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Kevin Tyler
Hello, hello. Welcome back to Higher Voltage. I am joined today by two friends. One is silver and one is gold because one is new and one is old. Jenny Petty, who is the VP of Marketing Communications Experience and Engagement at the University of Montana. Genius for learning a few other industries before blessing us as a higher ed marketing wizard. I have known her for maybe four-ish years or something. It’s been quite a ride. And then today I’m meeting for the first time, Emily Smith, VP of Partner Success at CollegeVine, close to the weekly Vinedown podcast, billion-year veteran of enrollment consulting and higher ed tech. And she can be found at collegevine.com and thevinedown.com. Thank you both so much for joining me today on Higher Voltage.
Jenny Petty
Aww.
Emily Smith
Jenny, Jenny never forget that I am the gold friend, and you are the silver friend. I just want you to know that I am the gold friend.
Jenny Petty
Yeah, I had my birthday yesterday, so when he said, end one old, I was like, ugh.
Kevin Tyler
Well, this is because I’ve known you longer, not because of your age. And happy birthday, by the way. That was yesterday. I am late in wishing you that. But I am excited to have you both with me. So we are here to talk about something very important. We’ve had very fun conversations, you know, getting prepared for this conversation, but it really is important. It’s about the search cliff and search cliff is different from the demographic cliff, which we have heard tons about. But to set the table for this conversation, I would love for you, Jenny, to just provide kind of a high level definition of what the search cliff is and what it means for higher ed right now.
Jenny Petty
Yeah, thanks, Kevin. I feel a little bit like the canary in the coal mine around this issue. And I’m sure Emily feels even more so that way because I didn’t even know the terminology search cliff until probably nine or 10 months ago from starting to talk with and work with Emily a little bit. So we have to kind of step back in time and understand how our friends and admissions and enrollment marketing operate. So in this context, we’re talking about search as the practice of purchasing names of prospective students in order to market to them using all sorts of means that your admissions and your marketing communications teams use.
So the issue is that a couple of years ago, kind of this perfect storm started to be created. And when we talk about, we’re so focused on the demographic cliff, we don’t realize there’s all these other cliffs. Like actually there’s one cliff, and I like to think of it as a train going off the cliff really dramatically. Because as you know, I do enjoy a little bit of drama.
Kevin Tyler
Naturally.
Jenny Petty
So we’ve got the search cliff, we’ve got the demographic cliff, we have changing consumer expectations, we have privacy laws, we have the national narrative around higher ed and younger students choosing to not go to school. But the search cliff primarily is being driven by a couple of changes that are happening now and happened a couple years ago.
So, during COVID, we saw so many schools go to test optional, which I think was a great move for equity, but what that impacted was the name availability. So if you’re not taking the ACT or SAT or you’re not getting into College Board, we are not able to purchase your name. So we’re up against that. But we’re also up against rapidly changing privacy laws where we could be heading towards a situation where we are similar to what GDPR was in Europe. There are a lot of state level privacy laws that are impacting student data. There’s 20 states so far that have changed their privacy laws. We’re seeing the way people use technology, women in particular, is shifting dramatically because of the political environment, because of Roe v Wade. So you’re seeing women who are not willing to share their location data, they are not willing to share health data, they are not using certain apps where they’re not clear how their data is being used. And so I think we’re going to see more consumer awareness around privacy data as well. And that is deeply impacting our ability to purchase as many names as we used to purchase. And so I think one of the best pieces of data about this is that in 2018, R&L did a research study about if you purchased 100,000 names, how many names would you yield? And in 2018, their data found that you would yield 131 students. So out of 100,000 names purchased, 131 would be matriculate at your school and be revenue generating. CollegeVine, where Emily works, repeated that study last year. Correct, Emily, 2023? And in 2023, they found if you purchased 100,000 names, 43 of those would yield. So that is how stark this search cliff is and how quickly, I mean, we are already there. It’s not something like the demographic cliff we’ve been preparing for for a decade plus. The search cliff is here and I don’t think we have prepared on the marketing communication side at all for this.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, I would agree. First of all, the only person I’ve ever heard talk about this is Jenny Petty, right? To date. It’s feels like a very separate conversation. People seem very focused on demographic cliff and not this other thing. And so if you introduce the issue to Jenny, I’m curious if you could just talk about what you were noticing in the space that kind of raised the flag for you.
