There is a question every prospective international student is really asking when they land on a university website, read a programme description, or attend a webinar.
It is not “when was this institution founded?” It is not “how many faculty members do you have?” And it is certainly not “what ranking position do you hold on which list?”
The question is simpler and more personal than any of those: Is this for someone like me?
Most universities answer a completely different set of questions. And that gap — between what students are trying to understand and what institutions choose to communicate — is one of the most expensive problems in international student recruitment. Not because it is difficult to fix, but because most institutions do not recognise it as a problem at all.
When a prospective international student is evaluating a programme, they are trying to answer a small number of deeply personal questions.
Is this programme for me — and what kind of person succeeds here? Who will I become? What do graduates actually do, and where do they go? Can I realistically afford this, including the life around it? Will I be safe, and will I belong? And practically: how long does this take, and will someone help me through it?
These are not complicated questions. They are the questions anyone would ask before making one of the most significant decisions of their life — moving to another country to study at an institution they have never visited, in a city they may never have heard of.
When a university can answer these questions clearly and credibly, prospective students move forward. When it cannot, they move on — and the university never knows why.
Now look at what most university programme pages, brochures, and admissions communications actually say.
Founded in a particular year. Ranked in some position on some list. A “modern, dynamic, innovative environment” — a phrase so generic it appears on thousands of websites simultaneously. A list of faculty members and their research interests. Document requirements and application deadlines. Instructions for submitting certified translations.
None of this is wrong. Some of it is necessary. But almost none of it answers the questions students are actually asking.
The institution is communicating its own internal logic — its history, its structure, its administrative requirements — rather than the student’s reality. It is answering questions nobody asked while leaving the important ones unanswered.
Students are not confused by complexity. They are lost by irrelevance. When a university cannot speak to what a student is genuinely trying to understand, the student moves on. And the university, looking at its application numbers, concludes it needs more marketing.
This is where the problem compounds.
Universities invest in new channels — WhatsApp, social media, webinars, education fairs — trying to reach more students in more places. And those channels can work. But a new channel carrying the same irrelevant message does not perform better. It just reaches more people with content that does not answer their questions.
The students who are comparing options across five or six institutions are not choosing the one with the biggest LinkedIn following or the most active WhatsApp channel. They are choosing the one that made them feel, clearly and credibly, that the programme was built for someone like them.
That feeling comes from messaging, not from channel strategy.
When we work with universities on programme positioning, the most common finding is not that the institution lacks good stories to tell. It is that those stories are buried, absent, or framed entirely from the institution’s perspective rather than the student’s.
The impact of fixing this is more significant than most institutions expect — and it shows up faster. In one programme we repositioned from scratch, conversion from applicant to submitted application improved by more than fifty percent within a single recruitment cycle. No new channels. No increased marketing spend. The same applicant pool, responding differently to a message that finally spoke to what they were trying to understand.
In another, submitted applications nearly doubled after repositioning. Again, the change was not in where the message was delivered — it was in what the message actually said.
The pattern is consistent: when a programme can clearly answer “is this for someone like me?”, more of the people asking that question say yes.
Student-centred messaging is not about being informal or using casual language. It is about making a genuine case for fit — helping a prospective student understand not just what the programme contains, but what it is like to be in it, what it does to the people who go through it, and what becomes possible afterwards.
It means leading with outcomes rather than inputs. Not “our programme covers X, Y, and Z” but “our graduates go on to do this, in these kinds of roles, in these kinds of organizations.” It means using real student and alumni voices rather than institutional claims. It means addressing the practical realities — cost, housing, visa process, what daily life actually looks like — rather than pretending they do not exist.
And it means having a clear answer to the hardest question: who is this programme for, and who is most likely to thrive here? Institutions that can answer this specifically and honestly attract more of the right applicants — and lose fewer of them along the way.
Here is where many universities stop short.
They do the messaging work. They rewrite the programme page, sharpen the value proposition, update their listings in relevant portals and platforms. And the results improve — but not as much as they could.
The reason is that a good message still needs to reach the student at the right moment. Not when they happen to visit the website. Not when they open an email three days after sending an inquiry. At the moment they are actively thinking about their options, comparing programmes, and ready to take a step forward.
This is where the communication layer matters as much as the message itself. A student who receives a warm, relevant, personalized message through an instant messaging channel such as WhatsApp or Signal — the channels they already use every day — at the moment they are most likely to act on it, responds very differently from one who finds the same information buried in a programme brochure two weeks later.
The gap between a good message and a well-delivered message is where a significant portion of applicant drop-off still happens, even after the positioning work is done.
This is the piece that ties the full picture together.
Strong positioning tells the student that the programme is for someone like them. A clear admissions process removes the friction that stops them from applying. And proactive, personalized communication — delivered through the channels they actually use — makes sure the right message reaches them at the right moment, rather than waiting for them to come looking for it.
At EduEnable, we work across all three of these layers. The positioning and messaging work comes first — because without it, everything else is just noise. But we have seen the biggest results when that work is combined with a proactive communication strategy that puts the message in front of the student at the moments that matter.
Working with our partner Annie Advisor, we help institutions deploy AI-powered communication assistants that do exactly this — reaching applicants proactively through WhatsApp, Signal, or SMS, answering their real questions in real time, and keeping them engaged through the process rather than losing them to silence. Not as a replacement for the human relationships that matter in recruitment, but as the layer that makes those relationships possible at scale.
The results we have seen — conversion rates improving significantly within a single cycle, submitted applications nearly doubling, threatened programmes returning to health — have not come from any single intervention. They have come from getting the message right, the process right, and the communication right, at the same time.
Before the next campaign, the next channel, or the next education fair, it is worth asking one question about every programme you recruit for:
If a prospective student spends ten minutes with your programme page, your admissions listing, and your most recent outreach — can they answer, in their own words, what kind of person this programme is for and what it will do for them?
If the answer is no, that is the problem worth solving first.
More visibility for a message that does not resonate does not improve conversion. It just reaches more people who do not apply.
That is exactly the kind of problem we help universities diagnose and fix — from the message, through the process, to the moment of delivery. If you want to explore what that could look like for your programmes, feel free to send me a message.
EduEnable supports universities, national agencies, and EdTechs in building their global presence — from strategic insight to practical delivery. To explore how we can help your institution strengthen its marketing and communications, contact us today.
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