I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting college and university campuses. Some are intuitive from the moment you arrive. Visitor parking is clearly marked. The admissions office is easy to find. You can locate the buildings you need without a scavenger hunt, and you can grab a snack or find a restroom without wandering around like you’re in a maze. On these campuses, even if you step into the wrong building, someone is ready to point you in the right direction.
But some campuses are confusing—even for someone who has spent her entire career on one. No matter how prepared you are, if Google Maps drops you at the wrong entrance, the signage is sparse or inconsistent, or it’s impossible to tell where the campus begins or ends, visitors will get frustrated. And that’s not the tone any of us wants to set for a first impression.
I’ve walked into admission offices that feel empty—or staffed by people whose attention is anywhere but on the visitor in front of them. And look, anyone who has worked in admissions knows the job requires wearing five hats before lunch. But students and families don’t know that. What they feel is brushed aside, as if their presence were an interruption rather than the point of the work. We have to remember that most students aren’t extroverted adults who stride into new spaces with confidence. They’re prospective teens standing on the edge of a life‑shaping decision, one that often comes down to whether they feel seen, welcomed, and like they belong.
These visits have me thinking about how prospective students actually experience a campus. They don’t separate admissions, facilities, academics, student affairs, dining, and operations into tidy organizational boxes. They experience one institution—one ecosystem that either works together or doesn’t.
That’s why I believe every college and university should treat its entire campus as a recruitment opportunity. Every interaction, every space, every moment communicates something to prospective students.
Whether we intend it or not, the campus experience is one of your greatest marketing assets.
Institutions No Longer Have Control Over Campus Visits
For many years, the traditional campus visit followed a fairly predictable path. Students scheduled a tour, arrived at the admissions office, checked in, and moved through a carefully planned experience. Institutions had considerable control over where visitors started, who they met, and what they saw first.
That’s no longer the case. Today’s students are researching institutions—sometimes inadvertently—long before admissions (we recently published a blog titled The Modern Campus Tour Starts On Social Media), and are savvy to marketing and PR machinations. Inside Higher Ed reports that many students feel that social media—especially student-run accounts—offer a more authentic, unfiltered look at daily campus life than a curated, student-ambassador-led tour. This might be one of the reasons there’s a rise in “stealth” visiting: students and families walking around independently rather than on an official tour.
Technology has also made it easier to visit campuses on the fly. Anyone with a smartphone can quickly research and navigate campuses, so more and more families are incorporating self-guided visits into vacations, athletic tournaments, or other travel plans. And since Google or Apple Maps often guide these self-guided tours, admission isn’t guaranteed to be a prospective student’s first stop. It might not even be a stop.
And then there’s the student who attends a camp on your campus. They spend days navigating “student areas” and walk away believing they’ve seen everything they need to see. But did that camp show them the full picture—or just one narrow slice of it?
That’s an important shift for institutions to recognize. If recruitment experiences can begin anywhere on campus, then the responsibility for creating positive experiences extends far beyond the admissions office.
Wayfinding Is More Important Than Most Colleges Realize
One of the most overlooked aspects of the visitor experience is wayfinding.
At first glance, signage and navigation may seem like operational concerns rather than enrollment concerns. But when I visit campuses, I find myself paying close attention to how easy—or difficult—it is to navigate the environment as a newcomer. What seems obvious to employees who work on campus every day can be surprisingly unclear to first-time visitors.
Despite how easy it is to use our ever-present smartphones, many prospective students and families arrive with some degree of uncertainty. They’re exploring an unfamiliar place while considering one of the biggest decisions they’ll make. The last thing they need is additional stress caused by confusing directions or unclear signage.
Good wayfinding creates confidence. It allows visitors to focus on the campus experience rather than the logistics of getting from one location to another. And it shows them that their experience will be intuitive and helpful, rather than… frustrating.
Accessibility is another important consideration. Clear, ADA-compliant signage helps ensure all visitors can confidently navigate campus and access important resources.
Prospective students shouldn’t have to spend mental energy figuring out where to park, where they are, where to go next, or where to find help if they’re lost. When those answers aren’t obvious, friction begins to accumulate. And while any one moment of confusion may seem minor, those moments can shape how visitors feel about the institution as a whole.