Emily Smith
Yeah, like we’re really interested at CollegeVine in sort of solving this problem of like what makes for a better student experience. And over time, we can of course observe that sort of the stage-by-stage conversions as we are pulled in on more on like the enrollment side, we can watch those stage-by-stage conversions getting like worse and worse over the years. I’ve been running student search projects in some way or another since 2004. And, you know, that 2018 data that Jenny cited is a whole lot worse than it was in the 2004 to 2014.
So things have just been getting steadily worse. And the layering of all these cliffs, not only, sort of, the demographic cliff and the search cliff, also the sentiment cliff, all of these things really start to stack up and layer to create this state of being, where colleges really aren’t effectively able to solve that problem of recruiting students in a way that feels good to the students and in a way that feels efficient for the institutions.
Kevin Tyler
So Jenny, I’m curious if you, like since you have kind of your arms around the search cliff in the ways that you do, how is the University of Montana planning to minimize the impact around its own recruitment efforts?
Jenny Petty
Yeah, so I feel really lucky here, Kevin, because of the relationship we have with our enrollment management and our admissions team is really one of partnership. And so we are walking this road together. And so I feel like we are able to support the tactics that they are still rolling out, but they are also really willing to try new things. And so we are moving really quickly into new technologies, of these AI technologies that have popped up in the last year.
I think, you know from this work that we did together that between 2011 and 2019, the University of Montana had a 40 % drop in enrollment. And so, I often think this is a place that had already experienced rock bottom and because of that, there’s a real urgency to do what needs to be done. And so I feel lucky culturally that that is the case. But we’re really leaning into building an inbound marketing program, trying to diversify that pipeline and lead gen efforts to support the work that our admissions colleagues are doing. You know, they are still doing some name buying. They’re getting more into predictive modeling and trying to be smarter with their name buys. But we want to be able to supplement that. So we are getting smarter about the way we’re building inbound programs. We are experimenting with technologies like CollegeVine and Halda. We are experimenting with personalization. We’ve been working on that on the website for a long time of making as personalized of an experience as possible.
And just being really open and to trying some of these new tools because it feels a bit in this space right now like an arms race to see who’s going to fill this void.
Kevin Tyler
I am curious, Emily, what kinds of guidance you and College Vine are providing the industry as repairs to deal with the search cliff?
Emily Smith
Yeah, there are things that I think about is, like me, Emily, who have been across student search projects for many years, as well as a lot of different enrollment and marketing enrollment, marketing consulting. And there’s like the CollegeVine advice and me, Emily, and my sort of enrollment consultant hat. I would say there are really three key things you can do to get ready. The first is really clean up your ops and reporting. Like in the spirit of like you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
You can’t really know the impact of the search cliff unless you’re really able to get a clean look at your operations. If you’re like listening to that and you’re like, that sounds really basic, great, good job. Good job. You’ve done a great job. There are many colleagues that you have at other institutions who are not able to tell me what their enrollment goals are, how many names they have at the top of the funnel, how many names they buy. So if you can’t answer those basic questions, I would really urge you first and foremost to clean up your operational house so that you can understand what you’re looking at. Like that’s number one. And if that hits you as a basic, great, move on to step two.
The step two that I would give you is to sort of diversify your portfolio. So if I’m managing your money, which like you should never ever give me your money to manage, but like if I were managing your money, I would say something that sounded really smart. Like we should diversify your portfolio. And by that, I mean, you should investigate different list sources that perform particularly well, because you’re going to measure them like in step one and think about whether you’re trying to do in service of that number. Whether it’s unlocking a new market, whether that’s winning in your own backyard, like what are the levers that we need to pull and buttons that we need to push across a whole bunch of different list sources. I think, mobility data is really interesting right now, around like who is willing to travel to come to your school and what kind of mobility that that student might have socioeconomically in order to do that. That might start to inform that strategy of diversification.
And the third thing that I would say is to update your tech stack. So if you think about whether it’s the technologies that you use or your vendor partnerships. I would classify your vendor partnerships into sort of like red ocean vendors, meaning they’re like solving the problems that you know you have and the blue ocean vendors who are really thinking about innovation. Jenny, you just talked about like, well, we had to get to this place where we were like 40 % down in order to get really hungry to get innovative. So I would encourage you to think about that tech stack.
And in the spirit of the tech stack, the CollegeVine answer I’d give to that question, Kevin, is around, like, what you would do to answer this question of like, what you would do if I said you had 30 additional staff members to do jobs on campus. And that’s the availability of what an AI agent can do in order to provide leverage across, whether it’s enrollment marketing, recruitment, advising, student success, so on and so forth, to like start to solve some of these administrative problems.
