Colleges spend considerable money convincing prospective students to enroll. Sophisticated advertising campaigns, personalized communications, and elaborate CRM systems guide students toward that all-important application.

Then, when a student decides to enroll, we hand them a scavenger hunt.

Activate your account. Submit your transcripts. Complete financial aid verification. Schedule advising. Register for classes. Figure out why there’s a mysterious hold on your account.

Congratulations! You’ve been admitted. Now prove you can navigate our bureaucracy.

In his recent Community College Daily article, ⁠How college processes shape student experience, College of DuPage President Muddassir Siddiqi argues that institutional processes profoundly shape the student experience. He’s right. And marketing ought to be part of the solution.

The great enrollment contradiction

Colleges have become remarkably sophisticated at understanding prospective students. We study their motivations, anticipate questions, identify barriers, and personalize their experiences.

Then they enroll, and we treat them as a collection of administrative transactions.

Somewhere along the way, onboarding became an institutional potluck. Every department brings a form, a presentation, a mandatory training, or another item for the checklist. Nobody seems particularly concerned about how much is already on the table.

Each office may be fulfilling its responsibilities perfectly while collectively creating an exhausting experience.

And that burden isn’t distributed equally. Processes often assume students have unlimited time, reliable technology, readily available documentation, and familiarity with American higher education’s bureaucracy.

For first-generation and immigrant students, unfamiliar paperwork, requests for family financial records, and documentation requirements can create additional hurdles. Students balancing work, family, and coursework may have little flexibility to navigate multiple offices during business hours.

The problem isn’t student preparedness. It’s institutional design.

Processes should make life easier for students, not employees. Yet colleges routinely organize requirements around departmental responsibilities, operating hours, and internal convenience, expecting students to accommodate the institution rather than the other way around.

Design for students, not departments

We know when a prospective student opens an email, clicks an ad, or abandons an application. But can we tell whether an enrolled student has contacted three different offices trying to resolve the same problem?

A genuinely integrated CRM could help, provided it’s accompanied by shared workflows and accountability.

Imagine contacting one office where an employee can see relevant interactions, identify outstanding requirements, and coordinate a resolution without making the student start over or repeatedly explain sensitive circumstances.

That’s a one-stop experience, not merely a one-stop office.

The same principle should guide communications. Instead of bombarding every student with identical messages, colleges could use targeted drip campaigns reflecting actual progress, needs, and upcoming milestones.

Financial aid verified? Stop sending reminders. Registered for classes? Shift toward preparing for the semester. Encountering difficulty? Offer help rather than another warning.

Personalize based on what students need and do, not what we presume about who they are.

And pay attention to the language.

Our communications too often describe students as deficient, noncompliant, or at risk when they’re navigating processes we’ve made unnecessarily complicated.

Compare “You have failed to complete your financial aid verification” with “There’s one step remaining in your financial aid verification. Here’s how to complete it, and where to get help.”

Both communicate a requirement. Only one assigns blame.

Not everything students need to know eventually needs to be communicated immediately, either. Thoughtful sequencing can replace the kitchen sink with information that’s relevant when students actually need it. Trust me when I say your accept packet does not need to contain instructions on how to get a parking permit.

Replace administrative anxiety with accomplishment

What if enrolling felt less like completing a compliance checklist and more like making progress toward something exciting?

Gamification offers possibilities.

A personalized dashboard could present necessary requirements as manageable milestones, celebrate completed tasks, and show students exactly what’s next.

Registered for your first semester? Congratulations! Here’s a free coffee.

Or imagine snacks inside a vending machine that feature decals displaying a reminder: “Registration opens Monday. Have you checked for holds?” A QR code provides a direct path to the relevant information.

Personalized push notifications could offer timely prompts, then stop once students complete the task. And students should always have accessible alternatives to any particular technology.

These aren’t exotic concepts. Marketers routinely use behavioral triggers, contextual messaging, incentives, and personalized communication journeys.

Yet we often reserve that sophistication for people we’re trying to recruit rather than those we’ve already enrolled.

Stop decorating broken processes

Of course, technology and clever messaging won’t fix everything.

Higher education’s organizational silos create a peculiar problem: Every department can define what students must do, but few people are accountable for the cumulative burden.

Marketing may be invited to improve communications about a process without being permitted to question why that process exists.

But gamifying an unnecessarily complicated procedure only makes the obstacle course more colorful.

The priorities should be straightforward: Eliminate unnecessary requirements, simplify and coordinate what remains, and then make those interactions engaging, reassuring, and occasionally enjoyable.

That may require employees and departments to change familiar routines, share responsibilities, or undertake additional coordination. So be it. Administrative convenience should never be the organizing principle of the student experience.

Marketing can contribute audience research, behavioral insights, journey mapping, and experience design alongside colleagues throughout the institution. But leadership must empower that collaboration to change processes, not merely explain them.

Otherwise, marketing becomes the department responsible for making dysfunction sound welcoming.

A college can spend millions presenting itself as accessible, welcoming, and student-centered. But if its processes are confusing, repetitive, and exhausting, the institution undermines its own promise.

We’ve spent decades figuring out how to make students want to enroll.

Imagine what might happen if we applied that same ingenuity to making them glad they did.