Your Enrollment Infrastructure, Rewired: Building a Modern Power Grid for Higher Ed

Higher education has always operated within a web of complexity—but never quite like this. Enrollment leaders are facing pressures on all fronts: declining international student numbers, uncertainty around domestic graduate enrollment, and intensified competition for a shrinking pool of qualified applicants. And while economic downturns have traditionally spurred adults to return to school, reskill, or pivot professionally, that pattern is less certain in today’s climate. Economic instability, rising costs, and global disruptions are causing, in many cases, potential students to delay or abandon plans for higher education altogether.

This has immediate implications. Institutions dependent on steady tuition revenue are facing new urgency to reassess their approach to recruitment. Even the total addressable market for graduate programs, which may appear broad when counting all bachelor’s degree holders, quickly narrows when we factor in intent, affordability, and urgency.

At the same time, institutions are wrestling with internal challenges. Inefficient technology, manual workflows, and disconnected departments create barriers that prevent campuses from responding effectively to change. Many teams are operating without a clear picture of where leads originate, how applicants are progressing through the funnel, or how financial aid is influencing decisions.

This is no longer about improving isolated processes; it’s about building resilience through interconnection. A unified enrollment technology ecosystem doesn’t just make daily operations smoother. It enables continuity in a volatile environment, turning insight into action and reaction into strategy. Like a power grid, this connected ecosystem connects and energizes every corner of the campus.

When enrollment technology functions as the foundation of a unified strategy rather than as a patchwork of disconnected tools, institutions experience a fundamental shift in what they can do and how they do it. This is the power grid model in action, energizing each stage of the student journey and empowering staff to go from reactive firefighting to strategic engagement.

Instead of guessing at outcomes or compensating for system gaps, teams gain the clarity and consistency required to make real-time decisions. Fragmentation gives way to flow, with leads moving seamlessly through recruitment, personalized messaging adapting to student behaviors, and financial aid strategies aligning with enrollment goals. The outcome is operational efficiency and institutional agility.

For example, Liaison’s Centralized Application Services, Enrollment Marketing strategies, CRMs, Othot (an AI-powered predictive modeling platform), and productivity tools infuse every stage of the funnel with data-rich insights. The real power of a tech-fueled enrollment management strategy lies in what it makes possible for people. Liaison’s solutions don’t eliminate the work of enrollment professionals—they elevate it. By reducing manual tasks and surfacing strategic insights, these tools let staff focus on what matters most: cultivating relationships, guiding applicants, and improving outcomes.

Liaison meets institutions where they are, with the flexibility that makes it possible to tailor solutions without sacrificing vision. Liaison’s tools support a strategic enrollment management plan that fits each institution’s unique structure and goals, driving more consistent outcomes in higher education, even amid disruption.

While technology alone doesn’t drive enrollment success, connecting, configuring, and activating the right combination of tools at the right time creates a tangible impact. Liaison’s ecosystem includes a suite of easily integrated products, each of which supports a key function of the student lifecycle while contributing to a larger, orchestrated strategy. Below, we break down how each piece of this enrollment power grid operates to help create a more effective, efficient, and future-ready institution.

Application Services: Centralized, Scalable Admissions Infrastructure

Fragmented admissions systems waste time and limit visibility. Liaison’s Centralized Application Services (CAS) simplify the application process for students and staff alike, unify data, and support more informed decision making—without requiring institutions to sacrifice control. CAS platforms minimize duplicate entries for applicants while preserving individual requirements and branding for each school and program.

Examples of Liaison’s many discipline- and institution-specific CASs include:

• Health Professions CASs, such as NursingCAS, ResidencyCAS, and CSDCAS (for Communication Sciences and Disorders programs), are built in close collaboration with professional associations to address their unique application requirements. ResidencyCAS, for example, supports complex medical residency evaluations with role-based portals and predictive match modeling.
• Direct-to-Campus CASs (e.g., GradCAS, BusinessCAS, EngineeringCAS) are highly configurable to allow for institutional control and marketing agility.
• UniCAS offers a full-campus view for managing admissions across diverse programs in one system.

It’s also worth noting that SlideRoom, Liaison’s multimedia application submission and review platform, accepts embedded media from sources including YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and SketchFab.

The Benefit: Institutions using Liaison’s application platforms reduce administrative burden, expand applicant pipelines, and gain real-time insight across admissions touchpoints.

Enrollment Marketing and Search: Intelligent Outreach, Personalized Engagement

Getting in front of the right students at the right time requires more than broad outreach. It demands strategy, segmentation, and seamless communication. Liaison’s Enrollment Marketing (EM) and Liaison Search offerings make that possible by combining AI-powered targeting with omnichannel campaigns to build and convert a more responsive pipeline.

Enrollment Marketing:

• Drives awareness and engagement through coordinated email, print, SMS, and digital ads.
• Supports yield campaigns by utilizing a range of channels and touchpoints, including customized financial aid letters.
• Engages families and influencers throughout the funnel.