So I really think about like if I had 30 more staff members, what would I have them go do? And I would think really strongly about how to leverage AI to go and solve those problems, right? Like Jenny’s AI recruiter at the University of Montana is this like always on, highly consultative. It’s personified as a moose, which I find thrilling. And it’s providing students with like a really individualized journey in a way that human staff can’t. It doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t take the weekend off. It didn’t take Christmas break off. So Birth of the Moose, University of Montana’s AI recruiter is out there providing really strong leverage in order to start to solve, whether it’s search cliff or any of the other operational problems that we’re fighting.
EK ad read
Kevin Tyler
It feels like there’s a certain kind of person at a certain kind of institution that can enact some of these innovations on a campus. And I’m curious about what it is about University of Montana. Is it Jenny? Why is it working where you are, Jenny? And what is needed at other campuses to try to start adopting what is needed to solve the search cliff?
Jenny Petty
Yeah, I say with all humility, it’s a hundred percent me.
Emily Smith
Nailed it!
Jenny Petty
No, I joke. I think, you know, the environment here, our CIO is such a great partner and such an advocate of AI. And I think our president is really bought into the idea of efficiencies. And we’ve been able to show some of that efficiencies very, very quickly with with birth of the AI agent.
I think in the first month or so of using her, we were able to calculate, we had saved 280 staff hours, which was massive. You know, admissions departments turn over. It’s just a natural, very, very natural part of those groups. So I think it’s also a willingness to deal with your own discomfort around these tools. Like when I first heard that there was this AI calling, I was like, this is going to be so creepy. Who’s gonna wanna talk to this, you know? And then when you do it, you’re like, I know it’s AI. I’m using it as a tool. It’s very helpful. It’s not creepy. And so I think being more comfortable with just trying things, even if they scare you a little bit.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah. And I think, I mean, ultimately, and this is one of the drums I bang often on this show is like, if we’re presenting ourselves as an innovative institution, but there’s no evidence of the innovation, then how are we talking about innovation, right? How are we defining it? And I think, you know, I just had a recent conversation with Devin Purgason from Forsyth Community College. And he was talking about the need for higher ed to move from experimentation with AI to transformation. And I think what you’re talking about here is transforming the way we are experiencing higher education in a way that considers what the world is doing right now and participates in it in a way that isn’t like, don’t use it, don’t do it. Like a fear-based kind of use, which is what we’ve seen kind of in higher ed to date.
Jenny Petty
Yeah, and I think there’s also an oversimplification of it. I think, you’re seeing a lot of people pop up as like experts in the AI space right now when you’re like, this has been out a hot second. Like who, if you’re not like working in Silicon Valley, I don’t know if I trust you to be an expert. And I think what I’ve learned from Emily, especially, and she can talk to this because I think she’s an absolute whiz when it comes to this stuff. It’s like ChatGPT is like entry level AI. There is so much more to it. And I think most of us don’t truly understand what AI is. And so we’re settling a little bit for the simplest, easiest thing to jump into and try.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah. Emily, I’d like to go back to the three kind of recommendations you have for folks or institutions to get ready for this. So the three steps were measurement, diversifying your portfolio and updating your tech stack. How does that translate to external to the store audiences? Once I do that as a marketer at an institution, what does it look like when it goes external?
Emily Smith
So I think one of the biggest hallmarks of that work would be getting your website and web content in order. Because whether it’s my AI trolling your institutional website or any of the many, many, many others that are out getting information, it’s really important to have information that’s accurate and knowable about your institution. And I think a lot for many years, we’ve sort of come in and out of focus on, like, web content and sort of what we have on websites, whether it’s in service of compliance or whether it’s in service of marketing. And those two things can feel really different. But I would really get down with, yeah, right, that’s a different show. Yeah, crazy, right? It’s a different episode where we are holding each other and crying. And I think there’s a certain aspect of making sure that that content is really correct so that AI can go out and then be correct on your behalf. I think that’s how that work appears in the real world as schools are getting ready to deploy AI agents. And again, I think the other thing is really thinking about AI can give each of your staff members a promotion. Because if your job used to be entering data, OK, the AI should enter data. Your job is now making sense of the data or interpreting it. So thinking about the ways in which AI as a lever can level us all up.
