respondents were expecting to receive scholarship at the graduate level. Well, now that’s in excess of 50%. So they’re not willing to use their personal income, but they are expecting scholarship at the graduate level. And part of that I think is a hangover to what’s happening at the undergraduate level.

0:13:35.5 Todd Heilman: We have these runaway discount rates that are going sky high. Last year the average discount rate was 56%. That’s being carried over into their search at the graduate level. And then what goes along with this are two other things. We’re seeing increase in the expectation of graduate assistantships. That’s just another form of scholarship. So they’re either expecting scholarships or they’re expecting a GA position. And then we have, and this could be another whole topic that we could talk on, but we’ll do it on another podcast is what’s happening with the elimination of the Grad Plus loans. So they may not be willing to utilize their household income, but they also are going to be less willing to take out loans because of the new federal loan limits of being $100,000 for graduate degrees and $200,000 for professional programs. So it’s really putting a lot of downward pressure on institutions to… If they can’t meet the price narrative, then they have to meet the ROI social proof narrative. So if you invest X with me, your ROI for my institution, for my program will be Y. So you have to show them that clear narrative. When you invest your funds at my institution into my program, the expected outcomes are X or Y. And we really want to be able to do to tell that narrative is not say what the expected salary is at a point of credential. We want to get to the median salary at midpoint of career because that really is a clear indicator for prospective student to say here is the ROI for me investing in my education.

0:15:28.6 Val Fox: I love that you share that because I think the follow-on to that when we asked, we asked students about the role cost plays at two critical points. It’s that first kind of forming your consideration set or your short list of schools. And we saw that cost far outweighed by a factor of three to one, the next closest gating factor. So cost is the driver there. But when we asked about, okay, now you’re at the enrollment decision stage, you’ve applied, you’ve got… Let’s say you’ve been admitted to three or four schools. At that point, cost still matters, but is closely followed by these quality proxies. And when we asked the question what characteristics best represent the value of the education, accredited programs came out on top, followed by outcomes measured. So measures like salary after graduation, internships and co-ops, and timely job placement upon graduation. So your points are really well taken that career outcomes messaging can really bridge the cost gap at multiple critical points. But it seems to be that the enrollment decision can be the point at which that weighs most heavily and can have the most impact. So I love the social proof, the mention of, so how do you do that? You show the social proof, which is recent alums, current students who are getting the kinds of salaries, placements, experiences, tangible experiences through internships or co-ops that will position them well in the market.

0:17:11.6 Todd Heilman: Yeah. I think, Val, such an important point that you’re making. And I think to tack on to that, that I just want to emphasize, as we know in doing these surveys, that graduate students or adult learners apply to far fewer schools than the undergraduate population. On the undergraduate side, it’s about eight and a half. On the graduate side, it’s about three and a half. So once you get them to the application point, they’re really yours to lose. So you really have to understand that narrative and that ROI. And dare I even say, you do a great job with these differentiation workshops. You need to understand your differentiators. And your value proposition. You need to be able to drive that narrative home to this highly pragmatic adult learner.

0:18:01.8 Val Fox: Todd, you’re going to keep me busy. That’s going to be the next podcast. You’re right. Differentiation is a huge point. If your program is one of a sea of many and looks like the other schools and the three or four that they’re applying to, what are you doing at this point to really stand out? And I think outcomes is a big piece of it for any… Especially if you understand the prospective student very clearly and know that that’s a huge driver for them in that particular program, then you have to start messaging that early and often. I love that you brought up the number, the average applications with these adult learners. This year’s survey bore out that on average they apply to 4.2 programs versus, let’s look at undergrads, they’re applying to 8.5. So this is a very different game. And if your mindset and mental model has been around the undergraduate space, and no knocks there, because most campuses still largely operate with that mental model, this is a really different one. Adult learners apply to shockingly few schools. They’re busy. You describe them as pragmatic.

0:19:13.7 Val Fox: They’re also speeding up their decision timelines. We saw when we asked them in kind of our frames of reference are, “Did you make a decision in under six months or under a year?” The folks, and we call this like the tortoise and the hare, our fast-moving deciders who decide in under six months, that actually bumped up this year by a couple points. And the students that take more time, there were fewer of those. But let’s be clear, it’s still very much kind of a pretty close split between these two audiences. And that the idea that students might take more than a year still leaves a lot of campuses rattled when we share that data because their outreach to these adult learners ends at the next admission cycle. So, hey, if you don’t make a decision by my timeline my next admission cycle ends in two or three months. We say goodbye to you. We part ways. What’s your take on that?

0:20:17.5 Todd Heilman: Yeah, again I find such value in this data because we like to say it could take three days to three years to enroll an adult learner, which that really is the scope. And we are seeing slightly faster application times this year than we did over the previous years. But what that still tells me though, is that still 37% or so are searching for more than a year for their intended program or their intended institution. And if we broke that out even further roughly 22%, 23% are searching for more than 18 months. And I have not been on a campus yet that has a nurturing campaign that goes beyond a year, never mind 18 months or 24 or 36 months that it could take to recruit these students. So I think you’re spot on in that if you’re not equipped for the characteristics of today’s adult learner, you are missing the large majority of these students because you’re not meeting their time frame. You’re cutting off communication from them sometimes within, I’ve seen them as fast as 30 days. It could be six months at most. On the outskirts, I see it as a year. But even at a year, you’re probably eliminating a third of today’s prospective students because they’re taking beyond that. So it’s a really long nurturing process. And I love your turtle reference there, because that’s exactly what it is. You have to meet these adult learners where they are because they have such competing priorities in their life and they’re just trying to fit their educational journey into those competing priorities.

