Audience: Community College

Across the country, colleges face a common challenge—and an even greater opportunity. According to the Some College, No Credential 2025 Report from the National Student Clearinghouse, 43.1 million Americans have “stopped out” of college, meaning they left before completing a credential. Of those, 37.6 million are working-age adults under 65. They represent one of the most promising, yet often overlooked, growth segments for community and technical colleges.

Recently, Carnegie hosted a webinar with leaders of national higher education associations for a candid discussion about the demands of the moment and how leaders can navigate the uncertainty while fulfilling the mission of higher education. We opened the conversation to our attendees to ask questions directly to our hosts and panelists. Our panelists couldn’t get to all of the amazing, thoughtful questions posed during the event. We’ve compiled some of them here with answers from our hosts, Shankar Prasad and Emma Jones, as well as some of our favorite quotes from our panelists.

Last month, Carnegie’s Slate experts teamed up with Technolutions to host a Stump the Slate Squad webinar. With hundreds of institutions tuning in, the questions poured in—everything from quirky form logic to complex reporting challenges and student record edge cases.

We’re proud to announce that Carnegie won two 2025 Communicator Awards. Explore how we’re impacting higher ed marketing with creative design and storytelling.

The higher education landscape is shifting. Shrinking student populations, evolving expectations, and intense competition are forcing institutions to rethink their approach to attracting and enrolling students. The traditional methods of outreach and engagement are no longer enough.

Retargeting is a game-changer for community colleges looking to move prospective students through the enrollment funnel. By re-engaging individuals who have already interacted with your institution — whether by visiting your website, submitting an inquiry, or engaging with your ads — you keep your school top-of-mind and encourage them to take the next step.

As marketers, we’re used to abbreviations like CRM, CMS, CRO, and CTA; some of these are the bread and butter of what we do and how we do it. However, it’s easy to fall into a pattern with these concepts—to distance ourselves with abbreviations and routine, forgetting the true impact of their work.

Five years ago, higher education leaders everywhere were navigating the personal implications of a newly-minted global pandemic while also working overtime to support their teams, constituents, and communities through a fundamental destabilization of not only the higher ed sector but every aspect of our daily lives. We all emerged from that year never wanting to hear the word “unprecedented” again. But what higher education is facing at this moment is, once more, unprecedented, representing a significant degree of challenge to foundational assumptions about our sector.

Higher education should play a more central role in addressing the complex partisan divides in our country, but doing so will require us to examine our own actions and institutional strategies. Academia has long operated in an insular bubble. Now, more than ever, we must engage locally, bridging the gap between our institutions and the communities they serve, all while strengthening our commitment to educating students about and for democracy.