Kevin Tyler
One of the things that I can’t not ask about when we talk about something like the search cliff is where adult learners fall into this. I think, you know, when people talk about the demographic cliff, my kind of knee-jerk response is if we are institutions that are prepared to educate other kinds of people, the demographic cliff might not hit as hard. And so I think the same when it comes to search cliff, there are millions and millions of people who have some college and no degree, who want to go back to school to upskill, reskill, whatever. Is there a play for that to kind of minimize the impact of search cliff?
Jenny Petty
Yeah, I mean, I think it allows schools like the University of Montana to scale in a way that we haven’t been able to. So when I think about our adult learners, degree completers, nontraditional, new learners, whatever you want, we call it all sorts of stuff.
Kevin Tyler
Right, right, right.
Jenny Petty
I think about schools like Western Governors or SNHU or Purdue Global, right? Who, part of why they have been so successful is because they have shaped product and experience to match those audiences. And part of that product and experience, especially the experience, is, okay, I’m a degree completer, I have this many credits, I want to finish my degree, I want it to take this long. If I’m filling out an RFI on your website, you know, speed to lead for those institutions is something they have dialed down, and they have the staff and the ability to do that.
For places like the University of Montana that don’t necessarily have a full phone bank of folks to do that kind of work, I think these tools will give us the ability to scale in a way that we haven’t been able to. So to connect with those students in the way that these bigger universities that have been super successful are doing. And I think, I used, my husband was a degree completer. He finished through Purdue Global last year.
But I watched his experience and I watched, you from the time he filled out an RFI to being enrolled at Purdue Global was two weeks, right? It was like, that was the decision. And I don’t think a lot of our institutions are agile enough to be able to do that.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, I agree with that. I’m curious, Emily, from your perspective, are you seeing other institutions or leaders at institutions who are kind of charging forward in a really proactive way when it comes to solving the search clip for their institution?
Emily Smith
Yeah, I would say that Jenny’s right on when it comes to like that sort of dire circumstance leads to innovation. And hopefully we don’t all have to go through that, right? Like, hopefully we don’t have to all get to rock bottom, as you’re calling it, Jenny, in order to innovate. And I think about the ways in which we sort of think about, like, okay, here’s some, we didn’t like pre-run this, but I’ll give you some data about sort of the finances of institutions right now, which may blow your mind.
Overall, higher ed is operating at like a $43 billion deficit if we correct for hospital revenue, okay, like administratively. And if we layer in all of the cliffs, search cliff, demographic cliff, sentiment cliff, we’re at $98 billion deficit, okay? So that’s the operating cost deficit that we are facing. And if that’s not enough to get you to a place where you are thinking about feeling ready to innovate and thinking about ways in which you can bring leverage, into whether it’s for adult students or for your own enrollment operation in general, or for your sort of administrative layer at large at an institution, like, okay, you’re doing it wrong.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah. Yeah. I feel you 100 % on the, shouldn’t have to be bleeding in order to innovation to our institutions. And I’m always so curious around like what the hesitation around newness is. And I feel like we are now at a point where higher ed has got to look at other solutions to do the things that we have always kind of done and gone are the days of this is how we’ve always done it because nothing is the same as it used to be. And so I appreciate you making that point.
You both have mentioned this AI recruiter quite a bit in this conversation so far, and I would love to learn more about it. I know we’re planning to do a demo on this in this conversation, but before we do the demo, can you just like talk about its birth?
Emily Smith
It’s birth. We created it. Okay. Yes, of course. So the AI recruiter is really created in service of this problem around that we believe traditional methods can’t be effective, right? Like Jenny shared the math and we see that institutions really can’t effectively treat students as individuals at the top stages of the funnel, particularly. And we know this isn’t working. We know students aren’t really engaging with this.
The search performance as Jenny, as you shared, is really falling and like year after year, we’re chasing it by making the funnels bigger and bigger, which creates more and more operational and administrative work that makes that deficit that I just talked about like even bigger. So, we think about AI as a lever and CollegeVine as a company is really in service of building autonomous AI agents that can go out and do work for you. And Jenny, if I said like, let’s say like the money tree shook in Montana and just rained dollar bills upon the marketing organization. Jenny, what would you do with 30 more staff members? And Jenny might say something like, oh, well, we do more of this or we’d be able to do something we hadn’t been able to do previously. Like that’s the mindset that AI can help in that sort of autonomous agent who’s going out and doing work for you is really the thing that will provide you that leverage. So the AI recruiter is really doing a specific job to recruit the entire class, whether that’s, hey, AI, process all of the transcripts, or hey, AI, give each student an individual funnel journey rather than bucketing them together in the boring segments that we’ve already always been doing. So AI can now go do those jobs for us, improve the stage-by-stage conversions, start to solve some of that administrative deficit, and provide you that leverage. So that’s how the AI recruiter was really created.
