By Emily West
I’ve been through the college enrollment process before, and to be honest, it’s not exactly something that I wish to do again. And yet, as part of my role at UPCEA, I regularly step into the shoes of a prospective student during our Enrollment Process Reviews. These “secret shopper” exercises involve posing as potential applicants and interacting with colleges and universities to evaluate their responsiveness, the clarity and quality of their initial communications, and how they compare to competitors and to UPCEA’s benchmarking averages.
After conducting this exercise for several institutions, a few patterns have emerged. The most effective institutions prioritize responsiveness, quality, and ongoing engagement while avoiding overly complicated processes and impersonal interactions. Below are some key takeaways about what works, what doesn’t, and where institutions might miss the mark with prospective students in the very top of the enrollment funnel.
Timely and Helpful Responses
Institutions that respond to inquiries within a few hours stand out. Those that take a full day or more, especially without providing a detailed answer, risk losing students to more responsive competitors. The efficiency of responses is particularly important for prospective graduate students – a critical market for online offerings. Two-thirds (68%) of graduate students consider three or fewer institutions prior to sending inquiries, and 67% inquire with only one or two institutions.[1] A delay in outreach may deter these inquirers, leading them to explore schools that are more responsive and proactive. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of graduate students said they are more likely to enroll at the institution that first admits them. Furthermore, 19% said conversations with staff or advisors were the most influential factor when choosing between schools, while another 15% cited emails from those institutions. [2]
Nothing makes me more optimistic about a school than a speedy response that directly addresses my question and even goes a step further, such as offering additional resources or asking about my goals. A simple, “Let me know if you have other questions” is a great start, but an overused phase, in my opinion. The best responses feel like they come from a real person who is eager to help, not from a copy-and-paste template. If I ask whether a program has evening classes, I don’t just want a link to a course catalog. I want someone to say, “Yes, we do offer evening classes, and here’s how that might fit into your schedule. Let me know if you’d like help mapping it out.” That kind of response makes me believe that I would be well supported as a student during my academic journey.
Thoughtful Follow-Ups That Add Value
One common mistake that institutions make is assuming that a single response to an inquiry is enough. If I were really exploring my options and inquiring with many different schools, I’d probably forget who I emailed within a few days or lose track of a response in my busy inbox. The institutions that stay on my radar are the ones that send well-timed follow-ups that provide something useful, such as financial aid guidance, upcoming information sessions, or student success stories. The best follow-ups feel like, “Hey, I know you were interested…here’s something cool that might help you decide.” One particularly memorable follow-up came from an institution that shared a brief history of their college mascot. It was fun, lighthearted, and unexpectedly made me feel more connected to the school.
UPCEA’s findings show that universities that incorporate drip campaigns or follow-up emails see higher engagement rates. Conversely, we occasionally come across institutions that fail to follow up at all—meaning prospective students are left without guidance or encouragement to continue their enrollment journey.
Meet Prospective Students Where They Are
Another reoccurring misstep I observe as a secret shopper are institutions that treat every inquiry as a commitment to apply. In these instances, automated responses immediately push application links, skipping over the fact that inquirers may still be in the discovery phase. If the first email I receive after my initial inquiry says, “Congratulations on starting your application!” I immediately feel misunderstood. A better approach acknowledges where students are in their decision-making process. A message like, “We’re excited about your interest! Here’s more information, and let us know how we can help,” is far more inviting and respectful of the student’s timeline.
An Easy and Painless Inquiry Process
Request for information (RFI) forms should be as simple as possible. Yet too often, institutions ask for too much up front—home address, phone number, birthdate, start date preferences—before offering basic answers. Research from UPCEA indicates that only 60% of prospective students are willing to provide their phone number, and just 51% are willing to share their date of birth during this initial communication with an institution.[3] Those requiring unnecessary details at this stage risk deterring prospective students. I’m also a big fan of institutions that embed RFI forms into program landing pages and auto-populate the program field; that creates a smoother experience and reduces frustration. One university we recently reviewed had a three-field RFI form that prefilled program information and included a box for open-ended questions. Chef’s kiss!
