Higher Ed Identity Crisis: Can AI Shake It Off?

From confusion to clarity, this emerging technology might help colleges find their future.

GUEST COLUMN | by Ashish Fernando

JM GRAFIX

Higher education is experiencing an identity crisis. With enrollment rates declining, student engagement plunging, and admissions teams overworked, many institutions are seriously looking out for other convincing options to revive themselves.

Although the decrease in enrollment numbers is not a recent phenomenon, it has most certainly become a longstanding crisis for which the solutions are still harder to find.

As institutions struggle to stay afloat amid shrinking numbers, they are heading towards operational closures. Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to attribute declining enrollments as the sole cause of the higher-ed crisis. Demographic cliffs, alternative educational pathways, and employee burnout also add to the worries.

With financial concerns looming large, institutions are wondering how technology—specifically, AI—can shun monetary woes and help them redesign their enrollment processes.

‘With financial concerns looming large, institutions are wondering how technology—specifically, AI—can shun monetary woes and help them redesign their enrollment processes.’

Increasing Workloads, Understaffed Teams: AI Up for a Balancing Act

With mounting administrative burdens and universities operating on tighter budgets becoming a common sight, smaller enrollment teams are struggling with enormous workloads with seething discontent.

In this case, AI acts as an enabler in streamlining operations and enrollments, giving teams the much-needed space to focus on high-priority deliverables rather than redoing repetitive tasks costing them precious time. AI’s intervention gives them the time to engage with students in a meaningful way, guiding them through the enrollment funnel and making them feel included.

While some may view AI as a threat to human employment, which actually is far from the truth, it has become a calling card for universities as it does not seek to empty the enrollment department. AI tools enhance their efficiency by automating mundane (yet important) tasks, offering 24/7 student support, and reformulating engagement strategies with data-driven insights.

It allows enrollment counsellors and advisors to concentrate on designing outreach strategies and retain students with personalized guidance and data-driven decision-making.

While the presence of smaller enrollment teams with no AI does not exactly meet expectations, cultivating AI-literate teams by deploying the right tools not only helps maximize productivity and engage students better but also solves critical issues like staffing cuts as well as emotional and mental burn-out.

Rethinking Strategies: From a Lackluster Outreach to Data-Driven Messaging

While traditional enrollment funnels subscribe to a unidirectional path, modern admissions require a swift approach that includes quick outreach, messaging, and immediate follow-ups. If it is not student-centric, the whole exercise becomes futile.

On the other hand, students are quite self-aware, so they do not commit to an institution in haste. They explore options, make their own wishlists, and narrow them down based on multiple factors. They have wholesome judgement criteria and pick only the ones that feel right.

Students tend to downsize their wishlists by removing colleges that are unresponsive, lack real-time application updates, ignore student queries, and fester old-fashioned operational ways.

In the era of rapid communication, quick and personalized responses are the key to thriving and standing out from the rest, prompting students to take appropriate actions and helping them make well-informed decisions.

AI enables tailored messaging, aligning outreach according to students’ interests, enrollment stages, locations, and past actions. Institutions are breaking out of generic messaging campaigns and misaligned content designs to targeted messaging that actually brings the desired results.

AI is not just a messaging co-creator but also understands contexts. It assists institutions to keep tabs on open rates, click-throughs, time spent on page, form fills, and A/B testing results to readjust individual messaging.

Taking the help of technologies bolsters engagement and response rates, brushes up outreach campaigns, and leads to stronger student satisfaction, creating a more democratic and student-driven enrollment process.

Concluding Thoughts

Crisis calls for opportunity making. The higher-ed industry is coming to terms with AI usage in different and broader contexts as problems differ from institution to institution. Technology has become one of the pivotal yardsticks to judge an institution’s forward-thinking in the stream of “too many options”. In a fight to stay relevant and attract students rapidly, institutions are experimenting and transforming their enrollment journey by making it more and more student-friendly through AI.

As higher education institutions take a slew of measures to allay the crisis, AI will play a predominant role in reshaping college admissions, bolstering student interactions, and restoring institution credibility.

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Ashish Fernando is the Founder and CEO of EDMO & iSchoolConnect, companies focused on revolutionizing student admissions with AI-driven solutions. Passionate about education, Ashish aims to bridge the gap between education and the workforce. With a background in leadership and entrepreneurship, he emphasizes the importance of action over perfection and strategic focus in creating real-world success. Connect with Ashish on LinkedIn.