Kevin Tyler
And before we dip into the demonstration of this, I want to pull a thread, Jenny, that you mentioned before about this and that to not have to make the top of the funnel wider and wider and wider, we might have to go back to some of the practices from earlier days where it’s like organic content, content marketing, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jenny Petty
Yeah, so I mean, I think the last decade or so we have been so focused on building brand properties on platforms that we don’t own. So we have been highly focused on social media content. Social strategy is super important, but the fact of the matter is that we chase prospective students from platform to platform and we have neglected our owned properties like our websites, our blogs. It was a trade off that we’ve made. And I think what we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to get back to really strong content marketing, really emotive, connective storytelling that connects students with your brand.
And I think one of the biggest risks to higher ed is that we put out these messaging that could be traded for any institution in the country. I mean, I will say there are some big vendors in this space who will sell you packages and promise enrollment results. And your messaging that is going out, paid, email, is the same as everybody else’s in the country. And so I think we really do have to lean into our brands, especially in a market that doesn’t have a ton of differentiation across schools. But I think, Kevin, you and I are both in love with that Volvo ad that came out that doesn’t look like an ad. It looks like a short film. It enraptured me. I watched it twice. It made me cry. That’s the type of stuff that consumers are so smart. We all have adapted to advertising. We all can tune it out, we can ignore it. But those breakthrough moments, we are still wired for good stories, and we are still wired for connection. And I think that is where we’re going to have to tune, and that is hard work in this space.
Kevin Tyler
It is hard work, but I will tell you that some of the best stories live on college campuses, some of the best stories, and I can’t wait for those to start rolling out in a really intentional and connective way. So let’s do an AI recruiter demo. Emily is going to use it to call Jenny, and then we’ll have a little demonstration.
Emily Smith
Yeah, so AI recruiter works across like email, phone, text, chat, about like all the different things. It operates in up to 30 languages. And Jenny, I’m giving this AI recruiter a mission. I’m instructing it to just find out about you. I’m having it call you from Knox College, which is a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. And you should have like a really high standard for it. You should interrupt her. You should talk about some weird dietary thing, where you want to live, what you want to do.
But yeah, just talk to her and pick it up on speaker and we’ll see what you have to say as she gets to know you.
Jenny Petty
Hello.
Sarah the AI
Hello, Jenny. My name is Sarah and I’m an AI that works with the admissions team at Knox. I’ve been assigned to help you on your admissions journey. I’m calling to learn a little bit more about your college preferences and help you decide if Knox could be a good fit. What’s most important to you in your college decision?
Jenny Petty
Hello Sarah,I really am interested in playing soccer, partying with my friends, and maybe studying like the environment or English or something.
Sarah the AI
That sounds awesome. Knox has a great soccer program and you’ll find a lot of opportunities to get involved. Plus, our campus is super friendly for socializing, so you can definitely enjoy some fun times with friends. As for your studies we have strong programs in environmental studies and English. You can even combine interests, like studying environmental literature. What do you think about that?
Jenny Petty
Sarah, what’s the party scene like?
Sarah the AI
The party scene at Knox is pretty lively. There are lots of students, who organize events, and you’ll find a mix of parties…
Jenny Petty
What about the food, Sarah? Is the food good?
Sarah the AI
Oh, absolutely. The food at Knox is known to be pretty feasty. We have a variety of options, including vegetarian and vegan choices. Plus there are themed dining nights that keep things interesting. You’ll definitely find something you’ll love.
Jenny Petty
I can’t eat gluten, I can’t have gluten or dairy. Will I be able to eat anything?
Sarah the AI
No worries at all. Knox is really accommodating with dietary restrictions. They offer gluten-free and dairy-free options, so you’ll have plenty to choose from. The dining staff is super helpful too, so you can always ask if you need something specific. Does it help ease your mind a bit?
Jenny Petty
It does. You know, Sarah, I’m really looking for a place that’s like really inclusive and friendly. How would you describe Knox’s campus life that way?
Sarah the AI
Knox is definitely known for its inclusive and family atmosphere. The campus community is super welcoming and students really support each other. There are tons of clubs and organizations that celebrate diversity, so you can find your niche and meet people from all over the place. Plus, the small class sizes mean you’ll get to know your professors and classmates really well. Does that sound like what you are looking for?
