Key points:
- A website is the proverbial front door–institutions must get prospective students through it
- Using student housing to sharpen your retention strategy
- Rethinking higher education enrollment trends for a plateau era
- For more news on prospective students, visit eCN’s Campus Leadership hub
I’ve spent more than 30 years working in higher education, so I know my way around a college website. I understand how institutions are organized. I know the difference between admissions and enrollment, academic affairs and student affairs, advancement and communications. I generally have a pretty good idea of where information should live.
And yet, I still routinely find myself visiting university websites and unable to find the information I need.
Sometimes I deliberately approach a site as a prospective student, trying to apply or find information about financial aid.
If someone who’s worked for decades in higher education (and knows exactly how the sausage is made) struggles to find basic information, imagine what the experience is like for a 17-year-old first-time college student interacting with your institution for the first time?
That should make us rethink how we approach higher education website design and strategy.
Higher-education websites have too many audiences
Higher education websites are inherently built with many audiences in mind. Alumni want to stay connected, donors need information, athletics want to draw in audiences (and ticket sales), and current students need to find everything from course information to campus services. All of those audiences are important.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons a university website has multiple audiences. But that doesn’t mean every audience should have equal priority on the digital front door.
Why, though, I have to ask (and this is largely a rhetorical question), do websites so often seem to be prioritizing prospective students the least?
Prospective students keep the lights on at colleges and universities, but the campus website experience rarely reflects that.
It’s especially misdirected when you think of it this way: alumni have been to your website before, and ostensibly so have sports fans (and the “athletics” usually gives it away) and donors. Current students were walked through it during orientation.
But a student starting their college exploration? They don’t know where to look. And often, they haven’t been introduced to what your institution entails and values. They don’t know what makes you different or why they will or will not belong there. And there’s a good chance they’re overwhelmed.
I understand that websites have many roles and that many stakeholders want the audiences they serve to be represented. But prospective students are the audience that makes all of these other audiences possible—and the one that needs the clearest explanation of who you are, what you offer, and what makes you different.
More technology won’t fix a bad college website UX
According to research, more than nine in 10 high school students report using an institution’s website as part of their college exploration process. Yet students continue to report frustration with finding information and navigating these sites (one study found that 22% find it hard to find info about specific majors while 18% say directions related to admissions are “confusing.”)
Higher education has more digital tools than ever—search, analytics, personalization, chatbots, artificial intelligence, and more. These can improve a website, and it’s very tempting to try and utilize all of them. But don’t lose sight of what technology can’t do: clearly communicate your unique value add. Or, fix an experience that wasn’t designed around the user in the first place.
Before adopting the next digital tool, institutions should ask a simpler set of questions: What are we asking prospective students to accomplish when they come to our website? And are we making it clear why they should want to do those things with us?
Design for the student, not the institution
This comes back to something I find myself repeating a lot: Put yourself in their shoes.
One place to start is actually to navigate your website as different prospective college or university students. What happens if you’re a first-generation student trying to understand the application process? An adult learner looking for an online program? A parent trying to figure out what college will cost?
Then test those same experiences with actual prospective students—or people who closely resemble them. Give them a simple task—find the application deadline, find the cost, find someone to contact—and watch what happens. Where do they click? Where do they hesitate? What do they misunderstand?
It may be uncomfortable to watch someone struggle with something your team knows should be easy to find. But that’s exactly why the exercise is valuable. You may discover that while your website serves one audience well, it creates friction for another. And that’s the kind of information you need to decide what to fix—and what to prioritize.
Your college website is your digital front door
For today’s prospective students, a website or social media account may be their first interaction with an institution. It’s the proverbial front door—and institutions must get prospective students through it.
Prospective students are encountering the institution with the least context and the most questions.
If prospective students are essential to an institution’s future, its digital front door should be optimized first and foremost to their needs—not the institution’s internal structure.
Roger Jones is AVP of Development at The Parish Group and is a higher education enrollment strategist with more than 30 years of experience working with colleges and universities. Since beginning his enrollment management career in the mid-1990s, he has worked with public, public research, community college, and private liberal arts institutions, giving him a broad perspective on enrollment strategy and the challenges facing higher education.
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