0:22:06.8 Val Fox: Todd, you know that I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve actually signed up for, over the course of my time at EAB, probably close to 100. I’ve completed close to 100 RFI forms, request for information forms for a variety of adult degree completion and graduate programs. And I can’t believe how many times I’m broken up with.

0:22:31.7 Todd Heilman: How quickly are you broken up with?

0:22:34.1 Val Fox: It’s not enough in the real world, Todd. But at work too, really? Yeah, I’m given up on within weeks sometimes. I get one or two emails and then I’m dropped. So it’s a sad state of affairs. If you haven’t secret shopped your own communication streams, I would highly encourage you to because we might know what was true when they were set up a few years ago, but things have changed. And I’ve often helped schools really understand, “Oh, that’s right. We didn’t realize that that change had a ripple effect and we had stopped communicating with MBA prospective students or RFI completers within that time frame.” So it’s really eye-opening and I would encourage you to do that if you haven’t. And as a baseline, maybe compare yourself to your near peers or your cross-app schools and compare your communications to that because that’s a lift. That’s exactly what your prospects are seeing in their inboxes. I’d like to pivot because this topic is on everyone’s mind in 2025 and 2026. It’s AI. And I have a sneaking suspicion, actually it’s more than a suspicion. We have the data to back it up, that AI is the… And the adoption of AI as part of this process is speeding up some of these decision cycles and could be helping our very pragmatic adult learners get to that consideration set of schools very quickly.

0:24:09.5 Val Fox: So this year we saw a real leap in the use of AI-powered search among adult learners. And if I had a megaphone and could use it to alert higher ed leaders right now, my message would be this. Our sector has been very dependent on paid search as a primary acquisition channel and AI is really rewriting the rules right now. So I’m going to share some exciting or sobering stats depending on how prepared you are for this sweeping change. But the use of AI-powered search among adult learners jumps from three and a half percent to almost 20% in one year. That’s a five-X leap, factor of five. 23% of the students who use AI said, “Yeah.” And they’re reading AI summaries at the top of the search results page before clicking anything. And so the knock-on effects there is that that AI panel that we’re all seeing at the top of traditional search results pages has pushed both the paid and organic listings down on the results page. And so fewer users are engaging with traditional paid or organic listings because that AI panel kind of creates this click-free environment, we call it, where the answers are all there for you.

0:25:26.2 Val Fox: You don’t need to click on any links to learn more. It’s presented to you, served up, if you will. And so a few things have happened. When there’s less paid search inventory because there’s fewer clicks, that drives prices up for paid search. Institutions that are advertising using paid search are going to notice that those keyword costs and ultimately acquisition costs have gone up and that traditional SEO, while still relevant, isn’t generating as much traffic to your site as it used to. So Todd, how is this shaking out? What do you hear on campuses? Are campuses getting worried and how are they wrestling with the changes they’re seeing with an acquisition channel that they’ve been so dependent on for so long?

0:26:12.5 Todd Heilman: Yeah, I think that this is a gap on most institutions’ campuses in that they’re just now starting to realize this click-free environment. I think many, including myself, have been reluctant to these AI summaries. They’re getting better now. They are now even putting a flashy little thing on the top to catch your eye that brings you right to that summary. I was a late adopter to this myself. I now use the AI summaries. I think many institutions are not yet equipped in understanding how that affects their paid search and their click. We’re obviously seeing decreases there. But what we’re doing as part of the information that with our partners and helping them prepare for this new AI landscape is equipping them with the necessary tools and information to ensure that they are appearing in those AI summaries. We want to get them from the bottom of the page up to those AI summaries and it’s really important that we work with them to do so. And you know, one of the things that I know, again, a lot of the work that you do with our prospective and our current partners is ensuring that they understand the need to support student searches with relevant content. We want to ensure we’re getting that informational, that transactional, that navigational content and we’re pulling these institutions’ information up to that AI summary. Would you like to talk a little bit about how you address that with partners?

0:27:54.5 Val Fox: Yeah, we’ve had partners who almost want to overcorrect and maybe leapfrog. Let me step back. There are kind of two camps today. There are the schools that have maybe ignored or just its SEO has been a little bit of an area of benign neglect for them. And those who have really corrected and leaned into SEO, traditional SEO. And so those that… There are some that just want to leapfrog. Well, we never invested in SEO. Let’s now invest in AI visibility. And I’d say don’t do that because the key foundational work in SEO, which is structuring content that addresses student search queries, is still increasingly relevant in an AI-driven world. It’s just now we all need to be structuring content in ways that both search engines and these large language models, or LLMs for short, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, use. And that means being answer-ready for those LLMs. They will pull, weigh, and verify information a little bit differently than SEO. So we do work with partners to do that. But the same principles still apply in SEO and the AI visibility work. And so for anyone that’s interested in getting specifics on that, there is a great case study on our site.