Jenny Petty
That sounds great. Thank you, Sarah. Oh, mom, mom, leave me alone. My mom wants to know if it’s safe, Sarah. Is the campus safe?
Sarah the AI
Totally understand. Knox takes safety seriously. The campus is well lit and there are campus safety officers available 24/7. Plus, the community is tight-knit, so everyone looks out for each other. Your mom can rest easy knowing that safety is a priority here. Does that help reassure her?
Jenny Petty
She’s nodding yes, I think so.
Sarah the AI
Awesome.
Jenny Petty
Thanks Sarah, appreciate it.
Sarah the AI
You’re welcome Jenny, I’m here to help. If you have any more questions or need info about Knox, just let me know. What else are you cautious about?
Jenny Petty
That’s it. Talk to you later.
Kevin Tyler
Okay, so first of all, Golden Globe to Jenny Petty for her role as teenager, American teenager.
Jenny Petty
I accept. I accept.
Kevin Tyler
That is, I think it’s fascinating. I love that it’s not like pretending to be a human. It’s very upfront about it, which is great, obviously, because I think that there are probably some actors out in the world who are gonna be like, let’s pretend like it’s a real person. But it feels very helpful. And it feels like a way to access information about a very important purchase, essentially. Especially if you don’t have anyone in your household to talk to about it. If you’re a first generation student, that’s a very helpful tool, just like chat bots were positioned when those kind of rolled in the first iteration of this. And so I think it’s great. The first question that comes to mind though, is, and this is more for Emily, that is like, we are seeing all this news about the environmental impact of AI. And if we have a school like University of Montana that really, one of their pillar programs is around the environment and sustainability. How do we reconcile those two things?
Emily Smith
Yeah. And actually, like, I even want to slow down that question because when I first was asked that question, I didn’t actually even understand what was at play and the environment is super important to me. And essentially it’s like, AI requires a lot of math and to do a lot of math, you need a lot of computers and to run a lot of computers, you need a lot of energy and to get a lot of energy, you need a lot of water. Okay. Like that’s the very short version of if you just heard Kevin’s question, you’re like, well, I don’t get what he’s asking. So, okay, you ready for like economics class?
Kevin Tyler
Ugh, no.
Emily Smith
Okay, get ready. Okay, get ready. So Thomas Malthus, the like old economist, is like every econ professor is like dying right now. So the Malthusian contradiction was like Malthus said, the population will grow exponentially, but resources will only grow linearly. And basically like we’re gonna use up everything on the planet and like everything’s gonna die. But like, that’s not correct. Like, resources are not only consumed by humans, resources are also created by humans, okay? And by human ingenuity. So the same thing is true of the ingenuity of AI. And I could answer this question pretty simply by saying like, do we think it’s reasonable to just say like, stop innovating, AI requires like too much energy, turn it off. Like, would humans be okay with that answer? Like, hell no. Humans are going to want the best possible earth and community and societies that are possible. And humans like in general, like don’t do well with totalitarianism, like as we have seen.
Kevin Tyler
Right.
Emily Smith
So like if you think about the ways in which AI can actually start to solve this and like the behaviors of the companies at play here, like Microsoft just bought Three Mile Island and is basically going to power like literal lifetimes of insane innovation with and like, yes, they will use about two basketballs worth of uranium and probably create like two water towers worth of waste between now and the end of time. But my thinking about this is like, if we can make nuclear energy safe and we can because who’s going to help us? AI is going to help us make nuclear energy safe. Like, we’re good. I would say like it would be more scary to not innovate in this way.
Kevin Tyler
I could buy that.
Emily Smith
Okay, cool. Sick.
Kevin Tyler
Listen, I’m not an economist.
Emily Smith
Should I run for office? Am I in?
Kevin Tyler
But yeah, I thought you already did.
Emily Smith
Sick.
Kevin Tyler
Okay, so can you talk a bit about results of the AI recruiter to date? What does it look like?
Emily Smith
Yes. So, okay, this is going to make you happy sad as institutional marketers. Jenny, if I asked you what a good benchmark would be for a marketing email coming from the institutional University of Montana email, what would be a good open rate for you?
Jenny Petty
I think we look at industry benchmarks of like 11 to 15 percent or something like that.
Emily Smith
Okay, and what would you say is like a good click rate?
Jenny Petty
15.
