College Board flags four enrollment shifts
The College Board outlined four major shifts reshaping the enrollment landscape and argued that some traditional recruitment strategies no longer fit today’s student needs. Those framing shifts reinforce the need to rethink outreach tactics for decision‑stage students. (x.com)
Colleges used to spend heavily on juniors and seniors, then wait for applications. College Board is now telling enrollment teams that by the time many students show up in the process, they have already done their homework somewhere else. (signup.collegeboard.org) The first shift is that students now start with search tools, not with campus mailers or admissions calls. College Board says students use online tools like BigFuture to research schools and show interest before they contact a college directly. (signup.collegeboard.org) That changes the timing. College Board says students who add a school to their BigFuture list are “qualified, organic leads” and are 10 times more likely to apply, which means the useful signal now appears while a student is still browsing. (signup.collegeboard.org) The second shift is demographic, and it is bigger than any email campaign. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that the number of United States high school graduates peaked at 3.9 million in 2025 and will fall to 3.4 million by 2041, a 13% drop. (wiche.edu) When the pool shrinks, late outreach gets riskier. College Board says focusing mainly on juniors and seniors is “no longer an effective strategy” and argues that colleges need to start building relationships earlier in high school. (signup.collegeboard.org) The company ties that early push to its own data. College Board says students who connect with colleges through its Search service are 25% more likely to enroll in a four-year college and 31% more likely to graduate in four years than similar students who were not identified through Search. (highered.collegeboard.org) The third shift is about how students expect to be talked to. College Board says today’s students live in an “era of algorithms,” so generic messages that repeat facts from a college website are less useful than messages matched to a student’s interests. (signup.collegeboard.org) That is why its recruitment pitch now runs through a phone, not a brochure rack. BigFuture School is a free mobile app for United States students age 13 and older who took an in-school Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test or in-school Scholastic Aptitude Test, and students who opt in can receive messages from nonprofit colleges, scholarship providers, and government agencies. (bigfuture.collegeboard.org, satsuite.collegeboard.org) The fourth shift is scale. College Board says more than 6 million unique students participated in Search and Connections between 2022 and 2023, a 7% increase from Search alone, and its current pitch to colleges is that Search reaches more than 5 million students each year, or about 2 in 3 high school students. (signup.collegeboard.org, highered.collegeboard.org) Put together, the message is blunt: the old model of waiting for seniors, sending the same copy to everyone, and treating search behavior like a side note no longer matches how students move. College Board’s answer is earlier contact, mobile messaging, and outreach triggered by what students actually do online. (signup.collegeboard.org, highered.collegeboard.org)