Clear and Accessible Contact Options
Automation is helpful, but only up to a point. Students still want (and need) to know they can reach an actual human. Those that clearly list phone numbers, direct email addresses, or offer live chat with staff create a stronger impression of accessibility and care. When contact information is buried or limited to a generic address like [email protected], it signals that personalized support may be hard to come by.
As for chatbots, some are genuinely helpful but many fall short. If it can’t help and simply regurgitates a list of website links (often ones I’ve already looked at), I’m out. A better experience would look like this: I ask a question, the bot makes an attempt to answer, and if it can’t, it offers to connect me with an admissions rep or directs me to live support. That shows me the institution values real engagement and isn’t just trying to automate me out of the conversation.
Leave No Question Unanswered & Take Ownership
This seems basic, but it’s surprising how often it’s overlooked. One of the most important things institutions can do is actually answer the question a student asks. Sometimes I’ll ask a specific question, such as “Does your online program require a residency?” and get back a generic response like, “Thank you for your interest in our university! Click here for more information.” If I need to send an additional follow-up just to get my question answered, I already feel discouraged. The best responses engage with what the student asks, not just direct them to a website. One university in a recent enrollment process review had a very strong response rate—84% of all inquiries received a reply—but only 70% of those replies actually answered the questions asked by our secret shoppers. That gap is a missed opportunity to build trust and demonstrate support.
Equally frustrating is being told to contact someone else. If I ask about transfer credits and get a response that says, “You’ll need to email the registrar’s office for that information,” I feel dismissed. The best institutions take ownership: either answer directly or forward the inquiry internally. Don’t make the student do the legwork of navigating your internal systems. That small act of service signals that you care about the student experience from day one.
Final Thoughts
If I were a real prospective student, my decision to enroll would be heavily influenced by how I was treated during the inquiry process. Did the institution respond quickly? Did they answer my questions? Did they make me feel welcomed and supported? The schools that stand out in these enrollment process reviews are the ones that make the process feel effortless, personal, and even energizing. They make me forget, if only for a moment, that this is just a research exercise.
When institutions get their earliest enrollment communications right, they don’t just increase engagement and conversion, they build trust. They make students feel confident that they’ll be supported not just at the start, but throughout their educational journey.
[1] https://insights.educationdynamics.com/modern-learner-report-2025.html
[2] Ibid
[3] The Six Personas of the New Learner: Changing Motivations and Situations of the New Learner Landscape (UPCEA & ThinkingCap, 2021)
The 2025 State of Continuing Education study examines the evolving role of online and professional continuing education (PCE) units in higher education, focusing on program offerings, institutional support, technology integration, and collaboration across academic units.-
Collaboration with online and PCE units for continuing education has increased, but administrative burden remains a top challenge.
-
5,500: Median online and PCE unit enrollment
-
8%: Increase in collaboration with other units, schools, or colleges for CE programming
-
48%: Agree it is easy to access real-time enrollment data
The field of higher education is notoriously slow to change. Yet, when faced with the extraordinary challenges of today, our associations are quick to foster support, collaboration and unity.
just returned from the UPCEA Annual Conference held in Denver. A record attendance of some 1,300 administrators, faculty and staff from member institutions gathered to share policies, practices, innovations and knowledge in advancing the mission of higher education in 2025. It was a thriving and exciting environment of energy and enthusiasm in seeking solutions to challenges that confront us today and into the future.
Recent policy shifts regarding the federal funding of grants provided by the institutes and foundations that support university research were on the minds of most who attended. These topics provided the undercurrent of discussions in many of the sessions. The spirit was one of supporting each other in advancing their initiatives despite the prospect of cuts in federal support. The confluence of the demographic enrollment cliff of college-bound students due to the drop in births during the previous recession of 2007-2009 and additional promised cuts in funding from federal and many state sources, created an environment for collaboration on solving shared challenges rivaled only by that of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A number of the sessions addressed innovations with cost savings, efficiencies, and effectiveness gains that can be realized by thoughtfully introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into supporting many aspects of the higher education mission. The potential savings are significant if they can take over duties of positions that become vacant or instances where staff are better utilized by shifting their efforts elsewhere.