Emily Smith
A 15% click rate. That’s really good. I would say like, typically I would say like, if you had like a student search email, for example, that had like a 19 % click rate, you probably are open rate. You probably shouldn’t like fire your vendor or stop what you’re doing. That’s pretty good. And if you had like a two or 3 % click rate of that, you would, that’s like industry pretty good. Like AI recruiter, as far as like how it operates, we have a 66 % open rate when that reaches out to introduce itself and a 25 % click rate.
Again, I’m holding that benchmark between two and three. Okay, so that’s just like the AI reaching out effectively. That’s basically saying, sorry, humans, AI has us beat in terms of making compelling content enough that it gets opened and dealt with. The other thing that I look at is how much are people sticking with AI? Ninety percent of students who are interacting with the AI recruiter don’t actually ask to transfer away to talk to a human. And by that, I mean like, we’ve all done the thing with like bad voice recognition software. We were trying to change a flight and you’re like, agent, agent, like, ah. Okay. So like there’s 90 % of students never get to the place where they’re like, yeah, this is not helping me. I’m out. The other thing that I think about is extensibility of sort of the student success day and the student success, the hours in the day that we have the weekends, the evenings, right? To talk about recruiting adult students. When do they want to talk to you? In the middle of the night. When do they want to talk to you? Over Christmas break. So the AI recruiter actually, like 52% of the interactions with students are happening outside of business hours, which I think is really important as we think about the things that students really need in order to be successful. And Jenny, you had shared some information about sort of the staff time saved. Again, if I’m thinking about positioning AI as like, this is a thing that can go and do jobs for you, creating the work of about like 80 people added to your staff.
So, the results are really great. And again, I’m not one to say like AI should replace human staff. I think AI should free up human staff to do the like deep, gritty transformational things later in the funnel, the relational things that students expect and want.
TVP ad read
Kevin Tyler
Are there specific lessons, opportunities that you’re learning about through the adoption of these new tools?
Jenny Petty
I think about the adoption of these in the way that the AI recruiter can be translated to other functions on campus. Things like advising, financial aid, packaging, or customer service. Any of those functionalities where we traditionally are struggling a little bit to have continuity. So that’s where my mind went was like, what else could we do with this where we have, advising, right? Same kind of thing. You know, you’re dealing with students who might be working multiple jobs, they’re going to class. They don’t have the normal schedule, but they could do advising at 9 p.m.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah. And then, anything to add there? Any lessons you’re learning from the CollegeVine perspective?
Emily Smith
Say more about the question, Kevin.
Kevin Tyler
Are there trends you’re identifying that lead to other ways to make it even better? Are there other places it can live? Like Jenny mentioned a couple of other places. What’s the growth path look like from where we are now to what could be used for in higher ed?
Emily Smith
Yeah, that’s such a good question. I think advising is a great one to think about because if you think about the extensibility of an AI agent going like, hey, Jenny, how are you feeling? Have you made a friend? Do you feel like you fit in? What’s your felt sense of being on campus? Can an advisor really get to know that when their caseload is 500 kids? Like, no.
So there’s a certain amount of things that we can do across the student success lifecycle when students are enrolled, whether it’s finding things out from them or notifying them like, hey, therapy dogs in the commons, like come for puppies, mochis, like whatever the things are that we want to notify them, find out from them, or gauge in that sentiment as far as like it being a concierge. The other place it extends really nicely is into advancement, right, to build like your alumni network, to keep them notified, right? Hey, you live within 20 miles of campus. Your faculty advisor from way back is speaking tonight or is being presented with an award or there’s a new job board that you can participate or help young alumni in these ways. There’s a ton we can do if we remove from our minds the limitation of what the human staff can deliver. Because that’s how we’ve created strategy and tactics. It’s like not what we really want to have happen, but what we think we can deliver.
And if we add a ton of capacity in what we think we can deliver, then we start really solving root cause problems and not just like slapping Band-Aids on different workflows across the institution.
Kevin Tyler
That is a powerful statement. I agree with you 100 % that we create these things based on what we can deliver. That’s killer. I have two more questions. One of them is around, I guess, the build of the AI recruiter and like how you learned what was needed from the students who would be interacting with it. How did you determine the ones, what was important, all of that, all those kinds of things.
Emily Smith
Yeah, so you train it just like you would train a staff member. So you give it a bunch of stuff to read and you have it set up a bunch of phone calls. And I’d love for Jenny to talk about the training at the University of Montana, because it should feel like you got a really smart member of your team who can do a whole lot and you give them a bunch of stuff to go do. So Jenny, what’s that felt like for you?
