The conversation surrounding college admissions and enrollment is dominated by the so-called demographic cliff. While seismic, it is not the only structural challenge upending higher education. The past decade has seen the traditional four-year degree face a value crisis as students weigh the cost of their program against potential employment outcomes.

In a labor market sure to be disrupted by AI, is the four-year program worth the debt that comes with it? The answer for many is no. The options for students today look different. Many are gravitating toward vocational programs and skilled trades. Institutions are diversifying their programs, offering accelerated educational pathways that equip students with workplace-relevant skills, and it is attracting a different profile of learner. “We’re seeing the value of skilled trades become more and more prevalent, and the growth of two-year and specialized institutions take more share of students than before,” says Tony Pearman, CEO and president of the higher education marketing company AccessU.

Those students might be older, seeking a fresh start. They might come from underserved communities or lack high school qualifications. What they share is the need to gain a different type of value from their education. This raises a practical question for institutions: are they communicating value with the same customer focus students expect in other areas of their lives?

Susan Pollard, assistant vice chancellor for strategic communications at Virginia Community College System (VCCS), believes institutions have been guilty of not seeing themselves as a business like any other. “If your customer, the student, is not feeling like they’re getting the best product for the price, then they are going to go elsewhere because, guess what? There are so many other higher education institutions,” says Pollard. “That paradigm still needs to shift.”

That kind of customer mindset has implications for how institutions communicate with prospective students across a growing set of touchpoints. Harnessing the power of aspirational and relatable stories of personal transformation to design dynamic, innovative marketing campaigns may be the playbook higher education needs to tackle the value crisis.

Just as the student journey is being diversified, so too are the means and modes that institutions can use to reach them. Higher education marketing campaigns can now be conducted across social media, email, myriad online platforms, as well as in analogue formats. “When I say ‘meet students where they are,’ I mean two things: being accessible through 24/7 media channels that support a nurturing journey, and understanding how today’s students’ needs are changing,” says Pearman. “Many aren’t coming straight from high school—they have jobs, families and different realities—and institutions need to adjust how they engage them.”

As Pearman acknowledges, meeting them where they are is only part of the equation, engaging them through the process is the other piece. We live in the attention economy, a technologically complex information environment where data insights are invaluable. Institutions can monitor engagement metrics in real time, see what students are clicking on and where they are dropping out of the process—all useful information. But what underpins the success of these campaigns is the institution’s ability to tell a compelling story. Success rests on understanding the student, their hopes and dreams—and their concerns—then presenting an educational pathway that the student can see themselves in. Here, smaller institutions can punch above their weight, be more nimble in their marketing campaigns and take risks in their presentation. “We think it’s great to push clients out of their comfort zone if it’s right for their students,” says Pearman.

At the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, Virginia, the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing (ATDM) program places employment outcomes at the center of its messaging. ATDM runs classes in additive manufacturing, non-destructive testing, metrology and welding, to name a few. It’s addressing urgent skills shortages in US manufacturing to provide the maritime industrial base with the talent it needs. “Students can complete what would typically be about a year-and-a-half to two years of a community college traditional program in about four months because they train eight hours a day,” says Telly Tucker, president of the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research. “These young people have an opportunity to jumpstart their career in 16 weeks and end up with a credential and earn a living wage.”

The program is a textbook example of an accelerated pathway that is embracing a nonconventional outreach strategy. Many ATDM students are adult learners. The program is popular with veterans. ATDM’s goal is a thousand graduates per annum, and it uses AI predictive modeling to support its recruitment. There is no typical ATDM student, but they are all goal driven. They buy into ATDM’s model because they see the value. The marketing outreach is tailored to establish trust among a diverse cohort who might be skeptical about higher education. Conventional marketing campaigns are simply too static to communicate this effectively. Today’s students are resistant to prestige branding; they want to see how a program will transform their lives.

Pollard says building trust is a long game. VCCS is a network of 23 community colleges, spread across the state, in rural and urban areas. It, too, relies upon data but the success of its campaigns lies in student-focused messaging, such as its hugely successful “find your answer” tagline. The key is to always consider how to evolve the message and build the brand. “We went from ‘find your answer’ to ‘I found my answer’. Then we started doing nuanced messages to different audiences,” explains Pollard. “Because the message that may resonate with a military veteran is very different to a message that may resonate with a student that just graduated from high school.”

Knowing how the message will be received requires familiarity with the student and the institution. AccessU spends at least a week on a partner campus speaking with faculty and students to understand the institution, its community and the academic journey. “We make sure that each institution is authentically reflected in their marketing,” says Pearman. “Then you start touching people in a way that they say, ‘Oh, that looks like me.’”

The architecture of a successful recruitment strategy is rooted in communications. Pollard says she knew the message was resonating when she read their language being repeated by students in VCCS surveys. Such is the importance and complexity of communications: the institution must be in lock-step internally and with partners to maintain consistency across its messaging. This allows institutions to be intentional in their marketing, as when VCCS started advertising transfer programs during the state’s football games. Everyone needs to be involved. “We were in a meeting just last week where the president attended the first meeting of a kick-off for a new website,” says Pearman. “When you see that kind of institutional buy-in, you just know that you are going to succeed.”

Engagement metrics can be illusory. But what defines success in admissions and enrollment are student outcomes. It is the student who dropped out of high school because of her math skills who later found a community college professor who inspired her and now has a PhD in mathematics. “You can see these amazing, transformational journeys that wouldn’t happen with any other four-year institution,” says Pearman.

Success is measured in the number of lives that have been changed. With ATDM’s program so closely linked to industry, Tucker sees success as recruiting students who will excel on the factory floor. “Quite frankly, if every student that graduates leaves quickly from the jobs they’re in, then we have failed as an organization in preparing them for what’s ahead,” he says.

The institutions that will thrive in this new recruitment marketplace are those who recognize that the game has changed. The shift may start with the development of new pathways, but success depends on institutions’ willingness to describe them honestly, clearly and in language students recognize. For AccessU, that work begins with pushing past familiar tropes and helping institutions tell stories grounded in real lives and outcomes.