Digital Wayfinding Matters Too
In 2016, Pew Research reported that 9 in 10 smartphone users used their phones to get directions. In 2020, the Department of Transportation found 74% of U.S. adults did the same. Smartphone usage has become so ubiquitous for wayfinding, orientation, and navigation that there haven’t been any recent studies on the topic. There doesn’t need to be!
However, much like how some institutions neglect to prioritize signage, many organizations aren’t prioritizing digital navigation. For example, while businesses tend to their Google profiles religiously, a recent BrightLocal survey found that 59% of organizations are unfamiliar with Apple Business Connect, suggesting many may not be actively managing how their locations appear on Apple Maps.
When I used Apple Maps to get to campus, only three of the ten schools I’ve visited in the past three weeks directed me to the admissions office. Most routed me to an athletic field or to whichever building was associated with the institution’s official mailing address.
Given how frequently prospective students rely on mobile navigation, that’s a missed opportunity.
Forward-thinking institutions have begun to think more intentionally about these digital experiences. Duke University, for example, has used Google Maps to provide real-time road closure information and updated navigation guidance for visitors. It may seem like a small detail, but it addresses problems before people can even encounter them.
Ultimately, wayfinding isn’t just about helping people find a building. It’s about reducing anxiety, creating confidence, and making visitors feel like the institution anticipated their needs before they arrived.
Make it Easy to Ask for Help
Getting visitors to the right building is only part of the equation. What happens when they walk through the door?
Do they know where to go next? Can they immediately identify someone who can help? Do they feel welcomed, or do they feel like they’ve accidentally wandered into a space where they don’t belong?
One of my mentors taught me a lesson years ago that I’ve never forgotten. Whenever we attended campus events together, they always wore a name tag—even when it wasn’t required. When I asked why, they explained that a visible name tag signaled approachability. It told people, “If you have a question, you can ask me.” Remember, people often need permission to ask for help.
The same principle applies across campus. Visitors are constantly looking for signals that tell them whether they’re welcome, whether they’re in the right place, and whether someone is available to assist them. A clearly marked reception desk, visible staff members, simple directional signage, and even something as basic as a friendly greeting can make a meaningful difference in how students and families experience a campus.
Institutions don’t need to create elaborate concierge programs to improve the visitor experience. Often, small changes can have an outsized impact: making reception areas easier to identify, ensuring visitors know where to go when they enter a building, or helping employees feel comfortable directing guests to common destinations.
Your Whole Campus Should Be Recruiting
This is why I’ve increasingly come to view recruitment as an institutional responsibility rather than a departmental one.
The challenge is that higher education professionals often think about institutions very differently from how prospective students do. We do see admissions, facilities, academics, student affairs, and operations as separate departments because that’s how colleges and universities are organized (and this siloed organization causes a litany of other challenges, which is another blog for another day).
Prospective students don’t. They experience one institution. Every interaction—whether it’s finding a parking space, asking for directions, attending a tour, or chatting with a faculty member—contributes to their perception of what it might feel like to be a student there.
That’s why some of the most important recruiters on campus may not work in admissions at all. They’re the faculty member who takes a moment to answer a question, the facilities employee who notices a confused family and offers directions, or the administrative assistant who welcomes a visitor instead of assuming someone else will help them. None of these people are trying to recruit students in the traditional sense, but all of them are helping visitors understand what it feels like to be part of the campus community.
The institutions that do this well don’t necessarily have the largest enrollment teams or the most sophisticated visit programs. More often, they’ve created a culture where helping visitors is everyone’s responsibility. Employees don’t need to memorize admissions talking points or become experts on application processes. They simply need to understand that prospective students can appear anywhere on campus and that a small interaction can have an outsized impact. Imagine if you were lost and someone walked you to the right location; I bet you’d remember that interaction!
In other words, the goal isn’t to turn every employee into an admissions counselor. It’s to create a campus where every employee and every physical or digital touchpoint serves as an ambassador for the institution.
Think Beyond the Admissions Office
After spending years working in higher education—and more recently, spending a great deal of time visiting campuses as a guest—I’ve become convinced that some of the most influential parts of the recruitment experience happen outside the admissions office. They’re found in the signs visitors follow, the people they encounter, the questions they ask, and the way a campus makes them feel.
I’ve had the opportunity to visit campuses across the country and help institutions create cultures that support enrollment, belonging, and student success. If you’re interested in evaluating your own visitor experience or exploring ways to make your campus a stronger recruitment asset, I’d love to talk. Schedule time on my calendar and let’s start the conversation.
