PUBLISHED APR.10, 2025 | 4 MIN READ

The Search Cliff and Beyond: Strategies for 2025 Enrollment Success

  
    With fewer college-age students and fewer leads to reach them, higher-ed is entering a new era of recruitment challenges. Discover how the overlooked “Search Cliff” is disrupting traditional strategies and what your institution can do now to stay ahead.
  

We’ve all heard of the Demographic Cliff, the expected decline in high school graduates starting around 2025, as highlighted by WICHE and similar studies, but a new and equally pressing challenge is emerging in higher education enrollment: the Search Cliff. While the industry has long grappled with shifting demographics, 2025 presents a perfect storm of compounding issues—the Demographic Cliff, the Search Cliff, and evolving privacy laws. These external pressures are making it increasingly difficult for institutions to attract and convert prospective students, yet the Search Cliff has not garnered the attention it likely deserves, despite its growing impact on yield rates.

Understanding the Search Cliff

Enrollment management teams across the country have long relied on purchasing student names to fill the top of their recruitment funnel. However, due to privacy laws, test-optional policies, and shifts in standardized testing procedures, the availability of names for purchase is plummeting.

According to Forbes, “Due to the College Board’s shift to a digital PSAT and SAT and digital privacy laws governing school districts, the number of names available for licensing in the College Board’s Student Search Service will drop by nearly 40% over the next four years.” The reduction in available names is not just a theoretical problem—it’s a very real disruption to a core recruitment strategy. For enrollment leaders, the reduction in leads available for purchase represents a direct and tangible challenge to the institution’s enrollment.

In 2023, a CollegeVine research report revealed that the performance of name-buys has dropped by 67% since 2018. In 2023, 100,000 purchased names yielded just 43 enrollments—a conversion rate of 0.043%, down from 0.131% in 2018 and 0.300–0.400% a decade ago. This decline is not merely a numerical dip; it directly impacts the cost-effectiveness and success of an enrollment strategy. Worse yet, as the list of available students shrinks, it is still being shared among the same institutions, increasing competition for a smaller pool of prospective students. With fewer students opting to share their data, traditional name-buy strategies are becoming increasingly unreliable. The combined impact of the Demographic Cliff and the Search Cliff is only amplifying this challenge.

As Bart Caylor, President and Founder of Caylor Solutions and The Higher-Ed Marketer Podcast, states, “The Search Cliff is a wake-up call for higher-ed institutions relying too heavily on traditional mass marketing tactics. As student behavior shifts, schools must focus on building authentic, mission-driven engagement—meeting students where they are through authentic, distinctive messaging and relationships.”

Overcoming the Search Cliff: Diversifying Lead Sources and Increasing Conversion Rates
With fewer college-age students due to the Demographic Cliff and fewer names available for purchase due to the Search Cliff, institutions must adapt. To remain competitive, they need to either convert purchased names at a higher rate or increase the number of students entering their funnel—otherwise, they risk a precipitous decline in enrollment.

So, how can schools adapt to this changing landscape?

At Ring Digital, we partner with institutions of all sizes to help of all sizes to help them advance their enrollment initiatives in spite of the challenging landscape. Our solutions are designed to both increase conversion rates of the names you purchase and expand the top-of-funnel pool, ensuring institutions stay ahead in an evolving recruitment landscape. To achieve this, we leverage two cutting-edge tactics:

Household-Targeted Digital Advertising: With this solution, we adapt and enhance your existing efforts by placing your brand and message in front of prospective students whose names you've purchased at critical decision-making moments. By combining first-party demographic data with real-world location data, we ensure that your institution’s message reaches students and their parents at key decision-making moments throughout their enrollment journey. This strategic approach helps you convert prospective students at a higher rate, maximizing the value of every name you purchase and guiding students from initial interest to enrollment.

Domain Conquesting: This privacy-compliant solution enables you to place animated display, pre-roll, and connected TV ads in front of prospective students who have visited specific URLs, whether they're actively on a competitor’s website, your own website, or important industry-relevant websites. By targeting these high-intent visitors, we turn previously anonymous prospects into identified, targetable households, ensuring a steady flow of engaged students into your recruitment funnel, all in a privacy-compliant, consent-based environment.

These tools work best as part of a broader enrollment strategy, complementing other approaches like inbound marketing, social media engagement, and organic content efforts. By combining advanced targeting with a multi-channel approach, institutions can create a well-rounded strategy that maximizes reach and engagement.

  
    Increasing Your Win Probability in a Changing Landscape 

As the enrollment landscape shifts, institutions face mounting challenges—from fewer prospective students to declining name-buy effectiveness and intensifying competition. 
Relying on traditional, opaque tactics is no longer sustainable. To stay ahead, enrollment leaders must act now to diversify recruitment strategies, expand outreach efforts, and adopt a proactive approach before these challenges become too difficult to overcome. 

With the help of Ring Digital, institutions can tackle this challenge from both angles. 
Our  Household-Targeted Digital Advertising  ensures that your brand reaches the right students (and their parents) at the right moments, increasing conversion rates and maximizing the value of every name purchased, while, our  Domain Conquesting  identifies high-intent prospective students based on their online behavior, turning anonymous website visitors into engaged, targetable households.

 In an increasingly competitive environment, institutions can no longer rely on yesterday’s methods. Now is the time to adapt, optimize, and secure your institution’s future enrollment success.

Speak with our team.

Our digital video placement and display ad buying technology allows us to target your audience down to the household. Not ZIP code. Not block. Not range of IP addresses. Household.

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