• Issue #68

How to market with a demographic cliff looming

Generative AI render of a motorcycle rider jumping high into the night sky over a desert expanse. The round is miles below.

This Hot Take was written by Joel Goodman

Opening my morning Chronicle email newsletter, I saw the new demographic projections released by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). No doubt you’ve seen this elsewhere online, but in short, 2025 is the peak of high school graduates for at least the next 15 years.

Yes. It’s that demographic cliff everyone’s been talking about. And the reality struck me again. At Bravery, we work with a lot of small institutions. I am the product of a small, private liberal arts education. I highly value the effects of the liberal arts, and we are proud to champion smaller institutions. This also means I keep tabs on what’s up in the wider landscape.

It’s no secret that small colleges and universities have an outsized challenge to compete in a market dominated by mega universities and publically-funded state schools. We’ve seen closure after closure in 2024, many of those faith-based and smaller institutions. I’m worried this is only going to get worse as the supply of students drops and the effectiveness of our marketing plateaus.

What can we do?

You know what we’re facing: AI disrupting everything from how people find us to the pressures on us to do more with less, a lack of trust in higher education institutions (and AI, at the same time), and a political administration change that is openly hostile to higher education and seeks to destroy or weaponize it. It seems to me that we need to build trust with our audiences, simplify our operations, and take control of how AI represents our institutions.

This starts with our websites. College and university websites are our avatars on the web. They stand in and represent the work our colleagues do every day on campus. And they all look the same, are slow, and generally serve the whims of ego on our campuses.

With a compressed source of tuition on the horizon, this is the absolute opposite of what we should be doing. If 2025 is truly the peak of high school graduates (and thus prospective college students), then 2025 is the year to finally make that website work for you rather than against you.

You’re going to need every single student you can get, and that means tearing down every barrier your website puts up to keep them from making a decision. A few of those are:

  • Slow loading times
  • Confusing journeys
  • Unexplained internal speak
  • Black hole content
  • Stories that don’t go anywhere

… and the list goes on.

Call to action

So, this is your call to action. Whether you start small with focused optimizations or go big and completely redesign — the time to invest in your website is now. If you’re dealing with website performance issues in 2028, it’ll be too late. Set that foundation down in 2025. Fix the content issues. Fix your loading times. Simplify your user experience. Focus your efforts on the real humans who need to find your institution.

This is no time for guesswork. I’ll be real here: what we think is cool doesn’t tend to be the most effective when it comes to conversion rate optimization. Start with what works, then move on to what’s cool. And the only way we can know what works is by listening to prospective students.

There’s no time to waste.