Liaison Search:

• Uses AI to select and score prospective students based on fit and intent.
• Reaches underrepresented and first-generation students with personalized outreach.
• Boosts inquiry-to-application conversion with relevant messaging.

The Benefit: With these tools, strategic, measurable, and focused outreach connects institutions with the students who are most likely to engage, persist, and succeed.

Yield and Financial Aid: Smarter Incentives, Stronger Classes

Financial aid is one of the most powerful tools in enrollment management, but without data, it’s often imprecise. Liaison’s Othot AI platform, Enrollment Marketing services, and TargetX and Outcomes CRMs empower institutions to optimize aid distribution and yield results by making timely, data-informed decisions.

Othot:

• Models how different financial aid options have the potential to influence enrollment decisions.
• Predicts student behavior to identify the right applicants and maximize net tuition revenue.
• Updates scenarios in the moment to reflect new data and changing conditions.

Enrollment Marketing:

• Delivers targeted communications to demystify financial aid offers.
• Promotes FAFSA completion and reduces summer melt.
• Reaches families with clear, actionable financial information.

TargetX and Outcomes CRMs:

• Provide real-time information about applicant status and progress through the funnel.
• Automate personalized messaging around financial aid and enrollment milestones.
• Support coordinated engagement to reduce melt and improve yield forecasting.

The Benefit: These tools help institutions build not just a larger incoming class but the right one, while using financial resources efficiently and equitably.

CRM: Meaningful Engagement From Inquiry to Enrollment

A well-executed CRM strategy is the connective tissue of a modern enrollment operation. Liaison’s TargetX and Outcomes CRMs enable institutions to engage students at every stage with personalization, automation, and actionable data.

• Automated outreach | Ensure every message is timely, relevant, and strategic.
• Integrated workflows | Coordinate information and messaging regarding financial aid awards, application statuses, and recruitment initiatives.

The Benefit: Liaison’s CRM tools help institutions turn data into direction, empowering teams to engage high-intent students before they slip through the cracks.

AI: Powering Smarter Decisions Across the Student Journey

AI can now power insights into marketing, aid awarding, and recruitment strategies and outcomes. With Othot’s data-driven predictive and prescription capabilities, institutions get decision support that’s dynamic, responsive, and grounded in real-time data.

• Forecasting with purpose | Predict student behavior, enrollment outcomes, and risk factors.
• Optimizing interventions | Target at-risk students with support early in their journey.
• Sharpening strategy | Use likelihood scores to fine-tune outreach and retention efforts.

The Benefit: Institutions can make faster, smarter decisions with less guesswork—moving from reactive efforts to proactive strategies.

Productivity Tools: Streamlining Workflows and Protecting Equity

Admissions teams are under pressure to do more with less without compromising fairness or accuracy. To address those needs, Liaison’s WebAdMIT application management platform and Time2Track experience management system streamline workflows, help maintain compliance, and improve collaboration across programs.

WebAdMIT:

• Centralized reviews | Manage applications, scoring, and communication in one system.
• Compliance-ready design | Enforce fair practices with data masking and permission controls.
• Increased transparency | Facilitate more effective communication with applicants and review teams in real time.

Time2Track:

• Streamlined recordkeeping | Simplify time and experience tracking for both students and administrators.
• Anytime, anywhere access | Ensure maximum versatility for experience management.
• Secure data storage | Maintain integrity and compliance with trusted, cloud-based systems.

The Benefit: Liaison’s productivity tools aren’t just efficient—they’re equitable. Institutions can scale admissions efforts while maintaining quality, speed, and integrity.

Seeing the Power Grid in Action

Consider the experience of one Liaison client, a graduate business school grappling with the departure of a longtime staff member who was solely responsible for managing enrollment communications across multiple systems. In most cases, this kind of change would trigger a scramble to find documentation that may not exist and reestablish workflows previously known only to one person. But in this case, the school was already using Liaison’s TargetX, BusinessCAS, and Enrollment Marketing solutions. Instead of needing to start from scratch, the institution already had full visibility into its processes and strategies, enabling it to make a seamless transition.

Liaison helped by bringing in its experts from all three product teams to analyze the overall situation, identify gaps, and establish best practices. The result? A solution that didn’t simply replace the old way of doing things but improved upon it. This kind of internal collaboration is possible because Liaison’s tools work in concert, and its teams are aligned on delivering holistic outcomes in higher education.

Rather than focusing solely on functionality, a vibrant tech ecosystem drives transformation. When data flows across departments, so do insights. And when every tool contributes to a larger strategy, institutions can move with purpose instead of piecing together ad hoc fixes.

