No single tactic wins college recruitment. The best-supported approach is a multichannel mix: personal contact, targeted digital outreach, and enrollment operations that capture and measure interest. The mix should be tuned to the institution type and the student’s stage in the journey. Ruffalo Noel Levitz’s (RNL) 2025 report, Marketing and Recruitment Practices for Undergraduate Students, surveyed 114 U.S. institutions. It found in-person meetings among the top-rated strategies in every sector it compared. Digital advertising, text messaging, personalized video and website design moved up or down depending on whether the institution is a private four-year, a public four-year or a two-year college.
That evidence is useful, but it is limited. It records what institutions say is effective, not what has been shown to cause enrollment growth. This article shows how to turn it into a plan: which channels to compare, how to personalize without over-promising, where AI fits, and how to measure results honestly.
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What the 2025 RNL survey actually shows
RNL’s report draws on 114 institutions across the United States and breaks its results into three groups: four-year private, four-year public and two-year institutions. It defines a practice as “effective” when respondents rate it “very effective” or “somewhat effective” from the options supplied. The report’s own summary says: “The findings from these leaders highlight the importance of a multichannel approach, with strategies as varied as in-person meetings, digital advertising, and personalized communication rising to the top of the most effective practices.”
Leading recruitment strategies by sector
| Institution type | Leading undergraduate recruitment strategies named in the report |
|---|---|
| Four-year private | In-person meetings, mobile-responsive website, text messaging |
| Four-year public | In-person meetings, personalized videos, text messaging |
| Two-year | Digital advertising, in-person meetings, personalized videos |
Three patterns stand out:
- In-person meetings appear in all three groups. Even in a heavily digital funnel, the human conversation remains a core tactic.
- Text messaging is prominent for four-year institutions but not in the two-year list. Personalized video appears for public four-year and two-year institutions.
- Digital advertising leads for two-year institutions. The report’s advertising comparisons cover social media, retargeted, video, paid display and television advertising, and the rankings differ by sector.
Beyond advertising: response capture and operations
The report treats recruitment as more than media buying. Its digital comparisons include SEO, inquiry-for-information (RFI) forms, AI-powered chatbots, paid display and search engine marketing. Its management practices include admissions tracking, engagement scoring, CRM use, analytics and AI-assisted enrollment operations. Advertising brings students in. The forms, tracking and follow-up systems decide whether anyone converts that attention into an application.
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What the survey cannot tell you
The sample is U.S.-only and focused on undergraduates. It is descriptive, so it cannot show that adopting a top-ranked tactic raises enrollment. Do not apply it to graduate, international or non-U.S. recruitment without separate evidence. Use the rankings as a shortlist of options to test locally, not as a forecast.
Build the channel mix around the student journey
A channel list is not a strategy. A more useful frame is to ask what job each channel does at each stage, and whether your team can staff and measure it. The mapping below is editorial guidance that organizes the channels the report covers; the report does not prescribe it.
| Stage | Job to be done | Channels the report covers |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Reach students who do not yet know the institution | Digital advertising (social, video, display, retargeting), SEO, television |
| Inquiry | Capture interest and identify the person | Mobile-responsive website, RFI forms, chatbots |
| Conversation | Answer questions and build trust | In-person meetings, text messaging, personalized video, counselor outreach |
| Application and admit | Remove friction and show fit | CRM-driven communication, engagement scoring, admissions tracking |
| Deposit to enrollment | Keep committed students from drifting away | Continued communication, family resources |
Work backward from the weakest stage. If inquiries are plentiful but few convert to applications, more advertising will not help. The bottleneck is more likely follow-up speed, message relevance or process friction.
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Personalize without over-promising
The survey gives distinct attention to high-school counselors and to families, in addition to students themselves. It also discusses family-specific resources and communication after the deposit. Taken as design principles rather than proven formulas, these point to a few practices:
- Give each student a clear next step at every contact, rather than a generic stream of messages.
- Keep counselors informed. Counselors relay your information, so accuracy matters as much as volume.
- Give families process information such as deadlines, aid steps and orientation, while keeping the student as the decision-maker.
- Do not go quiet after the deposit. The report treats the deposit-to-enrollment stretch as a communication period, not an end point.
No source here shows that a particular message sequence raises yield. Treat each of these as a hypothesis, and test it against your own cohorts.
