Enrollment Strategy
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By Angela Brown
This post has been updated from 2025.
The budget meeting is on the calendar and leadership wants to know what you're cutting. Meanwhile you're staring at a list of vendors, campaigns, and platforms trying to figure out what earned its place in the budget and what's just costing you money.
You have plenty of company. According to EAB's 2026 survey of 121 higher education marketing leaders, 65% are facing higher goals with flat or shrinking staffs and budgets. 69% say budgets were flat or declined over the last year and 80% cite limited budget as a top barrier to their enrollment goals.
This is a case of resources versus priorities, and the two feel very similar from the inside.
But the key to coming out ahead in future cycles will be to stop treating budget decisions as a cost-cutting exercise and start making them like investment decisions, with your enrollment funnel as the benchmark.
The Budget Math Still Doesn't Add Up, So You Have to Make It Add Up
Institutional costs are still going up even when budgets aren't.
Commonfund's May 2026 HEPI forecast puts higher education inflation at 3.6% for FY2026, unchanged from last year. So a flat budget isn't actually flat. It loses ground every year it stays the same.
Paid media pressure is higher. EAB reports a 42% increase in Google Ads cost-per-click in education from 2024 to 2025. If you're budgeting for paid acquisition the same way you did two years ago, you're getting fewer clicks for the same money.
Staffing won't absorb the difference. EAB found that surveyed teams average 22 FTEs, with fewer than three staff dedicated to any single digital function. Effort has a ceiling.
Budget planning built on clicks and impressions, while applications stall, is an expensive way to report activity without generating outcomes. Cost-per-inquiry, cost-per-enrollment, and channel-level ROI are the inputs your planning should be built on.
Policy Changes Affecting the Funnel
If you’ve been reading the news from between your fingers you already know: federal and state policy changes are adding new pressure to an already cost-sensitive market. Even where funding has held steady, changes in aid availability, loan access, and compliance expectations are impacting how prospective students calculate value, and that affects how they respond to your marketing.
NACE has flagged student loan rule changes scheduled for July 2026, including caps on some Parent PLUS loans and the elimination of the Grad PLUS program. Those changes directly affect how students and families think about affordability.
The practical implication: enrollment marketing teams need tighter coordination with financial aid, admissions, and leadership right now. When the cost story changes for students, your value messaging needs to keep up. A conversion path full of friction is the last thing you want in a more complex aid environment.
It's also one more reason to build up owned channels. When federal policy is in flux, paid acquisition can't carry all the volume on its own. Your website, CRM, email, and SMS are channels you control, and they're worth protecting.
What You Should Budget for Now
Not all spending holds up equally under pressure. Here's where disciplined teams can put their resources.
Paid media efficiency, not just spend. Do you know your cost-per-enrollment by channel? If not, you're allocating budget without knowing what's working, in the most expensive paid media environment higher ed has seen in years. Fix the attribution before you lock in the spend.
CRM cleanup and segmentation. When your CRM has stale records, duplicate contacts, and segments that treat a community college prospect the same as a grad applicant, every campaign you run is diluted. It's unglamorous work, but it pays off fast.
AI search and content optimization. More students are starting their research through AI-generated answers. If your program pages aren't structured to show up in those results, you're missing a growing share of the funnel. This one moves from "nice to have" to table stakes quickly.
Web personalization and conversion improvement. Many institutional websites still serve the same generic page to every visitor, regardless of program interest, visit history, or funnel stage. That's a missed conversion, at scale, every day. Dynamic experiences that respond to where a student is consistently outperform static pages, and every percentage point of improvement is essentially free enrollment.
Reporting that connects activity to yield. Attribution infrastructure is the thing nobody budgets for until they're sitting in front of a CFO who wants to know what marketing produced. Build it before that meeting.
Where to Cut and What to Protect
Website improvements, lifecycle automation, and attribution infrastructure get more valuable over time, not less. Cutting them to save money now means rebuilding later, usually at a higher cost. Student journey mapping and CRM-based nurture belong in this category too. The work you do to understand your enrollment funnel this cycle pays dividends through the next one.
On the cut side: campaigns with strong impression counts and no inquiry conversion. Brand spend with no enrollment tie-in. If a tactic can't be traced to any point in the enrollment funnel, that's a conversation worth having out loud, especially during budget season.
Also worth scrutinizing: anything that only works because someone on your small team is doing it manually every week. Prioritize tools that run without daily intervention.
And consolidate where you can. Most enrollment marketing stacks have at least one redundancy: two platforms doing similar outreach, two analytics tools reporting the same data in different formats, a point solution bought for one campaign that never got turned off. Fewer, better-integrated tools are easier to manage and easier to measure.
A Word on the Vendor Decisions You're About to Make
Budget season runs parallel to vendor renewal conversations and new demos. Right now, the market is full of platforms pitching one of two things: doing everything at once, or replacing everything you already have.
The "AI operating system" pitch sounds compelling until you realize it's asking you to fund a transformation project across every office on campus in a year when your enrollment goal is due in October. Campus-wide platforms have their place. A flat budget and a three-person digital team is probably not the moment to bet on one.
The CRM rip-and-replace pitch has a similar problem. Replacing your enrollment CRM is a 12-to-18-month implementation. If you're trying to figure out how to hit yield targets, a migration project is the wrong lever. Ask any VP who's been through one.
What moves enrollment numbers in a constrained environment is precision: tools that connect directly to the funnel, integrate with what you already have, and start showing results before the next budget cycle starts. The right question for any vendor right now isn't "what does this do?" It's "what does this do for enrollment, and how quickly?"
Before You Close the Spreadsheet
Higher enrollment goals. Flat budgets. Rising paid media costs. Policy uncertainty. A small team doing the work of a larger one.
That's the context behind every decision on your budget right now. There's no version of this that's easy.
What you can do is be disciplined about what earns its place: investments that build with every cycle, channels you control, reporting that traces back to applications and yield, and vendors whose pitch holds up when you ask the hard questions.
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As Halda’s Director of Marketing, Angela Brown brings more than 15 years of experience leading marketing and content teams in education and B2B SaaS. When she isn’t at her computer, you can find her reading, watching a true crime documentary, or driving her son to basketball practice.
