Most universities have a good idea of what prospective students ask by email. Admissions teams field the same questions every day: entry requirements, tuition fees, scholarships, application deadlines, accommodation, career outcomes. What those enquiries don’t tell you is what prospective students searched for on your website, couldn’t find, and then abandoned. That may be the more useful information.
The questions you receive are only part of the picture
Imagine two prospective students trying to answer the same question – how much will this programme cost? The first searches your website, can’t find a clear answer, and sends an email. The second searches your website, can’t find a clear answer, and leaves. Your admissions team sees the first student. The second is invisible. Nothing appears in the inbox, nothing enters the CRM, and there may be no indication at all that an interested prospective student couldn’t find what they needed – even though they may have been just as serious about applying. That creates a distinctive blind spot. The enquiries arriving in your inbox aren’t the questions prospective students most urgently need answered. They are the questions students were prepared to wait to have answered. The ones that cost you applicants are the ones you never receive.
The information usually exists. Access to it doesn’t.
The questions themselves are rarely complicated. Am I eligible? What will it cost? Are scholarships available? When do I need to apply? What happens to graduates afterwards? Most universities already have those answers published somewhere. The difficulty is where they live. A tuition figure sits on a central finance page. Entry requirements sit in admissions. Graduate outcomes are in a report. International requirements are on another part of the site again, and some of the detail is inside a PDF. From the university’s perspective, the information has been published. From the prospective student’s perspective, their question hasn’t been answered.
The website carries more weight than it might seem
Research from EAB, a US-based higher-education research, technology and consulting firm, shows the importance of an education institution’s website. Drawing on its 2024 Adult Learner Recruitment Survey, its 2024 Student Communication Preferences Survey and its own research and analysis, EAB reports that:
• 92% of students make a point of visiting the websites of every institution they are considering
• 70% will abandon a website if it isn’t user-friendly
• 83% say a poor website negatively affects their opinion of the institution
EAB works commercially with higher-education institutions, so this is industry research rather than independent peer-reviewed work, and the findings are primarily North American. But the direction of the finding is what matters: prospective students don’t only use university websites to gather information. The experience of using the website shapes what they think of the institution behind it.
When they are asking matters as much as what
This becomes sharper for universities recruiting internationally. A prospective student researching your institution at 2 a.m. your time isn’t an insomniac. They’re in another country in the middle of their afternoon. Your offices are closed, no admissions officer is available, and an email enquiry may not get a reply until the next working day – frequently much later. Meanwhile, the student keeps researching. They visit another institution, then another. One of those universities makes the answer easy to find. This makes one number in your analytics worth looking up: what percentage of prospective-student visits happen outside your office hours, and where is that traffic coming from? For those visitors, your website isn’t supporting your recruitment team. It is your recruitment team.
Look for the questions you aren’t receiving
Universities already hold several sources that show what prospective students want to know – admissions emails, contact forms, recruitment teams, call-centre conversations, and in a small number of cases live-chat transcripts. All of them record questions somebody asked. The more revealing exercise is to look for the questions people tried to answer themselves and gave up on:
• What are visitors typing into your internal site search?
• Which programme pages have unusually high exit rates?
• What generates repeated enquiries even though the answer already exists on the website?
• Which pages send visitors backwards and forwards between sections?
• Where are visitors dropping out of the journey entirely?
• What are international visitors looking at outside your office hours?
And the one that tends to be most useful: which high-priority questions require a prospective student to contact you before they can make a decision? Those are your points of friction.
The answer isn’t more content
It is almost never another hundred webpages. Most universities already hold enormous quantities of information across programme pages, policies, PDFs, FAQs, databases and staff knowledge. The opportunity is in making that information easier to reach. A straightforward test: write down the ten to 20 questions a prospective student most needs answered before applying, then try to answer each one using your own website, starting from a typical programme page. Can you find a clear, current answer quickly? Can you do it on a phone? Would an international student be able to tell whether the answer applies to them? And could they get it at 2 a.m. without waiting for somebody to come into the office? If not, the problem probably isn’t that your website needs more information. It’s that it needs to do a better job of delivering the information you already have. Because the most revealing prospective-student questions aren’t the ones sitting in your admissions inbox. They are the ones nobody ever sends.
Source: EAB, The Enrolment-Optimized College Website 2.0 (EAB Digital Agency, June 2025). Figures sourced to the EAB 2024 Adult Learner Recruitment Survey, the EAB 2024 Student Communication Preferences Survey, and EAB research and analysis.
How well does your website convert enquiries into enrolments?
The Enrolment Conversion Score is a short diagnostic that scores your website against the points of friction described above – what a prospective student can find, how quickly, and what happens to the ones who arrive outside your office hours. It takes a few minutes and you get your score immediately.
Click the link below that’s relevant to your institution.
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