The true power of Liaison’s ecosystem lies in what it enables colleges and universities to do—faster, more clearly, and more collaboratively. Beyond removing friction, these tools unlock capabilities that siloed tools can’t by providing:

• Streamlined workflows and reduced bottlenecks | Institutions eliminate redundancy and minimize lag time across recruitment, application review, and communications.
• Flexible systems that grow with you | Enrollment needs evolve year over year. Liaison’s ecosystem adapts, supporting a mix of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs with ease.
• Smarter strategy through predictive analytics | AI-driven models surface actionable insights, thereby helping teams proactively adjust recruitment efforts, marketing tactics, and financial aid strategies.
• Inclusive, student-centered enrollment approaches | Aligned systems allow institutions to connect with students more thoughtfully, targeting support where it’s needed most and reinforcing equity in outreach.

Funnel Optimization: Doing More With Less

In today’s enrollment environment, the top of the funnel is harder to fill and even harder to convert. It’s no longer enough to cast a wide net and hope for the best. Institutions must extract greater value from every inquiry already in the system.

Case in point: One university, facing a shortage of traditional search names due to standardized test declines, turned to Liaison to activate a new strategy. By analyzing historical inquiry data and applying Liaison’s intent-scoring model, the team identified the prospects most likely to apply. Those records were then used to build high-intent lookalike audiences, informing targeted marketing campaigns that extended reach without relying on outdated sources.

This is a perfect example of the power grid in action: The university used Othot for predictive modeling, Liaison Search for audience development, and Enrollment Marketing for execution. Together, those elements formed a strategy with greater precision, efficiency, and impact than any one tool could deliver alone.

When the market feels uncertain, institutions need something they can rely on. In higher education, that foundation isn’t a single system or department—it’s the underlying infrastructure that powers them all. A comprehensive strategic enrollment ecosystem helps universities operate more efficiently today and prepares them to thrive tomorrow.

Schools that continue to rely on outdated or fragmented technology are already seeing the strain. As demographics shift, applications decline, and student expectations evolve, the cracks in disconnected systems widen. As a result, these institutions struggle to forecast enrollment, personalize engagement, or pivot strategy in real time.

By contrast, a comprehensive enrollment technology strategy equips campuses to:

• Adapt to demographic and economic shifts with speed and insight.
• Leverage AI-driven tools for personalized, data-informed decision making.
• Meet rising expectations for relevant, student-centered experiences.

When the Grid Goes Down: The Critical Importance of Invisible Infrastructure

This concept isn’t theoretical. One Liaison team member compared it to living through a hurricane and only realizing how dependent they were on the power grid when it was suddenly gone.

That’s the metaphor for enrollment infrastructure. When critical elements are missing, you feel it immediately. Messages don’t go out. Students fall through the cracks. Financial aid isn’t optimized. Forecasts miss the mark. The engine stalls.

A carefully considered and well-implemented enrollment ecosystem keeps that engine running. It’s what allows teams to stay steady in uncertain conditions, find the right students, engage them in the right ways, and support them through graduation. It doesn’t eliminate external challenges, but it gives institutions the time, space, and tools to address them effectively—highlighting the benefits of long-term planning in an environment that often demands short-term reactions.

When institutions adopt Liaison solutions, they don’t simply gain access to tools. They benefit from the guidance of highly experienced enrollment strategists, marketing professionals, and implementation specialists who are committed to shared success.

Whether it’s workshops on graduate enrollment strategy or hands-on help integrating CRM data with student information systems, Liaison partners with institutions to translate infrastructure into impact. When external pressures mount, internal teams need more than just functionality; they need confidence. Liaison provides both.

In today’s enrollment field, institutions need the right infrastructure—smart, strategic, and complementary systems that empower them to navigate uncertainty, engage students meaningfully, and achieve long-term success. That’s what Liaison offers: a configurable, aligned ecosystem backed by decades of experience, deep partnership, and a commitment to continuous support.

Unlike one-size-fits-all platforms, Liaison’s solutions are tailored to the complex, evolving needs of higher education. Whether you’re refining application processes, scaling outreach efforts, optimizing financial aid, or personalizing student engagement, Liaison connects the dots between your goals and your outcomes.

It’s this ability to meet institutions where they are and help them build toward what’s next that makes Liaison different. With over 30 years of experience, more than 40,000 programs served, and 3.5 million applications processed annually, Liaison powers enrollment while empowering schools to rethink what’s possible.

The real question isn’t, “What can you do with Liaison?” It’s, “What can’t you do?”

Liaison is more than a provider—it’s a partner in strategic planning for higher education institutions, offering teams the tools, insights, and support to navigate today’s pressures and prepare for tomorrow’s opportunities. Our highly experienced enrollment experts, technologists, and service professionals become an extension of your own team, from planning through implementation and beyond.

Institutions ready to strengthen their enrollment power grid and align their technology investments with their strategic vision can connect with Liaison to explore custom-built solutions that:

• Enhance operational efficiency.
• Improve student engagement and recruitment outcomes.
• Deliver data-driven insights that support smarter decisions.

Whether you’re building from the ground up or fine-tuning what’s already in place, Liaison can help you move from complexity to clarity with technology that works together and a team that stands with you. Let’s talk about how Liaison can help you build a more connected, future-ready enrollment strategy.