Why Higher Education Enrollment Marketers Struggle with their Leads
A Q&A with Cassandra Razzi and Wesley Rupar
By Calvin Scharffs
Enrollment marketing in higher education is under more pressure than it's been in a generation. The traditional playbook (run ads, collect leads, hand them to admissions) isn't working the way it once did. And the institutions that recognize that earliest are going to be the ones that come out ahead.
To understand what's actually happening on the ground, I spoke with Cassandra Razzi, Senior Business Development Manager, and Wesley Rupar, Sr. Director, Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, at Orange 142. Orange 142 is a digital marketing and enrollment partner that helps universities connect media, UX, and admissions workflows to drive enrollments, not just leads. Both Cassandra and Wesley work directly with higher education marketing teams, and our conversation covered everything from demographic headwinds to AI-powered ad tools to the uncomfortable truth about what happens after a lead comes in.
CS: Let's start with the big picture. Why is it so difficult right now for universities to recruit potential students for their programs?
Cassandra: The short answer is demographics. The 2008 financial crisis caused a significant drop in birth rates, and those missing babies are now the 17- and 18-year-olds who should be filling incoming classes. There are simply fewer traditional-age students to recruit, and that decline isn't a one-year blip. It's a trend that's going to continue for several more years.
Wesley: And it's not just the numbers. The students who are out there have more options than ever. They're comparison-shopping across institutions. They're more skeptical of the value proposition of a degree. So you have fewer prospects and higher expectations at the same time.
CS: So what does that mean for enrollment marketing strategy?
Wesley: It means the enrollment marketing team needs to make sure they’re fully integrated with admissions to ensure every lead is tracked and handled. With a smaller pool of potential students, both marketing and admissions need to understand which tactics, channels and message sequences have the biggest impact on enrollment.
CS: You've said many universities don't have a lead problem; they have a systems problem. What do you mean by that?
Wesley: Most institutions we talk to are generating leads. That's not where the breakdown happens. The breakdown happens after the lead comes in. Can you trace that lead from the initial click to enrollment? In too many cases, the answer is no. Marketing doesn't know what happens to the leads they generate. Admissions often doesn't share enrollment outcomes back with marketing. Follow-up is inconsistent, sometimes a lead gets a call in 24 hours, sometimes it takes a week, sometimes it never happens.
Cassandra: And when you can't close that loop, you can't optimize. You're making budget decisions based on cost-per-lead instead of cost-per-enrollment, which means you might be pouring money into channels that generate cheap leads that never convert while starving the channels that actually drive enrolled students. That's not a lead generation problem. That's a systems problem.
CS: What does an effective enrollment follow-up cadence look like?
Cassandra: Speed matters more than anything. Day zero, or the day the lead comes in, should trigger an immediate acknowledgment, especially for graduate programs. An email, a text, ideally both. Within the first 48 hours, a personal outreach from an admissions counselor. Then a structured cadence over the next three to four weeks: a mix of emails, calls, and texts that provide relevant information about the program, answer common objections, and make it easy to take the next step.
Wesley: I think "structured" is the key word. It can't be ad hoc. It needs to be built into the CRM, with clear ownership and accountability. When we look at institutions that convert leads at a high rate, the difference is almost never the quality of the ads. It's the quality of the follow-up system.
CS: Why are higher education enrollment leads not converting?
Cassandra: This is a common challenge we hear, and it often is a result of a bad UX. For this reason, we always recommend a user experience audit as a first step.
You can have great ads driving the right people to your site, but if the landing page doesn't make it immediately clear what they should do next — request info, apply, schedule a visit — you're losing them to friction, not lack of interest. We look at all touchpoints from a student's perspective: Are the forms easy to find on mobile? Does the page match the intent of the campaign that brought them there? Where exactly are people dropping off? A lot of the time, the fix isn't more spending, it's removing the obstacles that are already in the way.
CS: How can higher ed marketing and admissions teams align on data?
Wesley: It starts with sharing it. There are five questions every marketing team should be able to answer with help from admissions: How many total enrollments came from marketing-generated leads? How long does it take a lead to convert to an enrollment? How many times is a lead contacted before they convert? Which communication channels — email, phone, text — drive the most engagement? And which programs convert best from marketing leads?
Cassandra: If admissions can’t answer those questions for marketing the institution has a gap that will hobble its enrollment. This isn’t about blame, it’s about building a shared framework so both teams are working toward the same outcomes. When that alignment exists, everything gets better; targeting improves, budgets are spent more effectively, and you stop wasting money on leads that were never going to convert.
CS: What are the biggest challenges with digital campaigns?
Wesley: I think it’s the complexity of enrollment campaigns. They’re not one-size-fits-all, especially for online programs and business schools. These types of programs are incredibly varied and are designed for people who may be at very different phases of their careers. An adult learner finishing a bachelor's degree, a working professional pursuing an MBA, and a career-changer going after a nursing credential, these are completely different people with different motivations, different timelines, and different decision-making processes. Each program needs its own strategy. So when we talk about an enrollment marketing campaign, it can be ten or more distinct campaigns.
CS: How should universities use AI ad tools like AI Max and PMAX?
Cassandra: These tools are absolutely helpful, as long as you do not set it and forget it. Our PPC team has had great success with tools such AI Max, but the results come from how you deploy them, not from just turning them on.
Wessey: The key AI Max and PMAX is being deliberate about the setup. For higher ed specifically, you want to target non-branded terms, such as searches where a prospective student isn’t looking for your institution by name but is searching for a program or outcome and pair that with a hard conversion, such as filling out an inquiry form. You need to feed the algorithm a clear signal of what "good" looks like.
Cassandra: And you still need the foundational campaign structure. If your brand and non-brand terms are not separated, if your match types are sloppy, if you can’t track what happens after the click, then AI Max is going to amplify those problems. It is a powerful tool, but it is an accelerant: it makes a good setup better and a bad setup worse.
CS: Final question. What's the one thing you'd tell an enrollment marketing leader who's reading this?
Cassie: Stop treating enrollment marketing as a media buying exercise. The ads are the easy part. The hard part,and the part that actually moves enrollment numbers, is what happens after the lead comes in. Fix the system first, then scale the spend.
Wesley: And do not go it alone. The institutions that are winning right now are the ones that have a partner who understands the full lifecycle, not just someone who can launch campaigns but someone who can look at the entire enrollment funnel and identify where it is leaking. That is where the real value is.
About Calvin Scharffs
Calvin Scharffs is a global marketing executive with over 20 years of experience in programmatic advertising, AdTech, and SaaS. He has led brand, product marketing, and demand generation teams across North America, APAC, and EMEA, helping companies sharpen their positioning and accelerate growth. A founding member of his company’s AI Council, Calvin is passionate about the responsible adoption of AI in marketing and go-to-market strategy. He is a regular contributor to industry conversations through earned media, speaking engagements, and thought leadership publications.
