Audience: Undergraduate

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. 

Following the 2024 election, Carnegie researchers wanted to continue exploring the ways politics interacts with prospective students’ decision-making. This research surveyed more than 2,000 prospective and current students, and their parents, about the impact of politics at a campus- and state-level on their decisions.

If your institution uses Slate but hasn’t strategized about leveraging Ping’s capabilities, then this article is for you. Think of it like Google Analytics for Slate – you can see where a student came from and what they did during their time on the site. However, the aspect that is different from Google Analytics is that you can connect this behavioral information to student profiles once a student enters the system.

hen launching a new Slate instance, one of the most crucial steps for ensuring high deliverability is IP warming. IP warming is the gradual process of building trust with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) by sending a small, increasing volume of emails over time.

One of the most impactful areas for improvement is your website’s information architecture (IA), or how you label and organize information to make it easy to find. IA includes both your sitemap and your navigation elements. Done well, good IA is nearly invisible, allowing site visitors to focus on your content. It’s the difference between a seamless user experience where visitors find what they’re looking for without thinking twice or a frustrating, confusing experience full of endless clicking and scanning.