Use AI as an operational choice, not a promise
RNL describes AI-powered chatbots and AI use in enrollment operations and analysis as emerging practices. Its practical advice is to assess how a tool is implemented and to tell students what a chatbot can and cannot do. In practice, that means:
- Say plainly when a student is talking to an automated system, and say what it cannot answer.
- Provide a route to a staff member for aid, deadlines and eligibility questions.
- Evaluate it like any other channel, by what it does to inquiry quality and conversion, not by novelty.
The survey does not establish a causal enrollment lift from AI or a sector-wide governance standard. Decisions about data use, privacy and oversight need your own institutional policy.
Reaching first-generation and underrepresented students
The RNL report covers recruitment of underrepresented students as a distinct topic. Generic best-channel rankings do not tell you what works for a specific community. The institutional example below shows what a combined approach can look like.
One institution’s approach: SUNY Geneseo
SUNY Geneseo’s 2024-25 president’s report describes a coordinated out-of-state strategy. It combined a tuition-match program, larger prospect-pool name purchases, counselor and alumni engagement, consortium activity and scholarships. The institution reports:
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- Name purchases rose from 35,000 in 2023 to 70,000 in 2024, and leads exceeded 100,000 in 2025.
- Out-of-state admits doubled compared with the 2023 out-of-state cohort.
- Out-of-state yield stayed at roughly 3%.
The yield figure is the useful caution. More leads and more admits did not raise yield. Volume at the top of the funnel and conversion at the bottom are separate problems. These are Geneseo’s own reported numbers for its own context. They are not a benchmark, and they do not prove that the name purchases alone drove the change, since the tuition match and scholarships ran alongside them.
The same report describes work with historically underrepresented and first-generation students. It lists community partnerships, a revised Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) recruitment process, pre-orientation, first-generation scholarships and family sessions. Geneseo reports first-generation students at 22.1% of the 2024-25 cohort, against a 19.3% benchmark from 2021-22, with a 24.4% goal for 2026-27. The pattern is useful: access work is spread across recruitment, aid, orientation and family engagement rather than confined to a single outreach campaign.
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The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) published an education marketing and communications measurement framework in 2024, built to address a lack of consistent measurement and benchmarking. Recruitment and retention are among its six categories. It presents metrics as tools for setting goals, assessing progress and supporting continuous improvement. It does not prescribe a single recruitment KPI for every institution, and neither does any other source here.
A practical measurement setup
The following structure is editorial guidance built on that principle, not a standard from CASE or RNL:
- Name the audience and outcome. For example, out-of-state first-year applicants, adult transfer students or first-generation admits.
- Define a measure for each funnel stage. Examples are reach and cost, inquiry quality, application and admit movement, yield and persistence.
- Fix the definitions and dates. State what counts as an inquiry or a lead, which cohort and time period you are using, and which segment.
- Add cost and experience. Volume alone hides expensive or frustrating routes. Track resource cost, and check student experience with surveys or conversations.
- Include affordability and outcomes. Recruiting students who then cannot afford to stay or finish is not success.
Be careful with comparisons
Do not compare your results with another institution’s unless population, selectivity, program mix, geography and metric definitions match. Geneseo’s lead counts mean little for a community college with a local service area. For context, state agencies sometimes publish enrollment and equity data. Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission, for example, releases annual snapshots on enrollment, affordability and outcomes with a focus on underserved groups. Its latest snapshots, released in 2026, use 2024-25 learner data. Such data are bound to one state and cohort, so use them as local context rather than a national yardstick.
Compliance: check before you launch
Recruitment messaging, disclosures and aid information sit inside regulatory requirements for institutions that participate in federal student aid. The Federal Student Aid Handbook’s 2024-25 appendix summarizes institutional reporting and disclosure requirements and cites the statutes and regulations behind them. It also states that it is not complete implementation guidance and that omissions do not relieve an institution of its Title IV obligations. Before running a campaign or making claims about costs, aid or outcomes, check the current regulations and detailed guidance, and involve your compliance office.
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A sensible way to start
- Audit the funnel first. Find where students drop out between inquiry, application, admit and deposit before buying more reach.
- Protect human contact. In-person and live conversations rank highly in every sector the survey covers.
- Choose channels you can run well. Text messaging, personalized video and chatbots all need staff time, content and follow-through.
- Make the CRM and analytics foundation work. Admissions tracking, engagement scoring and analytics are how you learn which tactics are actually working for you.
- Run small tests with defined cohorts instead of adopting a ranking wholesale.
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