The Higher Ed Website Is Dead. We Just Haven't Buried It Yet.
Higher education websites are still built like org charts with a search bar. What comes next looks nothing like that.
The higher education website as we know it was built by colleges and departments that wanted to own their piece of the pie. Every school, every office, every program needed a home, a voice, and a place to put their content. The result is what most institutions still have today: a five-hundred-page information repository organized around internal structure rather than student intent, that asks prospective students to translate how the institution is organized into answers about their own lives. It has never really worked. The exceptions are the handful of legacy brands where admission rates are in the single digits. When demand exceeds supply by that margin, your website does not need to work very hard. For everyone else, it is a liability dressed up as a digital presence.
What replaces it is a personalized, context-aware experience that knows something about you before you arrive and delivers relevance on first contact. The data infrastructure to make it real already exists at most institutions. CRM systems hold behavioral signals, campaign history, and demographic context. Intent data tells us what someone searched before they clicked. Application and inquiry data tells us where someone is in their journey. The pieces are there. What most institutions have not done is connect them to the front door.
Imagine arriving at a university website not as an anonymous visitor, but as someone the institution already knows a little. You searched “nursing programs Denver.” You clicked an Instagram ad about clinical rotations. You have been to the financial aid page twice. The website that greets you does not show you what everyone sees. It shows you what you came to find, framed around how a nursing degree fits your life, with financial aid information front and center because that is clearly where your head is. Personalization done right is just basic respect for a person's time.
The second shift is even bigger. Navigation exists as a workaround for a problem that AI makes obsolete. Forty subpages under Financial Aid exist because no one could anticipate every question, so institutions documented every answer and hoped users would find them. What happens when a student can just ask? Not a search box that returns a list of pages, but a real conversational interface that says: tell me what you need to know, and I will tell you, in plain language, whether this institution is the right fit and what it will actually cost you. Love it or hate it, that is where this is going. The institutions building for that future now will not be waiting for the moment to arrive. They will already own it.
Higher education marketing never gets to rest. That is one of the things I genuinely love about it. The channel that worked three years ago is table stakes today. The website that won awards in 2019 is an anchor in 2026. The schools still proud of what they launched during COVID are competing against schools rebuilding for a world where the website is the first intelligent conversation a student has with your institution, not a brochure or a directory or a tour guide. You either show up ready to have that conversation or you do not show up at all.
The institutions that get there first will not just convert better. They will build trust faster, answer objections earlier, and show prospective students something most schools never manage: that they actually understand what students are going through when they are trying to choose a college. Will is the actual constraint. The technology is ready. The question is whether the institution is.
Matthew Gann, Ph.D.