Key points:
- AI is dramatically upending the college admissions process
- Higher ed faces mounting challenges amid evolving expectations
- Rethinking higher education enrollment trends for a plateau era
- For more news on admissions and AI, visit eCN’s Campus Leadership hub
When 5W started working with higher ed clients, the college search playbook ran on a predictable rhythm. Viewbooks, campus tours, search name purchases, Common App funnel management, a tight paid-media plan, and a frantic spring yield push. Marketing spent 12 months on top of funnel. Enrollment spent 12 months on bottom of funnel. If the two functions talked, it was usually about PSAT search-name lists.
That playbook is now a year, maybe two, from obsolescence. And the cycle closing right now, seniors submitting enrollment deposits in the next 30 days, is the last one that will look anything like the old ones.
In February 2026, the enrollment consulting firm EAB published survey data from more than 5,000 high school students showing that 46 percent now use AI tools like ChatGPT during their college search, up sharply from 26 percent in spring 2025. That is nearly a doubling in 12 months. The same survey found that 34 percent of students said their interest in a college grew because of AI research, and 18 percent had removed a college from consideration based on what AI told them. That last number is the one enrollment vice presidents should have printed on their office walls. Nearly one in five high school seniors has already eliminated a school from consideration without that school ever having the chance to make its case directly.
Inside Higher Ed called it “AI visibility becoming priority.” The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in April that educational consultants are seeing students make enrollment decisions partially on AI advice. A 2025 Adobe study found that 28 percent of Gen Z users launch a search with an AI chatbot rather than a search engine. Gallup and Lumina’s 2026 State of Higher Education study found 42 percent of bachelor’s students have reconsidered their major because of AI, and 14 percent cite preparing for AI as a reason they enrolled in college at all.
This is not a generational preview. It is the channel shift that has already happened.
What the AI shift actually changed for enrollment marketing
The first impression moved off your viewbook. A prospective student’s first detailed encounter with your institution is no longer your website, a campus visit, or a counselor conversation. It is an AI-generated paragraph describing your school’s fit, culture, selectivity, and price tag. That paragraph is assembled from sources your marketing team largely does not manage, Wikipedia, Niche, College Confidential threads, Reddit r/applyingtocollege, US News’ structured data, and third-party editorial coverage. Your own domain is rarely the primary source.
Fit marketing got repriced. For a generation, colleges marketed “fit” through high-touch narrative content, viewbooks, virtual tours, admissions officer videos. AI collapses fit into a two-paragraph summary based on structured signals AI can extract quickly. Schools that have invested in machine-readable, structured information about majors, financial aid, student outcomes, and campus culture are outperforming schools with beautifully designed but narratively dense marketing assets.
The small college got a new opening. The AI era is surprisingly kind to regional and mid-sized institutions that have historically been crowded out by the top 50 national brand names. When a student tells ChatGPT they want a college in the Mid-Atlantic with strong nursing, a Division III soccer program, and a price under $35,000 after aid, the AI cannot fall back on name recognition. It has to match against structured data. Regional colleges that have invested in clear, machine-readable information about what they offer are being surfaced in conversations that never would have reached them through a traditional search-name buy.
The mistake I see every week
The single most common mistake I see from enrollment vice presidents right now is treating the AI shift as a website refresh problem.
It is not. The AI answer about your college is being assembled from dozens of sources. Most of them are not on your domain. Your Wikipedia entry. Your College Scorecard data. Your Common Data Set. Your Niche reviews. Your r/applyingtocollege mentions. The YouTube campus vlog from a current student. Your job placement outcomes as reported in third-party employment data. The content your marketing team spent 18 months producing on your own site is a small contributor to the AI answer. The content other people produced about you is the majority of it. If you do not know what those sources say, you do not know what your brand is.
What I would tell enrollment leaders and presidents right now
Run the prompt audit. Pull together a list of 50 prospective-student prompts that mirror how real 17-year-olds ask AI tools about colleges. Include institutional name prompts, fit prompts, comparison prompts, affordability prompts, and outcomes prompts. Run them all across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode. Document the answers. Most presidents and provosts have never seen this data. The findings usually reset the enrollment cabinet’s priority list for the next twelve months.
Put a named owner on Wikipedia, Common Data Set, and College Scorecard. These three sources drive a disproportionate share of AI-generated answers about any accredited US institution. They are all under your organizational control, but usually not under any one team’s ownership. An institutional research lead who spends two days a year updating these is a higher-ROI hire for AI visibility than another digital marketing coordinator.
Stop building ungovernable narrative content. Beautiful, photo-rich, story-driven landing pages that take three scrolls to reach a factual claim are not what AI is extracting. Clear, structured, entity-rich content with specific outcomes data, specific program features, specific financial aid figures, and specific student quotes, that is what AI extracts, cites, and uses to fill in the answer. Marketing teams that cannot give up the feature-magazine aesthetic will lose to marketing teams that have.
Coordinate with your students directly. The largest untapped asset in higher ed AI visibility is the content current students and recent alumni produce about your institution on YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit. Models pull aggressively from this material. A program that systematically helps student content creators do what they already want to do, produce honest, specific, useful content about their campus, will out-visible a school that is trying to do this from the marketing office. Authenticity is a retrieval signal, not just a content virtue.
What a decade in higher ed PR has taught me
When we started working with colleges, the hardest problem in enrollment marketing was getting a prospective student’s attention. The solution was always a mix of media, print, search, email, event, campus visit, designed to reach a seventeen-year-old where they were paying attention.
The AI shift is the same problem at a new scale. The 17-year-old is paying attention to ChatGPT. The institutions that will fill classes in 2027, 2028, and 2029 are the ones whose marketing leaders accept that AI visibility is not a digital tactic inside enrollment marketing. It is the top of the funnel for every 17-year-old with an internet connection.
Higher ed tends to move slowly on technology shifts. The schools that move quickly on this one–three or four presidents and provosts deciding in 2026 that their institutional research office, their Common Data Set, their Wikipedia presence, and their structured outcomes data are as important as their admissions marketing budget–will fill classes for a decade, while slower-moving peers run into demographic cliff plus AI visibility gap compounding against them simultaneously. The demographic cliff is the stated enrollment crisis. The AI visibility gap is the quiet one underneath it.
Ronn Torossian is the Founder and Chairman of 5W Public Relations, one of the largest independently owned PR firms in the United States. Since founding 5WPR in 2003, he has led the company’s growth and vision, with the agency earning accolades including being named a Top 50 Global PR Agency by PRovoke Media, a top three NYC PR agency by O’Dwyers, one of Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces, and multiple American Business Awards, including a Stevie Award for PR Agency of the Year. Torossian is the author of “For Immediate Release,” a Forbes columnist, and a frequent media commentator on crisis communications and marketing strategy.
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