Prospective Students Decide if They Belong Before They Even Inquire
Here’s the new reality: 73% of education-related queries are now answered directly by AI overviews rather than website visits. Your carefully crafted homepage might not be the first impression you make anymore. Instead, it’s a ChatGPT summary. A Reddit thread. An AI-generated comparison of programs.
And in those environments, students are discovering and judging institutions differently.
They’re scanning for evidence of fit, relevance, and outcomes before they ever inquire. Belonging isn’t just felt anymore. It’s assessed.
In those moments, prospective students are making fast, emotional decisions about whether an institution understands them. They’re asking: Is this place for someone like me? Do they understand my life? Can I see myself there?
This shift matters especially right now because the enrollment environment has been radically—and permanently—transformed. Traditional-aged undergraduate decline is expected to begin in 2026, with Fall 2025 marking a demographic high-water mark. Growth is shifting to non-traditional populations: adult learners, dual enrollment students, and professionals returning to complete credentials. These students behave differently, decide differently, and demand different experiences than the traditional 18-year-old browsing campus brochures.
Layer onto that a growing crisis of confidence in higher education itself. In 2010, three-quarters of U.S. adults considered college “very important” to success. Today, that figure is 35%. The share saying it’s “not too important” has risen to 24%. This isn’t just skepticism about cost—it’s skepticism about whether institutions understand what students actually need.
The institutions winning in this environment aren’t the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to make students feel
Meanwhile, overall enrollment continues to decline. The institutions winning in this environment have figured out how to make belonging feel real across every digital touchpoint, even when AI is mediating the discovery.
What Makes Students Today Feel Like an Institution is Built for Them
The feeling we’re talking about isn’t about warm campus photos or inclusive language in your admissions materials. It’s what happens when a prospective student can see evidence of three things:
Recognition: “They get who I am.”
Not as a demographic segment, but as a person with a specific situation and specific goals. Students look for signs that their realities have been anticipated—not explained away after the fact.
Relevance: “This fits my actual life.”
Not theoretically, but as I am right now, with the constraints I’m actually dealing with. Programs, timelines, modality, and support either align with that reality—or they don’t.
Confidence: “I trust this will work for me.”
Not just that I’ll get a degree, but that the investment will deliver what I need it to deliver. Confidence is built through clarity and specificity, not aspiration alone.
When students feel—and can confirm—all three, they inquire and engage more deeply. They enroll. They persist.
This is why programs in healthcare, business, and technology are seeing growth while programs in humanities and social sciences contract. It’s tempting to attribute this entirely to ROI anxiety. But there’s something else happening.
These growing programs have gotten better at signaling both emotional and career value in ways students can actually verify. They’ve made the case for belonging feel concrete—by showing clear pathways, visible outcomes, and realistic next steps.
A nursing program doesn’t just promise a degree; it points to licensure, job stability, and a credible path forward that a 35-year-old considering a career change can realistically envision for themselves.
The contracting programs haven’t lost their value. They’ve lost the ability to make students feel like that value is for them. That’s a belonging problem, and it’s solvable through better experience design.
Why Students Stop Believing Your Institution Understands Them
Most institutions we work with have all the right pieces. Compelling student stories. Strong outcomes data. Authentic community. Teams that genuinely care about student success.
What they don’t have is a system that makes all of this feel coherent when it matters most.
Here’s what we see constantly: Marketing creates beautiful messaging about transformation. A prospect clicks through to a program page that looks dated, with dense copy and no clear path forward. They submit an inquiry. The automated response is generic. The follow-up email doesn’t acknowledge why they were interested in the first place. The advising call asks them to repeat information they already provided.
None of these touchpoints are bad on their own. But together, they send a clear message: “We don’t actually see you. You’re a lead.”
This happens because teams are siloed. Marketing optimizes for conversions. Enrollment manages volume. Web manages content. Everyone is working hard, but nobody is designing the experience as a connected whole or taking responsibility for showing a clear path and credible outcomes along the way.
The other challenge is that most institutions are still obsessing over the wrong metrics. Traffic is up. Click-through rates are improving. Great. But what’s happening between those clicks? Where is confidence being built or breaking down? Where are students finding proof that this institution fits their life and will deliver what it promises? Which stories resonate with which audiences? Where are people dropping off not because they’re uninterested, but because they’re uncertain?
Those are the signals that matter. Those are the signals that predict enrollment.
Making Belonging Measurable Through Data and Story
Here’s where strategy gets practical. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, but belonging isn’t measured through traditional funnel metrics. It’s measured by connecting behavioral data with the stories you’re telling.
When you connect these two things, you start to see patterns that matter. You discover that adult learners who engage with peer success stories about work-life balance are three times more likely to move forward. You learn that first-gen students who spend time on financial aid content need to see it paired with outcomes data to build confidence. You find that career changers drop off on tuition pages not because of price, but because they can’t envision the ROI without seeing stories from people like them who made it work.
This is the power of connecting behavioral signals with storytelling. The data tells you where people are hesitating. The stories tell you why. Together, they reveal exactly where belonging is breaking down and what you need to fix.
Start by identifying the moments in your enrollment journey that disproportionately shape trust. Your program pages matter enormously. So does the first email after inquiry. So does how you present outcomes data and tell peer stories. Once you know which moments matter most, you can instrument them to understand what’s actually resonating and building credibility.
Which student testimonials are people engaging with and for how long? What outcomes information correlates with forward movement? Where do specific audience segments consistently drop off? When you can answer these questions, belonging stops being abstract and starts being actionable.
This is where the inclusion of an AI system is critical. Most institutions have web analytics, CRM data, and content performance metrics living in different places, managed by different teams. Paskill is preparing to launch a proprietary AI system that connects those signals across touchpoints so you can see the full picture. It has the power to reveal which stories build confidence with which audiences, where the experience feels fragmented, and what content actually drives people from passive interest to active engagement.
It’s not about surveillance or tracking everything. It’s about having the clarity to see where your belonging strategy is working and where it’s not, so you can make every touchpoint more relevant and more human.
The Strategic Imperative
The enrollment landscape is rewarding institutions that make learners feel understood, not just marketed to. Belonging isn’t a brand exercise. It’s a strategic advantage that directly impacts inquiry quality, yield, persistence, and long-term viability.
In a world where AI mediates first impressions and trust is harder to earn, the institutions that design for belonging will own the future of enrollment growth. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their marketing performed great, but their results didn’t.
The opportunity is right now. Start by auditing your experience, not just your funnel. Walk through your enrollment journey as a 45-year-old career changer or a first-gen student. Where does it feel fragmented? Where does it feel like the institution doesn’t quite get who you are? Those are your belonging breakdowns.
Then align your teams around the moments that matter most. Get marketing, enrollment, and student experience in the same room. Map the touchpoints that disproportionately shape trust. Have an honest conversation about what’s working and what’s not.
Finally, invest in the infrastructure that lets you connect behavioral data with the stories you’re telling. When you can see which narratives resonate with which audiences, you can design experiences that feel personal at scale. You can make belonging something you don’t just hope for, but something you architect, measure, and continuously improve.
The institutions that figure out how to make belonging measurable and operationalizable will define the next decade. Because in an environment where students decide if they belong before you even know they’re interested, the institutions that make learners feel understood and prove their value will be the ones learners choose.
