The ideas I keep coming back to.

Higher education marketing can't stop at awareness. Every touchpoint from the first ad impression to the first day of class is either building trust or eroding it. The institutions that understand this stop thinking of marketing as promotion and start designing it as experience. Enrollment is not the finish line. It is the trailhead.

AI in higher education should make it easier for students to find answers, navigate systems, and feel supported. The goal is not to replace human connection but to free up humans for the conversations that actually require them. I've led AI deployment at institutional scale and write about what actually works versus what sounds good in a vendor pitch.

When prospective students ask AI where to go to school, most institutions don't have an answer. Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization are the new frontier of enrollment marketing. I was writing about this before most higher ed marketers had language for it, and I bring practical frameworks for how institutions can show up in AI-generated search results.

The traditional 18-year-old market is shrinking. The students who can drive enrollment growth for most institutions are adult learners, returning stopouts, and career changers. Marketing built for the traditional student is the wrong marketing for the growth student. I work with institutions on the strategy, messaging, and systems shifts that serve who's actually showing up.

Higher education moves at a glacial pace in a world that moves at the speed of business. The institutions that survive the next decade will be the ones that built cultures of honest self-assessment, experimentation, and willingness to change how they operate. I talk about what that actually requires from leaders, not the aspirational version but the operational one.