What does it actually take to recruit domestic students in a market shaped by a demographic cliff, shrinking international pipelines, and prospective students who research everything, everywhere, before they ever fill out a form?
That was the question at the heart of our recent webinar, Back to Basics: The Building Blocks of Domestic Recruitment, hosted by Gjergj Dollani, podcast host of The Enrollment Clinic podcast. The panel: Robert M. Kadar, Head of Graduate Enrollment Marketing at Yeshiva University, Sonya Lapikas, Associate Director of Admissions at Thiel College, John Gibson, Senior Managing Director, Residential Masters Programs at Purdue University Daniels School of Business, and John F. Albanese, Director of Admissions and Recruitment at City Tech, CUNY.
Here’s what they agreed is working now.
Lead with ROI, but don’t reduce it to a salary number
Our research shows that 53% of domestic students rank affordability as their top factor. But the panel’s message was that value is bigger than a salary figure: prospective students and parents weigh affordability, location, reputation, and outcomes, plus one bucket surveys often miss: the experience. Even liberal arts programs can get ahead on student recruitment by connecting families with current students and alumni.
“I like to frame it as: a liberal arts education is preparing students for more than one job after graduation,” said Sonya Lapikas.
Go old school and get to a human fast
With international demand down as much as 40% year over year in some areas, Purdue’s Daniels School turned to its own backyard of 40,000 undergraduates, pop-up events in every building, targeted messages on campus screens, and a famously successful “dirty soda” giveaway that captured leads via student ID. Recruiters followed up personally the next day. The result: domestic submitted applications up 40%, admitted students up 43% – a real win in a tricky local student recruitment landscape.
Your program pages are your most important marketing asset
Search no longer just means Google; it means TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and, increasingly, AI, which now accounts for roughly 30 percent of program discovery. And AI doesn’t always get it right: when Yeshiva University halved its online MBA tuition, AI tools kept quoting the old $50,000 price, and prospects walked away believing the program cost too much. The fix: treat your program pages as the source of truth AI will scrape, and keep them ruthlessly accurate. Make sure they answer the real questions: What are the outcomes? What does it cost? How long does it take? Who is it for?, and that the information is accurate everywhere it appears. As one panelist put it, discovery gets the student in the door; credibility keeps them there.
“Students are out there on their own at 2 a.m.,” said John Albanese. “Maybe they’re gaming, and they decide to take a break, ‘I’m gonna start looking at schools.’ What are they going to find?”
Put real people, including faculty, in the funnel
Students don’t just want to hear from admissions, they want to hear from faculty, staff, and, above all, current students. The panel shared how they sequence those voices throughout the local student recruitment journey: current students early in the funnel, helping vet and warm up leads; faculty later, as trusted “closers” through coffee chats and conversations with program directors. One admissions team found that formal faculty meetings can intimidate prospective students, but a faculty member casually “popping in” during a campus visit works.
The panel challenged a long-standing piece of student marketing orthodoxy: that faculty shouldn’t front your promotion. Faculty aren’t separate from the product, they are part of the product; they build the curriculum and mentor students every day and not showcasing them is a disservice to your institution.
Spend on conversations, not clicks
Where do schools waste the most money? The panel’s answer was unanimous: list buys. One panelist reported seeing little return on purchased lists over the past decade, and a deeper analysis at Yeshiva University found that 90% of enrolled students had never filled out a lead form. The typical journey from first ad click to application takes 8-12 months, driven by informed, patient research, not impulse form-fills.
So where should the money go? Anything student-facing:
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Responsive admissions advising
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High-quality yield conversations
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Faculty and alumni touchpoints
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Open houses
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Info sessions
“Activity is not enrollment. Clicks don’t fill classrooms,” stated John Gibson.
The bottom line
The demographic cliff isn’t on the horizon; the panel agreed it’s already here, with the pipeline of high school seniors set to shrink by more than a quarter in some regions over the next 10–15 years. That makes transfer students, adult learners, dual enrollment, and retention more important than ever, and it makes the fundamentals matter most: an authentic value story, accurate information everywhere students look, a real human connection early, and budgets focused on conversion, not clicks.
Want to recruit more domestic students?
Get your programs on the trusted, native-language portals domestic students actually use, so you land right in their shortlists without the search engine middle-man.
Watch the on-demand recording of Back to Basics: The Building Blocks of Domestic Recruitment on our website.