Jenny Petty
Yeah, our team members who participated in the onboarding of the AI recruiter really enjoyed it and said that it was such an interesting way to just download everything they know about the university. And it was everything. I mean, it was like, where’s your favorite place to eat? What’s your favorite burger in town? Where do you like to get a cup of coffee? It was a lot more than just like, what majors are you offering?
So you really get that personalized kind of content that I think makes a big difference. That experience that I just showed with Sarah, you know, you can tell, like it feels like she’s very knowledgeable, but it’s not coming across as cookie cutter or a robotic, like it feels very personalized.
Kevin Tyler
I totally agree with that. And then the last thing, I mean, it feels more applicable than any other episode I’ve ever kind of had. And that is like, what does higher ed look like in five or 10 years? I mean, we are talking about the future, but living in it as well. And it just feels like with this new tool, the sky’s the limit on what it could look like.
Emily Smith
I think colleges are good for Earth. So I hope that colleges can stay open, right? Like I think unfortunately we’ll probably see, I don’t know, it’s the beginning of the year, I’m gonna call it. I think we’re gonna see between 65 and 75 institutions close this year. And that makes me sad.
Kevin Tyler
Wow, that many?
Emily Smith
Yeah, I think so. That’s what I think it’s gonna be. And I think, like, back to that sort of scary math I was doing on sort of the financial deficit, like 40% of the spend in colleges right now is admin. That admin layer is actually rising faster than other costs. It’s not actually your faculty or your physical plant or your facilities. It’s the administration layer. Like if we look at 20 years ago, each 1,000 students had about like 55 faculty, 45 administrators. Now each 1,000 students has 64 faculty, so that’s like tracked up a little bit, but 82 administrators. So, it’s like doubled and the costs of that have doubled. So operationally and fiscally, like, higher ed really will need to get more efficient at the administration level. And I think that AI is really an important part of doing that. And I can really easily hold that in my mind of saying, and I hope that in five to 10 years when we’re in the near future, we still have plenty of colleges offering plenty of services in plenty of communities because it’s friggin’ good for America. It’s good for Earth. It’s good for the future of everyone to have more and more colleges providing excellent services and creating more educated humans.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah, no kidding. Jenny, what’s your take?
Jenny Petty
I completely agree with Emily that societally higher ed plays such an important role in democracy, in training our workforce. I mean everything down to a less educated workforce equals more people who have to rely on social services. It’s the trickle down effect of health care, things like that. It’s pretty severe and could have really serious impacts on our country. I think also it makes us less competitive with the world, which is not a good thing and scary. Although Emily’s economics lesson earlier, I was like, oh, I got some reading to do. Brush up on some of that stuff. But, you know, Kevin, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s an industry like higher ed that I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I think we’ve got some serious work to do around product.
And I think about what happened to Kodak in the film and photography space in the 90s, early 2000s. All the indicators were not looking good for film and dark rooms. But Kodak stuck to their guns and said, no, really, film is where it’s at. And, I mean, that was devastating. They filed for bankruptcy in 2012, but they had two decades to get ready for that and just didn’t.
And I worry at a lot of our institutions, we are getting more signals than we have ever gotten from consumers that this is not working for them. And we’re not responding to that, and that worries me.
Kevin Tyler
That worries me quite a bit as well. And the Kodak example is what comes to mind most immediately whenever I have a conversation like this is that we are getting signals.
Emily Smith
Yeah, we’re hearing hoof beats.
Kevin Tyler
The call is not coming from the right house, right?
Jenny Petty
Yeah, the stampede is here.
Kevin Tyler
Yeah. And that’s why I love your point, Emily, we shouldn’t have to be gutted until we, before we introduce a solution. And so, I’m just very thankful that there are institutions out there who are on the forefront of this like innovation kind of revolution. And not only is it for the institution, but it’s also for the students that you hope to ultimately serve. And I’m just really appreciative of this kind of thinking and this kind of service to the audiences that need it the most.
And so thank you both, Emily and Jenny, for being on higher voltage today, welcoming an old friend and a new friend to the show’s pretty wild to me, so thank you so much.
Jenny Petty
Thanks, Kevin.
Emily Smith
Thanks, Kevin.
Kevin Tyler
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Higher Voltage. You can stay up to date on the latest higher ed marketing trends and news by following Volt on LinkedIn and Bluesky, and you can find me, Kevin Tyler on Bluesky as well. We’ll be back soon with another episode. And don’t forget to catch Trusted Voices, hosted by my friends, Teresa Valerio Parrot and Erin Hennessy, also on the Volt network.