My obsessive read this month has been The Signal Solution: How Smart Colleges Stop Chasing Applications and Start Converting Students by Geoff Baird and Teege Mettille. It’s a work of piercing insight, warning that the college admissions process—and by extension higher education writ large—is caught in the middle of a category 5 hurricane.
Part 1 – The Storm
When Part 1 of a book about college admissions is labeled “The Storm,” and the authors write that it’s “a Category 5 storm,” readers are likely to sharpen their focus.
Geoff Baird and Teege Mettille categorize the current disruption in higher education admissions as a Category 5 storm due to the collision of five distinct forces:
- The Shrinking Demographic Base
- The Application Surge and Signal Distortion
- The Rise of Alternate Paths
- The ROI Crisis
- The Personalization Mandate (the TikTok effect).
I’ve written about these forces, and yet, never authored an article about the impact of all of them happening at once. Kudos to the authors for a well-scripted lead-in.
The Shrinking Demographic Base
Baird and Mettille write that the math of the shrinking demographic base (a 10-15 percent decline in U.S. high school graduates by 2030) may be worse than it looks. Why? Because while the overall pool of students is shrinking, the number of applications per student is exploding. Fewer students are applying to more colleges and are deciding later in the cycle.
The Application Surge and Signal Distortion
The Common App reported a 32 percent increase in college applications since 2019. For most institutions, yield (the percentage of admitted students who enroll) is down, prospective student engagement is weaker, and stealth apps are the norm. Indicators that were heavily watched in the past, such as campus visits or completed inquiry forms, are less important every year. Reliable signals like these have now transformed into noise.
The previously positive indicator that more applications are a good signal has changed to the opposite: more applications equal less intent. Direct admissions, the Common App, and other tools have increased access to higher education but have also changed the statistical relationships that admissions teams have relied on for years.
The Rise of Alternative Paths
There are many learning opportunities that compete with a four-year degree. The authors list bootcamps, apprenticeships, certificates, and employer-funded pathways. Credential Engine tracks the total number of credentials issued in the U.S. and sorts them into 18 categories, including boot camps, certificates, and apprenticeships. The authors write that “The monopoly on what the best path for students to do after high school is over.”
The ROI Crisis
The Student Loan Crisis clearly emboldened critics of higher education to ask, “What’s the ROI (return on investment) of a college degree?” Student loan debt now exceeds $1.8 trillion. Prospective students and their families are no longer only asking “Can I afford it?” but are following it up with “Will it be worth it?”
More importantly, the social contract that once ensured completing college would lead to a successful job and career has been ripped up. Prospective students want “proof, not promises.”
The Personalization Mandate
Personalized emails with students’ names on them “feel like junk mail,” according to Baird and Mettille. Students aren’t comparing one college’s emails to another’s. Instead, they’re comparing them to Netflix recommendations, Spotify playlists, and Instagram ads. They are accustomed to experiences tailored to their preferences and expectations, unlike a “fill in the name” standardized email. Colleges whose communication strategy is not meeting that bar risk becoming irrelevant fast.
What Makes These Five Forces a Cat 5 Storm
The five forces amplify each other, raising the storm to that dreaded Cat 5 status. A feedback loop that is accelerating looks like this:
- Fewer students means more competition
- More competition means more noise
- More noise makes personalization more challenging
- Perceived depersonalization makes ROI questions louder
- Louder ROI questions make alternative paths more attractive.
What most institutions miss is that when competition increases, the answer isn’t broader reach and more applications. The response should be building a deeper connection with students who are genuinely interested.
Institutions winning the battle for new students are not “casting a wider net.” Instead, they’re building relationships with fewer students who better match their profile. These schools are identifying the 20 percent of students who are “movable” and investing energy and effort in personalized, human connections during the critical period when students are emotionally deciding.
The Relationship Recession
A decade ago, students engaged with a college for months. The middle of the admissions funnel was active with relationship-building opportunities. Today, students research in silence. They make decisions without engaging.
The odd thing is, students still want relationships with their desired institution. The disappearance of engagement, according to Baird and Mettille, is because students have been trained by systems that respond to their behavior, and when a college doesn’t, they assume no one is listening.
Students still want guidance and to have their questions answered. However, they’re not going to ask for help if they think they’ll just get another brochure or be added to a form letter email response. Students want to know that they are seen by another human who is invested in their success.
Greater competition means many schools have increased their email and ad campaigns rather than deepening their relationships through greater personalization. The authors acknowledge that an institution can’t easily build relationships with 10,000 prospects, but an institution should build relationships with the 1,000 students who are reading and listening.
