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Every spring, enrollment teams exhale.
The work paid off. Deposits are in. The class is taking shape. And then, in most institutions, something shifts. The energy that drove nine months of recruitment starts to wind down. Student affairs will pick up at orientation. Marketing is already planning next year. And in the gap between those two moments, those three or four months of summer, the student is largely on their own. They're not on their own with their doubt, though. That travels with them. A student who deposited in April excited and certain can spend a summer quietly second-guessing. Not because another school did something dramatic. But because nobody kept making the case for the choice they'd already made. Nobody answered the financial aid question they were too embarrassed to ask. Nobody made them feel, consistently, like they were already part of something. This is where most melt actually happens. Not in a dramatic reversal, but in a slow drift that nobody catches because nobody was watching. The Niche report puts a number on it: schools are experiencing melt rates 88% above their own best-in-class benchmark. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a relationship problem. And it happens in the gap that, structurally, belongs to nobody. The institutions that are quietly outperforming right now have made one deliberate decision: keeping the students they've already won is as strategic a priority as finding new ones. That shift changes who owns the summer, what goes in the June email, and whether a parent's unanswered question becomes a reason to reconsider. Deposit day is not the finish line. It's the proposal. The work of actually getting married hasn't started yet.
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The most influential person in your enrollment funnel probably isn't the student.
It's the parent sitting across from them at dinner in June, asking quietly whether this is really the right choice. We know this. 76% of enrollment leaders in Niche's 2026 State of Higher Education report say parent engagement is "very important" to yield and melt outcomes. And yet most parent communication strategies amount to a readdressed version of whatever the student got, sent a few days later. That gap matters more than it used to. Because of who these parents are right now. The parents of today's college students are largely Gen X and older Millennials. They grew up being told that college was the path. Work hard, get the degree, build the life. A lot of them took that deal. Some of it worked exactly as promised. Some of it didn't quite. They've watched friends carry debt that didn't lead where it was supposed to. They've navigated an economy that made the return on higher education feel more conditional than the brochure suggested. They're not cynics. They still want to believe. They want their kid's college experience to be everything it was supposed to be. They just haven't seen enough from most institutions to feel certain it will be. When a parent feels genuinely seen and communicated with, when their real questions get real answers, they become one of the most powerful yield tools an institution has. They reinforce the choice at the dinner table. They quiet the summer doubt. They become advocates. When they don't hear from you, that doubt fills the silence on its own. Parent communication isn't a courtesy. It's enrollment strategy. And for most institutions, it's the most underdeveloped lever they have. Direct admissions is having its moment, and I understand why.
Reducing friction, reaching students who never would have started an application, expanding access to populations that the traditional process quietly excludes. These are real and meaningful goals. The enthusiasm is warranted. But the traditional application process, for all its stress, inequity, and absurdity, does one thing on the side that we've taken for granted. It builds investment. The student researches. The family drives to campus. Everyone has the dinner table conversation about fit and cost and what comes next. By deposit day, months of deliberation have created something real: a student and a family who have talked themselves into believing in this institution. A direct admit arrives without any of that. Which means the conviction that the process normally builds before the deposit now has to be built after it. The courtship has to happen in reverse. That's not impossible. But it requires acknowledging that the work exists in the first place. The Niche report notes it takes only a 1.7% yield improvement for direct admissions to show meaningful economic impact. That's an achievable number. It's also a fragile one. A weak summer communication sequence, an unanswered financial question, a parent who never felt like the institution knew they existed. Any of those can erase it. Direct admissions without intentional post-admit nurture is a wider opening in a leaky bucket. The schools that will actually benefit from it are the ones treating the direct admit moment not as the end of recruitment, but as the beginning of a relationship that still needs to be built. Those schools exist. They're just not the majority yet. |
AuthorBecky Colley has worked in and around higher education for over two decades. She's been in the rooms where the hard decisions get made and she's helped a lot of leaders say the thing they meant to say. She consults with senior leaders on communication, thought leadership, and the kind of strategic clarity that's harder to come by than it should be. She lives in Waterbury, Vermont. She will always tell you the truth. ArchivesCategories |
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