Enrollment Strategy
By Angela Brown
Sophomore Recruitment: Why Junior Outreach Is Already Too Late
We know you're not done yet. Decision Day is May 1st, and between now and move-in, a meaningful chunk of your deposited class might ghost you, second-guess, or in some cases, not show up. Summer melt is real, and it deserves your attention right now.
But this window in the calendar presents another opportunity. It can be the best time of year to think about who isn't in your funnel yet.
While you're working to keep your committed students committed, next year's highest-value prospects are already forming opinions about your institution. They're sophomores, they're lurking on your website, and many enrollment marketing plans won't formally acknowledge them for another year.
Let’s take advantage.
Students Are Engaging Earlier. Your Calendar Might Not Know That Yet.
By October of sophomore year, 9% of the Class of 2025 had already inquired with a college, compared to 5% of the Classes of 2022 and 2023 at the same point. That's an 80% relative increase in early engagement in just a few cohort years.
This isn't a fluke. EAB notes the change is consistent across the last four entering classes, with the most recent cohorts showing earlier high school engagement, particularly in freshman and sophomore year.
And the stakes are real. Students engaged earlier in high school are more than twice as likely to apply and enroll than those first contacted as seniors.
Read that again. Two times more likely. That’s a real number.
If your enrollment marketing timeline is still anchored to junior year batch sends, you're filtering out a disproportionate share of your best prospects before you've even introduced yourself.
Sophomores Are Already Researching, They're Just Not Hearing From You.
Encoura's student search research adds another layer to this. Among sophomores:
- 75% had visited a college website on mobile
- 58% did so at least monthly
- 39% visited at least weekly
- 70% had already requested information from a school website
These students are active researchers making early-stage impressions about institutions. Your website is already part of their consideration set; the question is whether you know they're there and whether you're giving them a reason to come back.
One more finding worth sitting with: only about half of those sophomores expected a response within a week after requesting information. The bar for follow-up is genuinely low, but most institutions still aren't clearing it for this audience because their outreach infrastructure isn't built to catch signals that early.
The Real Problem With "Junior Year" as a Starting Point
The title of this post is a little provocative on purpose. Sophomore outreach isn't inherently too late — reaching a 10th grader is better than not reaching them at all. The problem is when sophomore year is your first touch with no prior awareness-building, and when your strategy still treats this stage like a transactional blast rather than the start of a relationship.
The traditional enrollment marketing timeline looks like this:
- Junior year: name buys, mass email, search sends
- Senior fall: applications open, urgency increases
- Senior spring: yield season, panic mode
That model made more sense when students engaged later and the funnel was more predictable. Now students are doing their research earlier, forming opinions earlier, and ignoring institutions that feel irrelevant or generic when they finally do show up.
Batch-and-blast junior outreach is the enrollment equivalent of cold calling someone who's already decided to buy from your competitor. Technically it counts as outreach, but it rarely counts as a relationship.
What Early Engagement Looks Like
Early engagement doesn’t mean sending younger kids the same emails you send juniors with a different subject line. It means capturing intent signals early and building awareness that increases over time.
Think about the behaviors that come before an inquiry. A student visits your nursing program page, they come back twice, they search for financial aid. They've never filled out a form, so they don't exist in your CRM, but they're still telling you something. These are the signals that predictive enrollment models are built to catch. Most institutions' tech stacks weren't designed to act on them early enough.
The behaviors worth tracking now, for next cycle:
- First website visit — when did this student show up, and what did they look at?
- Repeat program-page visits — frequency matters more than one-time clicks
- Inquiry date and source — earlier inquiries tend to be higher intent
- Content downloads — viewbooks, program guides, cost calculators
- Event registrations — even virtual ones signal consideration
- Email engagement — opens and clicks in sequence, not just isolated sends
- Visit patterns over time — are they browsing or are they returning?
The students who do all of these things in sophomore year are your highest-probability prospects, and they're building a picture of your institution right now. The question is whether your data infrastructure is capturing that picture, or you'll meet them for the "first time" in a junior name buy.
Building a Relationship vs. Sending a Campaign
Doing this right means thinking about sophomore and early junior engagement as awareness infrastructure, not a pipeline play. You're not trying to get a 15-year-old to apply. But you want to be the school that comes to mind when they're ready to think about it seriously.
That means:
Personalization over volume. A sophomore who's visited your pre-med pages three times should get different content than one who's browsing general admissions. Generic outreach to early-stage prospects is a fast way to teach them to ignore you. Your enrollment email strategy needs to reflect where a student is, not just the grade they're in.
Consistency over urgency. Senior-year yield communication works on urgency because there's a real deadline. Early-stage communication needs a different rhythm. Show up consistently with relevant, low-pressure content. Be the institution that gives students useful information without asking for something every time.
Speed matters, even early. Remember: 70% of sophomores requested information from a school website, but only about half expected a response within a week. Response time in early stages shapes perception. Slow follow-up at this stage loses the inquiry and signals to a student how the institution will treat them before they're officially a prospect.
What to Do Right Now (Before Next Cycle Starts)
If you're reading this in April or May, you’re right on time. The current cycle is fresh. Next cycle's sophomores are in school. Here's what to do with the next few months:
Run a data audit on your sophomore engagement from this cycle. How many students in this graduating class first engaged with you as sophomores? What did that engagement look like? What converted and what didn't? Many institutions don't pull this analysis. Do it now while the cycle is still close.
Check your infrastructure for early-stage capture. Can your website identify and track repeat visitors who haven't filled out a form? Are behavioral signals — page visits, search queries, time on site — feeding into any kind of segmentation? If the answer is no, that's an issue. Stealth visitors are exactly the audience you're missing in sophomore year.
Build a sophomore-specific track for next cycle. Not a junior campaign with modified copy. A track designed for students who are 18+ months from application, built around awareness and light relationship-building. Content-rich, low-ask, and personalized by program interest where possible.
Set response-time standards for early inquiries. If a sophomore requests information and waits three weeks to hear back, that relationship is DOA before it starts. Set a 48-72 hour response target for early-stage inquiries and build the automation to support it.
Identify your highest-intent sophomore signals. Work with your data team to define what "high-intent sophomore behavior" looks like based on what you know about your conversion patterns. Repeat program visits? Financial aid page engagement? Campus visit interest? Once you know what predicts conversion for your institution, you can build triggers around it.
The Enrollment Marketing Timeline Needs to Move Up
The demographic cliff is real. Competition for students is real. And the students most likely to enroll are starting their research earlier than a lot of enrollment marketing plans account for.
But we won’t tell you to buy more names (please don’t). The solution is to build the infrastructure and strategy to meet students at the moment their consideration really starts — and stay present through the slow, unglamorous middle of their decision-making process, long before application season begins.
This cycle is almost over. Next cycle's sophomores are already on your website.
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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.