By Fall 2025, readily available AI tools will be able to serve in course development, delivery and assessment:
- Conceive, design, create, online (even self-paced) courses
- Adapt and update class materials with emerging concepts, societal situations, and news context
- Lead and assess class discussions – stimulate deeper thought and engagement
- Assess course assignments with personalized recommendations to fill in the gaps in knowledge
- Provide one-on-one counseling on academic matters and referrals for personal challenges
- Create a summative assessment of course outcomes and initiate revisions for improvement
- Generate a deep-thinking report for administrators and committees to consider
By Fall 2025, readily available AI tools will be able to serve in curriculum development, marketing and student on-boarding:
- Survey specified fields for addition or expansion of degree and certificate programs
- Recommend detailed curriculum for new programs and suggest tuition/fees
- Create marketing plans after developing a report on demand and competitors in the program area
- Develop, track, implement and adapt marketing budget
- Prepare and support student advising to optimize retention and completion
- Prepare updated and revised plans for Spring 2026
By Fall 2025, develop optimal staff allocation and review process:
- Assess performance evaluations, recommend additional interviews as appropriate
- Develop, refine and utilize departmental/college priority list to respond to revenue and enrollment trends for the year
- Match staff skills with desired outcomes
- Monitor productivity and accomplishments for each employee
- Make recommendations for further efficiencies, having AI perform some tasks such as accounting and data analysis tasks previously done by humans
- Be responsive to employee aspirations and areas of greatest interest
- Review and prepare updated and revised plans for Spring 2026
These tasks and many more can be accomplished by AI tools that can be acquired at modest costs. Of course, they must be carefully reviewed by human administrators to ensure fairness and accuracy is maintained.
I learned from a number of those attending the UPCEA conference that, in these relatively early stages of AI implementation, many employees harbor fears of AI. Concerns center around human job security. While there are many tasks that AI can more efficiently and effectively perform than humans, most current jobs include aspects that are best performed by humans. So, in most cases, the use of AI will be in a role of augmentation of human work to make it more expedient and save time for other new tasks the human employees can best perform.
This presents the need for upskilling to enable human staff to make the efficiencies possible by learning to work best with AI. Interestingly, in most cases experts say this will not require computer coding or other such skills. Rather, this will require personnel to understand the capabilities of AI in order to tap these skills to advance the goals of the unit and university. Positions in which humans and AI are co-workers will require excellent communication skills, organizational skills, critical thinking, and creative thinking. AI performs well at analytical, synthetical, predictive, and creative tasks among others. It is adept at taking on leadership and managerial roles that recognize the unit and institutional priorities as well as employee preferences and abilities.
How then can we best prepare our staff for optimizing their working relations with the new AI co-workers? I believe this begins with personal experience with AI tools. We all should become comfortable with conducting basic searches using a variety of chatbots. Learning to compose a proper prompt is the cornerstone of communicating with AI.
The next step is to use a handful of the readily available deep-research tools to generate a report on a topic that is relevant to the staff member’s work. Compare and contrast those reports for quality, accuracy and the substance of cited material. Perform the research iteratively to improve or refine results. This Medium post offers a good summary of leading deep-research engines and best applications, although it was released in February and may be dated due to the Gemini version 2.5 Pro released last week on March 26. This new version by Google is topping many of the current ratings charts.
In sum, we are facing changes of an unprecedented scale with the disruption of long-standing policies, funding sources, and a shrinking incoming student pool. Fortunately, these changes are coming at the same time as AI is maturing into a dependable tool that can take on some of the slack that will come from not filling vacancies. However, to meet that need we must begin to provide training to our current and incoming employees to ensure that they can make the most of AI tools we will provide.
Together, through the collaborative support of UPCEA and other associations, we in higher education will endure these challenges as we did those posed by the COVID pandemic.
This article was originally published on Inside Higher Ed.
