Student Experience

The first day of class is a marketing outcome.

Marketing's job at most colleges ends at the deposit. Mine doesn't. The work I do connects recruitment, onboarding, advising, and care into one continuous path, because the conditions that decide whether a student shows up in August get set months earlier by people who never meet her. When a student disappears between acceptance and the first day, that's a marketing outcome.

What I've built

At Forsyth Technical Community College, we stopped running those functions as separate departments with separate scoreboards. The model is called Student Care. In practice it means a few times a month I'm sitting with student services looking at which students from a program we just promoted never showed for advising. I leave that meeting with a list of things to fix, not a campaign to launch.

The USC Pullias Center wrote the model up as a case study in institutional redesign. That was gratifying and also a little uncomfortable, because Forsyth Tech hasn't finished this. Some of the handoffs still break. Parts of it work because specific people make them work, and a thing that depends on specific people isn't a system yet.

What I'm certain of is the direction. A college that designs its recruiting separately from its onboarding will keep producing students who feel recruited and then abandoned, and no amount of copywriting fixes that.

What I argue

The seam is where students get lost

Nobody plans the gap between an acceptance letter and a first advising appointment. It's just the space between two departments' job descriptions. A student sitting in that space has no idea she's in it. She only knows she said yes three weeks ago and nothing has happened since, and she has a job and a kid and a reason to stop trying.

The first six weeks have to match the recruiting

Whatever the emails promised is a claim the campus has to honor by October. If the copy said personal attention and she waits forty minutes at a window for someone to tell her she's in the wrong line, the copy was a lie with good typography. I'd rather write a duller email I can back up.

Concierge service is a systems problem

Every college has somebody who takes care of students beautifully. That's not the same as a college that takes care of students. The test is whether a student gets that experience when the person who's good at it is out sick, and most of the time the answer is no. Until it's designed, it's luck.

Stop calling it a funnel after the deposit

A funnel narrows on purpose. That's the right shape for recruitment and the wrong one for everything after, where the job is to keep as many people moving as possible. Colleges that carry funnel language past the yes keep building processes that filter students out, then wonder why persistence looks the way it does.

Measure the walk, not the campaign

Impressions and applications tell you what marketing did. They tell you nothing about what a student experienced. The measures I trust are slower and less flattering: how long from inquiry to a human reply, how many students who applied ever registered, how many of them came back in January. Those numbers move when the college changes, which is the point.

Writing on this

Enrollment Can't Be the Finish Line

The argument in full, built around one returning student who almost didn't come back after her first registration day.

Belonging Is the Only Product Higher Education Has Left That No One Else Can Sell

Cost and credentials are eroding as advantages. What a college can still offer is being known by someone, and most institutions fund that last.

The Question behind the Submit Button

A student filling out an inquiry form is taking a risk. Notes from a conference session on response time, AI, and what students read into silence.

Where this shows up

I speak on this as "Marketing as Student Experience" and "Integrated Student Care Models," for conference audiences and for cabinets. The consulting version means mapping the path a student actually walks from first click to first day, then rebuilding the handoffs that drop her.

If you're trying to work out who owns the gap between your acceptance letter and your first advising appointment, that's the conversation.

Related subjects

Enrollment marketing

The four minutes a prospective student actually gives you, and what that does to the copy.

Student retention

What the college promised during recruitment is still operating in week six.

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