AMA. Or, as I like to refer to one of my favorite conferences of the year, prom. Earlier this week, I gathered with clients, colleagues, and friends in Aurora, Colorado, for the 2026 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, where we spent three days having incredible conversations, learning opportunities, reunions, and celebrations. No one misses prom.
Following my presentation alongside Scott Dams of Moravian University, UWM’s vice chancellor for marketing & communications, John Drevs, asked a critical question about the future of non-traditional learners: How do we ensure that marketing to online students is no longer treated as an afterthought? That question lingered with me throughout the conference.
For years, institutions have treated online, adult, and hybrid learners as a peripheral audience while keeping the institution’s core focus on the traditional undergraduate experience. But as demographic shifts continue to reshape enrollment realities, these populations are no longer on the margins. They are the future of institutional sustainability. And we must integrate them into the university’s broader strategic vision.
That interaction in Aurora crystallized a realization that has been building over the past 12 months. Throughout this year, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the sharpest minds in our industry for the Higher Ed Icons podcast. The conversations I had in Aurora perfectly mirror many of those same ideas, bringing together lessons from the past year and new perspectives on where higher education marketing is heading. The real story of 2026 isn’t a shiny new tactic or a passing trend. It comes down to three fundamental shifts:
- Doubling down on the human factor
- Operationalizing artificial intelligence around actual student journeys
- Elevating marketing from a service bureau to an integrated driver of institutional strategy
The Human Element: Data-Based Empathy and Unfakeable Trust
In an increasingly automated digital landscape, authentic connection has become our most valuable currency. In our AMA session, Scott Dams shared how Moravian University grew its graduate revenue from $2 million to over $17 million. That kind of monumental growth doesn’t happen by tweaking ad creative. It happens by fundamentally understanding what working adults and career changers actually need before they ever apply, and by building marketing architectures around those lived realities.
This echoes a powerful framework that Terry Flannery shared with me earlier this year. When discussing her concept of “Different, Real, Relevant,” she noted a critical distinction—institutions can buy different and can engineer relevance, but real has to already exist within the institution. You cannot manufacture authenticity. In a market where prospective students are deeply skeptical of polished corporate messaging, finding and amplifying the genuine, unfakeable truths of your campus is the only way to build trust.
That trust must extend to how we design our experiences. For example, as Ashley Budd and I discussed on Higher Ed Icons, digital and marketing strategies should be designed around the realities of people’s lives, rather than chasing the latest platform or forcing users to behave in the ways we wish they would. Similarly, AmbioEdu’s Jen Lonchar reminded me recently that higher education is, at its core, a relationship business. Human trust will always precede technology adoption. If we aren’t using our audience research, psychographics, and behavioral data to build empathy, we are merely using data to be louder rather than more effective.
Operationalizing AI in Service of the Student Journey
The conversations in Aurora made it clear that artificial intelligence has firmly moved from the experimentation phase into implementation and governance. But the most vital application of AI in higher education marketing isn’t just generating first drafts of blog posts. Rather, it is about adapting to the changing rules of student discovery.
During our workshop “From Keywords to Conversations: How to Create Answer Engine Optimized Content That Gets Cited in LLMs,” Alexa Poulin, Rebecca Hofstetter, and I explored a pressing reality — AI-powered search is forcing marketers to rethink how prospective students evaluate institutions. When a student asks an LLM a complex, conversational question about the vibe of a specific major at your university, the engine may bypass your carefully curated admissions homepage and instead pull content from Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and buried subpages to construct an answer.
We are currently watching 1996 web governance problems collide with 2026 AI realities. For decades, university websites have been built to reflect internal campus structures and political hierarchies rather than the student journey. Students now arrive at an institutional website late in their search process to validate what they have already learned elsewhere. Claire Machamer’s work at Berklee stands out as a prime example of how to fix this. She and her team rebuilt their digital wayfinding entirely around what learners actually want to study rather than how the institution is organized internally.
Likewise, Kanahoma’s Seth Odell has pointed out that in this new AI-driven search environment, broad institutional brand awareness is no longer enough to guarantee visibility. Individual programs must earn real authority. Operationalizing AI means auditing our digital footprint to ensure that when AI search platforms draw on information from across the web to tell our story, they find clear, accurate, and audience-centric information that supports the prospective student’s journey.
Integration: Moving Beyond Boxology
If there was one theme connecting my conversations at AMA with those I’ve been having throughout the year, it was the urgent need for integration. This means breaking down the silos that fracture the student experience—between paid media, social, web, and campus visits. But it also means fundamentally integrating marketing with institutional strategy. Marketers are increasingly being asked to tie their brand investments directly to enrollment outcomes, revenue generation, and institutional resilience.
However, the directive to “smash the silos” is easy to say from a stage and incredibly difficult to execute on a campus. Higher education missions are simply too broad, and the required expertise too deep, to eliminate specialization entirely. As Navigate Gray’s Rob Zinkan shared with me earlier this year, the goal shouldn’t be erasing departments. The real work is moving “beyond boxology” — looking past the rigid org chart to embrace the grey areas of shared accountability. Mallory Willsea captured this beautifully by suggesting that instead of tearing down walls, our focus should be on building a better hallway between our teams.
This integration must also happen vertically. Rob warned of the danger of handing marketing problems to a team that had no seat at the table to shape. If marketing is only brought in at the end of the line to sell a program or a vision that is already struggling, it is operating as a drive-thru print shop, not a strategic partner. True integration requires the “power of no.” It requires marketing leaders to understand the financial realities of their institutions, speak the language of CFOs and presidents, and demand a voice in shaping the institutional vision before they are asked to promote it. You cannot effectively market an integrated online strategy or a unified campus vision if marketing wasn’t in the room when that vision was built.
And that brings me back to John’s question at AMA: Institutions cannot fully embrace online and adult learners if those audiences remain an afterthought in the strategies, structures, and decisions shaping their future.
As we look ahead to 2027 and navigate budget pressures, demographic cliffs, and technological disruptions, the mandate for higher education marketers is clear. Technology will give our work the necessary scale, but data-driven empathy and deep institutional alignment are what will give it its soul. The institutions that thrive will be those that stop asking “How do we get more students to pay attention to us?” and start asking “How do we better design our institution to pay attention to them?”
Keep the Conversation Going
What should higher education marketers prioritize as they plan for 2027? Join Joe Master and Voltaire Santos Miran on November 20 for A Cup of Joe. A Jolt of Volt: a candid conversation about AI search, brand differentiation, emerging student behaviors, and what’s actually working in higher education marketing.