In an era of heightened urgency, higher education institutions find themselves at a pivotal crossroads—confronting enrollment cliffs, shifting demographics, and growing skepticism about the value of a degree. Further, shifting federal policy and changes at the Department of Education will challenge postsecondary leaders like never before. Amid this turbulence, one area consistently demonstrates adaptability, innovation, and a clear-eyed view of the modern learner: professional, continuing, and online education (PCOE).
At the #UPCEA2025 session titled “The Future is Here: Translating Innovations From Online and Professional Education Into the Mainstream of Institutions and Systems,” a panel of PCOE leaders—Jenni Murphy, Vickie Cook, Jason Ruckert, and Lisa Templeton—gathered to share how their units and their unique personal talents are now central to institutional survival and success. With Julie Uranis moderating, the conversation moved beyond inspiration, offering blueprints for action.
PCOE Leaders as Institutional Change Agents
What makes PCOE leaders so valuable beyond their units? According to the panel, it’s their entrepreneurial mindset, strategic agility, cross-functional know-how, and relentless focus on student needs. These qualities positioned them to lead during crises—from pandemic-related chaos to structural enrollment declines. Each panelist offered real-world examples of leading enrollment management overhauls, system-wide restructuring, and digital transformation, all rooted in their PCOE experience.
With the short tenure of most institutional presidents and provosts, Uranis observed that longtime employees such as the four panelists, each having around two decades of employment at their institutions, were known commodities at their institutions. For new presidents and provosts hoping to be a catalyst for change, these trusted leaders could legitimize decisions and assist in the change management process. In essence, senior PCOE leaders have what new leaders lack, institutional history and knowledge of the organization.
But perhaps most importantly, they embody a cultural competency that higher education often overlooks: understanding the modern learner. Today’s learners are adults with jobs, caretaking responsibilities, and shifting career goals. They’re not just looking for education—they’re looking for flexibility, relevance, and ROI.
From Silos to Systems: Breaking Barriers to Innovation
Despite the successes, scaling PCOE innovations is far from frictionless. Institutional inertia, siloed structures, risk-averse cultures, and outdated financial models remain formidable obstacles. The panel offered strategies to address these barriers, from leveraging UPCEA’s Hallmarks of Excellence to aligning innovation efforts with institutional mission and metrics. Change, they emphasized, starts with trust, over-communication, and building psychologically safe environments for collaboration.
Online Education & Credentials: The New Academic Frontier
Online education is no longer an add-on. It’s an expectation. And the panelists underscored how their institutions are pushing even further—into micro-credentials, stackable pathways, and corporate partnerships that reflect real workforce needs. At institutions like Oregon State and UIS, these innovations are already reshaping access and learner experience. For institutions still catching up, the focus is on laying the groundwork for sustainable, scalable, future-proof transformation.
Access, Equity, and the Modern Learner
The session didn’t shy away from the equity conversation. PCOE units have long served those who fall outside the traditional student mold—returning adults, rural learners, international students, and others often rendered invisible by traditional metrics. As Lisa Templeton noted, today’s learners—regardless of age—prioritize flexibility, affordability, and career outcomes. It’s up to institutions to meet them where they are.
This vision was perhaps best captured by Jenni Murphy’s assertion: “If you can’t see them, you can’t serve them.” That ethos runs through everything PCOE units do—from CRM implementations to statewide policy partnerships aimed at creating “adult-ready” and “adult-friendly” designations.
A Call to Action
The future of higher education is already unfolding in PCOE units. They are not on the margins; they are the test labs, the bridge builders, and increasingly, the architects of institutional resilience and relevance.
Now is the time to stop asking whether PCOE leaders and units belong at the core of our institutions—and to start building systems that recognize what they already are.
By Jenni Murphy, Dean of the College of Continuing Education at California State University, Sacramento; Vickie Cook, Vice Chancellor for Enrollment and Retention Management at the University of Illinois Springfield; Jason Ruckert, Senior Vice President for Enrollment Management, Marketing & Student Affairs at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Lisa Templeton, Vice Provost for the Division of Educational Ventures at Oregon State University; and Julie Uranis, Senior Vice President for Online and Strategic Initiatives at UPCEA.