I was listening to an interview with Josh Shapiro on the All In Podcast recently. Shapiro is the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, and the hosts asked him about higher education and what he planned to do about it. I figured I knew roughly where it was going.
His answer surprised me. He said that on his first day in office he signed an executive order removing the four-year degree requirement from 92% of Pennsylvania government jobs, roughly 65,000 positions. And he talked about it like it was something to be proud of. Coming from a Democratic governor, with a party that has traditionally been higher ed’s biggest advocate, that landed differently than I expected.
The prize has flipped
There’s a concept in Oren Klaff’s book Pitch Anything called prizing. The idea is simple: in any social or business interaction, someone is the prize and someone is chasing. Status flows to whoever is being pursued.
For decades, students chased universities. They wrote essays, took tests, and waited to hear whether an institution deemed them worthy enough to attend. That was just how it worked.
That dynamic has flipped. Universities now find themselves chasing students, and most of them are not very good at it yet. We ran research where we showed prospective students emails with subject lines like “Application deadline extended just for you.” They weren’t moved. One student said flatly, “No it wasn’t. They just didn’t get enough applications. That makes me want to go there less.”
Being obviously desperate is its own message.
The headwinds are real
The Shapiro moment is one signal in a much bigger picture. Fewer high school students are graduating every year. International students, a financial lifeline for many institutions, are thinking twice. Visa uncertainty is real, and the cultural welcome mat has been pulled back in ways that matter. On top of that, public sentiment toward higher ed has shifted in ways that would have been hard to predict even five years ago.
None of this is insurmountable. But it all points in the same direction.
The only play left
The institutions that figure this out will do one thing differently: they’ll stop marketing and start helping.
The best way to not look needy is to be genuinely useful. Not “here are our programs” useful. Actually useful. Interested in the student’s actual situation, their actual goals, their actual fears about the next four years. Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. That’s true in sales. It’s true in enrollment.
Every enrollment professional I’ve ever talked to genuinely cares about students. The tragedy is the systems they use don’t show it. The emails don’t show it. The drip sequences don’t show it. The chatbot on the homepage definitely doesn’t show it.
The gap between what enrollment teams actually feel and what students actually experience is where universities are losing.
When a Democratic governor is citing no-degree-required as a point of pride, the window to close that gap is smaller than it’s ever been.
There are bigger product questions underneath all of this too. What does a university actually offer? Is it well aligned with where students want to go? Can it be done in a way that’s financially viable? I’m not qualified to answer those, and I won’t pretend to be. What I do know is that the best enrollment marketing in the world cannot solve for deep product issues. Both things have to move.