Part 2 – Seeing Through the Noise
Strategic Misalignment
Based on their experiences working with colleges, Baird and Mettille write that the crisis is not due to a lack of student interest. Instead, the crisis stems from strategic misalignment. Institutions continue to engage prospective students using tools from a toolbox honed over decades of enrollment management practices that quietly—but quickly—became irrelevant.
Traditional enrollment teams spend 70 percent of their time at the top of the funnel and 30 percent at the bottom. Teams have been trained to act like marketers and not like counselors. No one focuses on the middle of the funnel.
It’s time to write a new playbook, one designed to see through the static. Some traditional “comfort” metrics, such as completed FAFSAs (financial aid applications) and campus visits, can be enhanced by looking at broader applicant activity, including logins, downloads, and communication patterns. Student intent can be detected by observing those activities, and messaging and outreach can be personalized using that data.
The authors quote an AI professor from Carnegie Mellon who stated, “Trying to predict who will enroll is very much like trying to predict a student’s final GPA at the end of the semester; by the time you have enough data to predict it, it’s probably too late to change it.”
They recommend that enrollment teams change their mindset from prediction (passive) to proactively impacting the decision cycle (active). Understanding deeper signals of student intent is the key to unlocking the middle of the funnel, the key battleground for enrolling more students.
Institutions that lock themselves into checking the boxes for key milestones such as application submitted, FAFSA filed, campus visit, web hits, financial aid, and email opens are likely to miss the behavioral indications of whether a student is still in motion or is walking away. AI models used by Baird and Mettille are able to reveal the direction and implications of these patterns.
Stop Treating Yield as a Verdict
When the yield (enrollment) from admitted students is as low as 10 or 15 percent, the authors maintain that the institution should consider this a variable percentage that can increase. At the same time, they point out that behavioral patterns surface when the student is actively reading your emails repeatedly, evaluating a financial aid offer, or browsing the institution’s webpages about life on campus. Those moments are when counselors should engage, personalizing the student’s situation and reacting in real time when the opportunity is greatest.
“Most enrollment systems were built to track paperwork, not people,” Baird and Mettille assert. The authors maintain that the biggest crisis in the middle of the funnel isn’t just identifying these behaviors, but prioritizing actions based on them.
Counselors who are unable to focus their outreach on specifics will end up focusing on everything. Focusing on everything leads to frustration, burnout, and ineffective actions. Institutions that implement an AI-based enrollment model can provide a daily list of prospective students who are moving closer to or away from an enrollment decision, so a counselor can make a positive contribution by responding to that student’s individual behavioral actions.
Three Sources of Misalignment
There are three structural issues that no amount of optimization can fix. These are:
- The Obsolete Playbook Problem – most enrollment systems were designed for a world where student behavior is linear, predictable, and responsive to institutional timing. The tools didn’t break. The market they were built for no longer exists.
- The Product-Market Fit Gap – Students aren’t falling in love with campuses anymore. They’re calculating and comparison shopping. They’re asking if it’s going to be worth it to attend your college. Program pages need to mention career outcomes rather than burying them three layers deep.
- The Leadership Metrics Problem – Leaders are clinging to traditional metrics such as applications, campus visits, and FAFSA submissions. Unfortunately, these metrics are no longer leading indicators. They are trailing indicators.
Institutions that solve the misalignment problem fix their admissions processes by aligning their operation around the student decision journey. Baird and Mettille write, “The future of enrollment is not more volume, but more vision; not better communication flows, but stronger signals; not bigger aid packages, but deeper trust…none of that lives inside the admissions office alone. It lives in the institution.”
Part 3 – The New Operating System
Baird and Mettille write that when they considered what was missing from their focus on capturing more students in the middle of the funnel, they realized it had to be better aligned with how some known models and theories of consumer decision science applied to enrollment.
As a result of that thinking, they derived O-S-O, Objective-Subjective-Objective. O-S-O is the path that people move through when they make purchasing decisions. They emphasize that this decision science maps onto the enrollment journey. The three phases of the journey are:
- Phase 1: Objective – “Do you have what I need?”
- Phase 2: Subjective – “Can I see myself here?”
- Phase 3: Objective – “How do I complete this?”
Some of the themes that they have found in their research that are most impactful in each phase are:
Phase 1: Objective signals
- Time spent on program-specific pages
- Net price calculator usage
- Admission requirements page visits
- Time from inquiry to first contact
- Time from inquiry to first meeting
- Communication patterns in the first 30 days
Phase 2: Subjective signals
- Communication patterns 30 days pre/post application
- Late-night or weekend portal activity
- Return visits to student life content
- Social media engagement with current students
- Questions that shift from “what” to “how would I”
- Language sentiment that shifts from program to social fit
- Communication/response pattern consistency
Phase 3: Objective signals
- Financial aid form completion patterns
- Housing/orientation content engagement
- Course planning tool usage
- Response time to deadline communications
Students don’t always move forward. Sometimes, they cycle back. The most dangerous assumption is that all behavioral changes signal progress. When colleges can read the signals students are sending, they can meet students where they are, rather than where the CRM says they should be.
