In 2025, enrollment leaders faced intense pressure: volatile demographics, cost anxiety, policy shifts, and an AI-driven content deluge. At the same time, students continued to signal that they expect relevance, speed, and control in the college search. Platforms like CustomViewbook, which let students build a personalized digital viewbook while feeding rich intent data back to admissions moved from “nice-to-have” to core recruitment infrastructure.
Below are six trends that defined student recruitment in 2025 and will shape your 2026 playbook.
1. From One-Size-Fits-All to Radical Personalization
Personalization is no longer a differentiator; it’s table stakes. The 2023 E-Expectations research from RNL and partners found that high school students increasingly expect colleges to recognize their interests and tailor digital content accordingly, including program information, affordability, and campus life experiences. A follow-on brief on digital personalization emphasized that relevant content significantly improves student engagement and therefore the likelyhood to inquire and apply.
What changed in 2025 was the operationalization of that insight. Institutions increasingly began to:
- Use intent signals (programs viewed, campus pages visited, self-identified interests) to drive dynamic web content.
- Replace static PDFs with interactive, build your own experiences that assemble content into a single personalized destination.
- Align email and SMS flows to the student’s expressed interests instead of generic funnel stages.
Personalization isn’t just about being polite; it’s about making relevance your competitive advantage in a shrinking pool of traditional-aged students.
2. AI Everywhere and the Problem of Content “Slop”
AI made a decisive leap into marketing and enrollment operations in 2025. The UPCEA/EducationDynamics AI Readiness Report 2025 notes that marketing and enrollment teams feel a dual imperative: adopt AI to remain competitive while safeguarding data and maintaining a human-centered experience.
The result? A flood of AI-generated copy, much of it technically correct but fundamentally interchangeable. An Axios study found that more than half of all new articles are AI generated. Viewbooks, landing pages, and nurture emails started to reflect the generalization present in most generated AI copy. Students aren’t fooled; they scroll past formulaic content, especially when it could have come from any college.
Leading teams responded by:
- Using AI for production efficiency (drafting, structuring, versioning) but preserving human voice and institutional distinctives.
- Prioritizing experience-level personalization over volume with fewer touchpoints, more aligned to what the student actually asked for.
- Treating AI as a co-pilot that surfaces insights (e.g., common interest clusters) rather than an autopilot that blasts out generic messaging.
In other words, AI is most powerful when it amplifies personalization, not when it generates more undifferentiated “slop.”
3. School Closures and Market Contraction Become Impossible to Ignore
The risk of institutional closure shifted from abstract concern to visible reality in 2025. Even in the previous year, research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projected increased financial distress and closures among small private colleges and regional campuses, with ripple effects on local economies and access.
In 2025 alone, headlines told the story:
- Limestone University, a 180-year-old private Christian institution in South Carolina, announced it would close after failing to secure needed funding.
- Penn State voted to close seven branch campuses due to sustained enrollment declines and demographic pressures.
- As of mid-2025, more than 22 colleges or universities in the US closed, began shutting down, or were involved with significant mergers or acquisitions.
For students and families, this raised a new set of questions: Is this institution financially stable? Will it still be here when I graduate? For marketers and enrollment leaders, it underscored the need to:
- Communicate transparently about institutional strength, partnerships, and student outcomes.
- Emphasize clear academic pathways, transfer-friendly policies, and support structures.
- Provide digital resources that help students confidently see fit and stability, not just aesthetics.
4. Stealth Shoppers and the Middle of the Funnel
In 2025 prospective students are increasingly making decisions lower and lower in the funnel: application volume is up at many institutions, but inquiry volume and yield are volatile, and “stealth” applicants (who never formally inquire) remain common. Similarly, according to Brookings, in recent years schools have increased reliance on “direct admission” programs and treated applications more like lead forms.
In 2025, leading teams shifted focus from top-of-funnel name buys to middle-of-funnel engagement:
- Creating interactive experiences where prospective students voluntarily share their interests in exchange for tailored content.
- Using that self-reported data to prioritize counselor outreach and personalize financial aid conversations.
- Building nurture flows that acknowledge where the student is in their journey, not just where the institution hopes they are.
The institutions that gained ground treated their applicants as though they were yet undecided about where to attend. Continued engagement up through enrollment with meaningful content is increasingly important.
5. The Rise of Modalities and Audiences Beyond the “Traditional” Freshman
The 2024 Education Dynamics Online College Students report highlights the continued growth and diversification of online learners across ages, life stages, and geographies.
Even on-campus institutions increasingly recruit:
- Adult degree completers
- Career changers seeking graduate and professional programs
- Military-connected and working learners balancing study with employment
These audiences bring different expectations. They are more outcome-focused, more skeptical of generic marketing language, and more sensitive to time-to-completion and total cost of attendance.
In 2025, winning enrollment strategies:
- Offered modality choice (on-campus, online, hybrid) and made these options easy to understand.
- Surface program-, schedule-, and cost information based on the prospective student’s life stage and goals.
- Used modular content that can be reassembled into different journeys for undergrad, transfer, graduate, and online without rebuilding from scratch.
6. Data Feedback Loops as a Strategic Asset
Finally, 2025 clarified that the biggest gap between institutions isn’t access to data, but the ability to turn behavioral data into actionable strategy.
Sophisticated teams began to:
- Move beyond vanity metrics (opens, clicks) to intent metrics (topics selected, program comparisons, affordability tools used).
- Treat digital experiences-microsites, virtual tours, personalized content hubs-as ongoing research instruments.
- Use those insights to inform not only marketing campaigns, but also program development, staffing, and service design.
This is where tools like CustomViewbook are particularly powerful: they turn student self-selection into a continuous feedback loop. Marketing and enrollment teams can see, in real time, what students actually care about and adjust messaging, segmentation, and even academic offerings accordingly.
Looking Ahead to 2026
If 2025 was the year AI moved from experiment to expectation, it was also the year students reminded us that volume is not value. In an environment saturated with generic, AI-assisted content and shadowed by institutional closures, the institutions that stood out were those that:
- Anchored their strategies in authentic differentiation and clear outcomes.
- Used technology to personalize experiences, not just to produce more copy.
- Closed the loop between student behavior, data, and institutional decision-making.
As you plan for 2026, consider where your team sits on that continuum. Are you still pushing generic content into already-crowded channels, or are you giving students the ability to build their own path-and using those choices to make smarter decisions? For many institutions, adopting or optimizing a platform like CustomViewbook will be a key step toward making personalization, insight, and agility central to their enrollment strategy.
