It was the 2017 NACAC National Conference in Boston and, as Vice President for Admissions and Financial Aid at Colby-Sawyer College, Anna Miner was researching possible recruitment marketing technologies and vendors to help elevate her team’s effectiveness.
She recalls attending Capture Higher Ed’s NACAC session, which offered an interesting architectural metaphor to explain the importance of recruiting with behavioral intelligence — “desire paths.”
“It was an ‘aha! moment’ for me,” Miner recalls. “I remember the presenter saying something along the lines of, ‘students choose their own path, and as much as we want them to do what we want, they will go about it their own way.’ Helping them reach their goal — their college destination — requires us to understand and adapt to their path.”
Talking with Their Feet
Coincidentally, university campuses are some of the best places to see the architectural version of desire paths. College kids are known for seeking out the shortest distance between locations as they walk from class to class.
In the winter of 1914, Ohio State University architect Joseph N. Brad already knew this fact, and he used a hot air balloon to get an aerial view of the crisscrossing trails students created after the first snow. His findings were then used to design OSU’s network of paved walkways.
(Photos from the subreddit r/desirepath)
Don’t Re-Sod the Dirt
When faced with a paved path and a well-worn dirt trail, too often, enrollment managers — relying on familiar marketing themes and anecdotal evidence — simply re-sod the dirt. We assume prospective students should follow our carefully crafted recruitment messaging, rather than recognizing the organic paths they are already taking. In doing so, we override the data.
Capture’s recruitment marketing platform, built specifically for higher ed enrollment management, has tracked millions of visitors to our partner websites. This data provides an unprecedented, “hot air balloon view” of how prospective students explore colleges — important insights into the individual decision journeys students take.
What we know: students are finding their way to you through their own low-friction pathways, which often don’t align with the traditional recruitment pipeline. We now have more data than ever about students — their interests, behaviors, and needs. The question isn’t what we know; it’s how we use what we know.
Design vs. Desire
Students today take their own paths when exploring colleges — engaging across various channels, researching on their own terms, and often bypassing the traditional, structured enrollment journey institutions designed for them.
The challenge? Many tech stacks aren’t equipped to capture these unique journeys at the individual student level. But Anna Miner could when she partnered with Capture at Colby-Sawyer.
“I could see students’ behaviors, level of interest, and where they were engaging with us — even when they weren’t following the path we laid out in our marketing and communications strategies,” says Miner, who is now a Capture Senior Enrollment Advisor.
Does your current system provide you with data-grounded, actionable insights into student behavior? If not, chat with one of our experts. Find out how institutions like yours are leveraging behavioral intelligence to turn unseen engagement into real enrollment impact.
By Kevin Hyde, Senior Marketing Content Manager, Capture Higher Ed