Baird and Mettille list three signals to track:
- Communication patterns over time, not just totals
- Second visits versus first; repeat behaviors
- Behavior mismatches: communications not matching physical activity
Institutions that thrive will be the ones that see the signals, since the signal is the journey. “The future isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things, at the right time, for the students who are actually listening.”
Part IV – The Investment Discussion
Part IV lists several ways that enrollment leaders seeking to transform their enrollment process should justify the additional expense of capturing, analyzing, and acting on behavioral signals from prospective students. Positioning the change as strategic versus tactical aligns with almost all the suggestions.
The authors walk readers through three scenarios for building the case. The scenarios are:
- Start Small (efficiency focus) – minimal new spend, better prioritization, and cleaner signals. Reduction of 25-30% in wasted counselor time. Modest bump in yield. ROI in 12-18 months.
- Scale Smart (Efficiency + Growth) – strategic reallocation plus targeted technology investment. Efficiency gains of 30-40%, 10-15% yield improvement. ROI in 18-24 months.
- Go Bold (Full transformation) – comprehensive reimagining of enrollment operations. Efficiency gains of 40+%, 15-20% yield improvement, competitive advantage that compounds annually. ROI in 24-36 months.
Part V – Precision in Practice
Baird and Mettille begin Part V with a simple statement: Across hundreds of institutions with enrollments ranging from 500 to 40,000, the playbook is basically the same. All these campaigns are automating compliance and not generating interest in these institutions.
The shift enrollment teams need to make is to recognize real student signals when they occur and respond with precision and care. Students have grown up using platforms that learn from them, like TikTok, Netflix, and Spotify. If your enrollment system is not responsive, students assume that you are not interested in their behavior.
Break down the Myths that Hold You Back
Myth 1: More apps = more students
Volume isn’t a strategy; it’s a coping mechanism. Volume gives the illusion of control. More volume creates more clutter. More clutter means more missed signals.
Myth 2: CRM = strategy
CRMs are powerful tools, but they don’t make decisions. Don’t confuse automation with intelligence. The best CRMs don’t lead your strategy; they reflect it.
Myth 3: The aid package is the closer
Student behavior data shows that the aid package is rarely the moment of decision; it’s the confirmation. Aid is just one chapter in the story. A strong package doesn’t rescue a broken experience. Aid should be used to reinforce momentum, not create it.
Steps to Enhance Precision in Practice
- Rebuild counselor time around impact, not coverage.
- Retool your comm flows to trigger off behavior, not time.
- Start yield in October.
- Prioritize motion over milestones.
- Kill the “hot leads” list.
- Create shared visibility across teams.
The Role of AI is Not to Replace, but to Refocus
Baird and Mettille provide a concise explanation with these words:
“AI sees what humans cannot, not because we’re not smart enough, but because we’re outnumbered. We are outnumbered by the number of students, the number of interactions, and the sheer pace and spread of digital behavior.
Many institutions are using technology to manage volume but not to create insight. When used well, AI doesn’t flood a team with new dashboards. It does the opposite; it narrows the gap. It clears the clutter.”
Final Thoughts
It’s hard to argue with Baird and Mettille’s premises. I’ve witnessed the power of building automated systems and of effective, responsive communication with prospective students. When you’re operating an online university admitting more than 25,000 students per year, efficiency and effectiveness are only possible with automation and experienced admissions counselors. At the same time, very few colleges have had the opportunity to build such a system at scale.
Baird and Mettille are correct that the existing playbook for most colleges and universities is virtually the same. Analyzing the middle of the funnel and improving yield by observing and responding to behavioral signals is a better solution for everyone. Given the current cost of AI, their framework is a solution that can be implemented by almost all colleges.
If I led enrollment initiatives at an institution, I wouldn’t wait for my existing enrollment consulting firm to propose an idea like this. After all, the major consultants have existing systems and processes that have been honed over the decades. Making a change like this could be perceived as risky and costly, particularly if they were unable to execute it flawlessly.
The authors have a business helping colleges implement these changes. It only takes a phone call to find out their availability, the estimated time to implement the process in each of the three scenarios outlined in the book, and the cost.
Given the five forces colliding to create the current Cat 5 storm, I would posit that continuing to operate the same way, collecting the same metrics, and waiting for traditional milestones to occur while ignoring behavioral signals will not lead your institution out of the storm unharmed. Buy the book, read it several times as I did, and get moving before your competitors do.
