How to Get Admitted Students to Enroll: A Discussion on Melt and Its Impact

When enrollment professionals talk about “melt,” they’re talking about prospective college students who say yes—and then quietly disappear. For both undergraduate and graduate teams, that loss is more than a number on a dashboard; it’s emotional, operational, and strategic.

At Evangel University, Director of Admission and Recruitment Charlie Hungerford described how melt once felt like a personal breakup. As a front-line recruiter, he could spend 18 months cultivating a relationship with a student only to watch them vanish or choose another institution at the last moment. Now, as a director, his perspective has widened: every melt event is also a signal that something in the system—communication with an applicant, financial aid, handoffs—might be misaligned.

For Angela Montgomery, Assistant Vice President of Graduate Admissions at Drexel University, the defining change over time is the rise of ghosting. Where accepted students once called to explain a change of plans, many now simply stop responding. Her team refers to them as “phantoms” and does “phantom cleanups.” That ghosting makes it much harder to distinguish between normal competitive loss, systemic barriers, and solvable issues like communication gaps or unclear next steps.

Both panelists agreed: melt has become more ambiguous, and that ambiguity makes it harder to learn from, and act on, what’s happening.

Despite the uncertainty, there are recognizable warning signs.

At Evangel (undergraduate), key signals include:

• Sudden silence | A student who was highly responsive stops answering texts, calls, or emails.
• Breakdowns in campus support | Families report frustration with housing, student development, or other offices outside admissions. When students stop getting timely, helpful responses, they’re more likely to drift elsewhere.

Hungerford emphasizes documentation: “If you didn’t document it, it didn’t happen.” This protects his team (they can show outreach history to concerned parents) and helps them identify patterns when melt spikes in a particular territory or segment.

At Drexel (graduate), the signals are more digital than relational. Montgomery’s team tracks:

• Portal activity (logins and last activity dates).
• Contact with key offices (emails, calls to housing, financial aid, advisors).
• Application progression (where students stall—often on complex requirements like recommendations).

Because Drexel’s graduate students are adults managing their own process, these electronic footprints are critical. When engagement flatlines—no logins, no follow-up, no progression—melt risk rises sharply.

Melt is rarely a single-office problem. It emerges in the gaps between silos.

At Evangel, once a student deposits, key processes—academic advising, housing, financial aid—shift into other units’ hands. Some of those processes are inherently slow (e.g., housing assignments that don’t finalize until April, registration that can’t open until schedules are built). During those lags, admissions loses direct control, but families still see admissions as their primary contact.

Drexel faces a different version of the same challenge. The university runs a centralized–decentralized model: a central graduate admissions unit plus recruiters and staff in 14 schools and colleges. Traditionally, central owns inquiry through admission; colleges own yield and melt. Some colleges excel at nurturing admitted students—adding them to current-student communications, highlighting research, and integrating them early into the academic community. Others, with lean staffing or competing priorities, struggle to maintain that same level of engagement.

In both environments, unclear ownership and inconsistent communication during handoffs are fertile ground for melt.

Both institutions are leaning hard into coordinated, multi-channel engagement—and smarter systems.

At Evangel:

• Automated email campaigns deliver major updates, value messaging, and program-specific content on a regular cadence.
• Text campaigns provide quick nudges and reminders.
• Recruiter dashboards and alerts flag students who haven’t had a personal touch (visit or call) within 30 days.

The goal: keep students feeling seen and informed during long gaps between major administrative milestones.

At Drexel, one standout innovation addresses a notorious high-risk group: deferrals. Historically, students who deferred for a year almost never showed up. To get ahead of that, Drexel implemented:

• A re-qualification step three months before the new start term.
• A portal-based survey where deferrers must confirm they’re still interested, request help (e.g., financial aid, advising), or indicate they’vechanged plans.
• A structured “no” path that captures reasons (finances, competitor school, circumstances).

Students who don’t complete this step are proactively withdrawn, which clears out phantom records, surfaces real melt reasons, and provides earlier visibility into the true incoming cohort.

Ownership of melt looks different in each context.

At Evangel, Hungerford is unequivocal: as Director of Admissions, he owns melt. He expects recruiters to know, and document, why students choose not to enroll whenever possible. If the reasons are fixable—financial gaps, misunderstanding of aid, negative campus experiences—he wants to address them directly or escalate to those who can.

At Drexel, Montgomery sees melt as a shared institutional responsibility. With so many touchpoints—departments, financial aid, international, housing, advisors—no single office can credibly claim full control. Enrollment yield and melt are viewed as collective wins or losses, requiring collaboration rather than finger-pointing.

Across both institutions, effective leadership during melt season has a few common denominators:

• Radical transparency with data | Everyone sees the same numbers, trends, and forecasts.
• Clear narratives and expectations | Higher education leaders consistently reinforce that enrollment outcomes are shared work.
• Human-centered management | As Hungerford puts it, “love first, lead second”—team members who feel seen and valued are far more likely to invest deeply in the demanding, emotional work of enrollment.

For leaders inheriting enrollment yield responsibility for the first time, the panel’s advice was refreshingly straightforward:

• Know and trust your data | Learn what your metrics actually mean, get help interpreting them if needed, and look at them daily—not just at crisis points.
• Trust and empower your people | Create psychological safety so staff can name broken processes, admit mistakes, and surface uncomfortable truths.
• Treat melt as a signal, not just an inevitability | Every loss won’t be preventable, but many will be instructive—if you’re curious enough to ask why and coordinated enough to respond.