Webinar Recap | Removing Barriers, Building Connections, and Driving Yield

Most enrollment systems track what students do: deposit, visit campus, register. What they rarely capture is why a student goes quiet before any of that happens. By the time a missed deadline is flagged, the student has often already made up their mind. The three enrollment leaders on this panel focused their conversation around closing that gap and proactively capturing concerns in real time with Student Voice Intelligence, when there's still time to do something about it.

Panelists:

Amy Gade, Director of Admissions, Wayne State College

Jared AuBuchon, Assistant Director of Admissions, Jefferson College

Melissa Telles, Electronic Systems Manager, Western Illinois University

Students say more than you'd expect, just not to you.

All three panelists landed on the same observation: students are more honest with AI than they are with a real person. Admitted students who had ignored emails, calls, and social posts from actual counselors were responding to AI text message check-ins and sharing what was really going on. At Western Illinois, counselors identified students they had been trying to reach through every other channel, only to find them opening up through EdSights.

"We actually had several of our counselors identify students that they had been contacting for different reasons, who never responded to the emails, the messages, and the social media posts, but they responded to the AI, and that gave the counselor the avenue actually to enter that conversation. We found a lot of students where we were able to kind of automatically connect them to resources."
- Melissa Telles, Electronic Systems Manager, Western Illinois University

At Wayne State, Amy Gade noticed the same thing. When her staff called students directly, students would often sidestep the real issue. Proactive conversational AI is what surfaced the real, underlying challenge.

Knowing who to focus on changes everything

With lean teams and long admitted pools, a common challenge across all three institutions was prioritization. EdSights helped staff understand exactly which students needed follow-up and why, so no one started a conversation cold. Jefferson College operates with two recruiters and no CRM, so knowing exactly who to call and why has been critical.

“Being able to connect them to the right resources earlier, compared to, alright, it's July, it's August 1st, and they want to do fall. And there's all these things I would have missed before… But EdSights lets us kind of see their full profile, being able to talk to them in May or March instead. Before they're fallen off [and] don't consider our college anymore. And we also get to look at their fears and their goals, and see where we can help them become more confident in our resources.”
- Jared AuBuchon, Assistant Director of Admissions, Jefferson College

Wayne State ran 44 proactive campaigns between April and August, automatically connecting 1,400 students to resources and narrowing a full admitted pool down to 183 students flagged for direct follow-up. The result was their largest freshman class in over 50 years, with fewer applications than the prior year.

"Using [EdSights] really allowed us to communicate with students and keep them engaged in the process, while allowing my staff to really focus in on those that needed a little bit more attention… When you have a whole list of admitted students that, you know, all are top priority, and figuring out who is of most urgent need can be really, really difficult. And so, this really helped us sniff out who wasn't interested anymore, so we could kind of move on from those students, who was still interested, but who was interested and had some questions, or concerns, or issues."
- Amy Gade, Director of Admissions, Wayne State College

The data doesn't just help yield. It shapes what comes next.

A thread that ran through the whole conversation: what students say during this admissions cycle is a blueprint for the next one. Top questions surfacing in EdSights conversations are already pushing Jefferson College to rethink how and when they communicate around transcripts. Western Illinois is using commitment themes from this cycle to focus messaging for the next.

"We don't always know why students make the decisions that they do. We can look at the actions they've taken, but we don't always get to see the reasons why they're taking the actions that they are. And so, one of the things that we've really benefited from, through the EdSights platform, is, being able to qualitatively add to the quantitative number."
- Melissa Telles, Electronic Systems Manager, Western Illinois University

The institutions seeing the clearest results aren't just reacting to flags. They're using what students say to get ahead of the same friction points before they come up again.

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