0:29:25.4 Val Fox: We helped Regis University grow their presence in Google’s AI overview by close, I think it was 9x in six months. And so if you search on eab.com and search for Regis University, you can find that post. But this is important work and schools shouldn’t be choosing between one or the other. And the good news is that solid structured content can support both types of work, traditional SEO and this new generative search results work. So I think there’s one last area that we haven’t talked about and that’s just this world we live in today with increasing volatility and turmoil in the international space. And we had 30% of this year’s respondents tell us there were international students. And their concerns are all super valid around travel restrictions, safety, the political climate in the US. Those all rivaled their concerns about cost. What should leaders understand about the shifts happening today in this landscape?

0:30:44.4 Todd Heilman: Yeah as we work with partners, we hear two different camps here. One is that we our institution is not heavily reliant on international students, therefore we’re not being impacted, or we are heavily reliant on international and we know we’ll be impacted. But the reality is that every institution will be impacted by what’s happening in the international marketplace today. And we know right now that there is a 40% decline in first time international enrollment in the US that is putting tremendous downward pressure on domestic institutions to make up those losses by increasing their domestic recruitment. So I’m going to make up a number. If my institution has 10,000 international students and those 10,000 international students are now at risk, that means I as an enrollment manager have to enroll a multiple of those 10,000 because they are full pay students. So I probably have to enroll 20,000 domestic students to make up for those 10,000 international students. So that’s this downward pressure which means I have to expand my recruitment territories. I’m going to be pulling from other institutions. And then there’s this trickle down effect. Those institutions then have to expand their secondary tertiary markets and so on down the line.

0:32:02.9 Todd Heilman: So this 40% decline in international enrollment is a really big deal. There are other countries stepping into this space to make up and fill the gap, such as Germany and Canada. Germany is seeing a 68% increase in international enrollment into their country. So it may take, many think, a decade for us to recover from the reputational damage of international students choosing to come to the US for their education, if we recover at all. And the last stat I’ll leave the group with is it’s a 46% decline in visas from students from India and a 26% decline in visas for students from China. So the impact is severe that 40% new student enrollment decline is real and the total international student decline is about 15%. So these are significant numbers in an already very challenging environment for enrollment leaders.

0:33:07.9 Val Fox: I think it can’t be underscored enough that domestic adult learners need to be the primary growth strategy for institutions now. I’d also say, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, institutions that need to shift from an international growth strategy to a domestic one, it’s more than just shifting spend. I think they need to shift their mindset around this too, because it’s a very different approach. The teams that have really staffed up to support international recruitment, those kinds of skills, and the channels look really different than recruiting domestic. So maybe part two of us in a future conversation, Todd. But it’s a big shift and there are lots of ways… We help, we publish great content around this. I know we’re available for follow-on conversations if needed. But I think we’ve talked to a lot of institutional leaders that are feeling the pain on this point in particular right now. So thank you for backing that up with some really sobering stats. Todd, if an enrollment leader could take one thing away from this year’s survey and maybe change their approach, their go-to-market approach, what would it be?

0:34:28.9 Todd Heilman: Yeah, so it’s hard to narrow down these survey findings to one thing, but if I had to just pick one, it’s the long nurturing time it takes to nurture a prospective adult learner to get them to yield and matriculate at your institution. So very unlike traditional undergrad, which is a linear process, the adult learner is very nonlinear. They’re moving into their journey, out of their journey, depending on the pressures that are happening in their lives. And they could be taking up to 18 months to three years to really decide on the institution that they want to apply to and the program that they want to apply to. So it’s that long nurturing process. And along with that, I would say give them the information that they need and have it readily accessible on your EDU site so that they can select your institution and your program and envision themselves there and be successful. So it’s up to us to educate them and to provide them with the necessary information and data points to make that highly pragmatic decision. Interested in your thoughts and final takeaways? Because I know you’re really close to this data as well.

0:35:41.9 Val Fox: Thanks. I’d say that schools need to stop benching their enrollment MVP. And that enrollment MVP is your website. I’ve seen data, we’ve done other benchmarking studies that give us a view into how teams staff and resource the website’s role in that process, and it’s consistently underfunded. And if schools are interested in attracting a largely stealth domestic audience, the website is their enrollment MVP. There’s no other way around it. And so it really needs to be a focus, especially in this world of increasing reliance on AI. So that’s where I’d lean in if I had to make a big bet this year as an enrollment leader. Well, Todd, I think we’re wrapping on time here. Thank you so much for helping us break down this year’s findings. To our listeners, thank you for joining us on Office Hours with EAB. We hope today’s conversation helps you rethink how to reach, engage and support these adult learners in our very rapidly changing landscape. And stay tuned for more episodes where we’ll continue to explore what’s shaping the next era of graduate and adult enrollment. Have a great day. Thanks so much.

0:37:01.4 Todd Heilman: Thanks, Val. You too. Take care.