Reading the Signals: Reflections on Research into Applicant Mindset

I've spent a good part of the past year working with prospective grad students about their application experiences. The original goal was fairly practical: to understand how applicants think about the process so institutions can make better decisions about communication, technology, and enrollment strategy.

What I didn't expect was that the project would keep reminding me of a question I first encountered years ago while studying philosophy: How do we know what we know?

It sounds abstract until you realize how often we answer that question in everyday life. We see footprints across a lawn and assume someone passed through. We notice dark clouds and expect rain, or maybe we hear hesitation in someone's voice and begin constructing an explanation before they've finished speaking. None of those observations tells us exactly what's true, but they give us something to interpret, and humans love to interpret signals.

The more I worked through the applicant interviews, the more that philosophical question started to feel like an enrollment question.

Enrollment leaders spend their days surrounded by signals. Applicants begin applications, pause in the process and disappear for a while, then return to complete. They visit program pages repeatedly and look at the same info or click on the same links. They request recommendations, upload transcripts, compare aid offers, and eventually decide whether to enroll. Modern enrollment systems capture nearly every one of those interactions.

That capturing process in itself is remarkable, especially considering how little of this was visible even a decade ago. We know far more about applicant behavior than we once did. But I kept running into the same limitation — behavioral data tells us what happened; it doesn't tell us what that experience felt like to the person living through it.

That became the thread I found myself pulling throughout the study that formed the basis of Liaison’s report, Reading the Signals: What Graduate Applicant Behavior Means—And What It Doesn’t.

I wasn't especially interested in whether enrollment leaders were "right" or "wrong" in how they interpreted applicant behavior. Most of the time, their interpretations made perfect sense. What interested me was something subtler: what happened when applicants added the context that institutions couldn't see.

Take application volume, for example. The same thing kept coming up over and over again. It's easy to look at someone applying to six or eight graduate programs and assume they're undecided. That's a reasonable interpretation. If someone is considering that many institutions, uncertainty seems like the obvious explanation. But surprisingly, perhaps, the applicants rarely described it that way.

More often, they talked about managing risk. They were building options in an environment that felt increasingly uncertain. Admission wasn't guaranteed, and an aid offer could change the decision calculus overnight. Career outcomes mattered enough that they wanted meaningful comparisons before committing themselves.

So what happened here was that the applications themselves hadn't changed, but my understanding of what they represented sure did. And once I started looking at the data through that lens, I noticed how often the same thing happened elsewhere.

Applicants described moving through multiple portals and systems as one continuous experience, while institutions often thought about those same systems separately because different offices own them. Applicants talked about staying silent when they encountered problems, not because the process was clear or intuitive, but because they weren't sure who to ask or didn't want to appear unprepared. Even submitting an application carried a different meaning: Institutions naturally celebrated it as an important milestone, but applicants tended to see it as the point where a different kind of evaluation began.

None of this convinced me that institutions fundamentally misunderstand applicants. If anything, it left me thinking about how much interpretation shapes enrollment work.

The same behavior can support several perfectly reasonable explanations. The explanation we settle on eventually finds its way into comm plans, recruitment strategies, process documentation, and performance metrics. Over time, those interpretations stop feeling like interpretations at all, they just sort of become the way we understand applicants.

That may have been the most interesting thing I took away from the project. It wasn't just that applicants sometimes interpreted their own behavior differently than institutions did. Institutions often interpreted the same behaviors differently from one another.

Everyone was looking at the same footprints, but they were simply telling different stories about who had left them there.

If you’d like to see the details on the research project, download Reading the Signals: What Graduate Applicant Behavior Means—And What It Doesn’t.