Audience: Undergraduate

Standing out on crowded social feeds can be a challenge—especially for higher education institutions. While organic social media is vital, pairing it with paid advertising strategies has proven to be an increasingly effective way to amplify your reach and impact.

Connecting with prospective students is harder than ever before due to decreasing attention spans and increasing competition for attention—you’ve heard it all before. What you haven’t heard: Carnegie’s Lead Generation service now gives you a competitive edge.

In this digital age, social media platforms are vital tools for universities and colleges to connect with prospective students. However, engaging with prospective students, many of whom are minors, comes with important privacy and safety considerations. Major platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Snapchat, TikTok, and LinkedIn have recognized these challenges and implemented robust safety measures to protect young users. 

Your application deadline has come and gone. Wherever the number is now, your applicant pool isn’t going to grow any further. So what can be done to move as many students as you can from admitted to enrolled?

Enrollment professionals at colleges and universities are accustomed to April being a month of uncertainty. Admission teams read the tea leaves of deposit progress, yield event attendance, email open rates, and any other available indicator of interest and engagement, knowing that a significant portion of first-year student commitment deposits will arrive in the days preceding May 1.

Carnegie announced today its acquisition of Credo, a trusted higher education consulting firm. Together, Carnegie and Credo will provide clients with strategic consulting and comprehensive solutions, integrating presidential strategy, institutional planning, enrollment management, brand and marketing strategies, and student success partnerships to address the complex challenges facing higher education today.

With final application deadlines fast approaching, you might be looking at the numbers and wondering how to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Our Enrollment Strategists have compiled a list of tactics that we know can help you move the needle.

It’s hard to imagine social media without TikTok. Over the past few years, this platform has revolutionized the way brands, creators, and even higher education institutions connect with their audiences. But, with increased regulatory and security scrutiny, there are still questions about the future of the platform. Higher education institutions should prepare for potential disruptions.

In higher education marketing, tracking application and yield conversions is essential—but often, the insights stop at the surface. Many institutions face a critical challenge: while it’s possible to track an application or yield conversion through paid media campaigns, gaining deeper context such as the program, term, or student type remains out of reach, especially for an institution with a shared CRM. How is it possible to distinguish an undergraduate from a graduate application?

Understanding how politics impacts prospective students and parents in their choices for college has potentially more weight than ever before. Carnegie completed research about politics and school choice in early 2024 that found personal ideologies being at odds with state-based political policies could result in dropping a school from a prospect’s list.