Students Now Take the Bypass: Recalculating the Route to Enrollment
AI answers and social search are reshaping college discovery, while traditional analytics miss much of what happens before an inquiry. Higher education needs a measurable first mile built for the routes students now travel.
I grew up near Kokomo, Indiana (and no, probably not the same Kokomo the Beach Boys had in mind). In the 1950s, US Highway 31 was moved east to bypass the slower route through downtown. While the downtown businesses languished over the decades, businesses both new and old followed the traffic and flourished along the new thoroughfare.
Eventually, that bypass became so congested with stoplights that Kokomo earned the nickname “Stoplight City”, prompting Indiana to open a new 13-mile, $155 million highway farther east, allowing through-travelers to avoid around 15 traffic signals, but also the buildup of businesses over the past decades. Travelers, once again, found a faster route, but this time with limited access, bypassing the bypass. Businesses in the Kokomo area are once again adapting to this new route.
Enrollment marketing is arriving at its own “Kokomo” moment.
For years, the student routes were relatively dependable and predictable. A student might begin with a Google search, clicked a blue link, entered a college website or landing page, complete a form, and appeared in the higher education’s database. Institutions could see much of the trip and optimize accordingly. Those pathways still exists, but students are increasingly using other, newer search methods and do not travel it from beginning to end as often as they once did.
Increasingly, with AI, Google is becoming a source for answers, not a directory or referral to sources.
Increasingly, with AI, Google is becoming a source for answers, not a directory or referral to sources. A Pew Research Center analysis of 68,879 Google searches found that users clicked a traditional result 15% of the time when no AI summary appeared. When one did appear, the click rate fell to 8%. Users clicked a source cited within the AI summary just 1% of the time.
Importantly, AI summaries appeared most often on longer, question-based searches, the very sort of searches common in early college discovery: What can I do with this major? Is this program worth the cost? Which colleges will accept my credits?
Students may receive a useful answer without ever reaching the institution whose information helped produce it. From an enrollment strategy and marketing standpoint, this represents a pivotal time. College websites remain essential, but their role is changing. They are increasingly source material for machines, validators for students, and destinations for later-stage action. Clear information about cost, admissions, outcomes, and program differences now matters more, even when it produces fewer visible visits.
Meanwhile, the traffic Google still delivers is becoming more expensive. EducationDynamics reports that non-brand paid-search cost per click rose 30.9% year over year. Colleges are paying more to capture intent after it exists while seeing less of what created that intent.
Students are now triangulating information from a variety of sources now, too, across several different channels. In a 2025 study of more than 1,500 recently enrolled students, Manaferra found that 62% moved between platforms to verify information, 60% used social media as a search engine, and 36% used AI during the college-search process. Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) reports that social media matters most to 56% of students when they first begin thinking about college.
A student may discover a program in a short-form video, check its cost on the college’s website, watch a student-led campus tour, ask AI to compare alternatives, consult Reddit, and then apply directly. To the student, this is a sensible process of gathering and verifying information. To the institution, it may appear as little more than a completed application. This fragmented path makes it increasingly harder for enrollment teams to see how awareness formed, understand what influenced the decision, or measure which early encounters mattered.
Like the businesses along Kokomo’s old bypass, colleges must adapt to reach travelers who have found a new route. In both cases, businesses in Kokomo and higher education institutions are striving to adpat to the new route by advertising methods designed to drive traffic. The difficulty is that this new road (in both cases) is increasingly limited-access: AI answers, social platforms, and peer communities often shape preference without sending measurable traffic to the institution.
Higher education therefore needs credible, measurable places to meet students before the final turn into the application. Institutions that measure only the last click risk paying more to capture demand after someone else has already created it.
Institutions that measure only the last click risk paying more to capture demand after someone else has already created it.
So, the important question is: What can be done?
First, create credible encounters earlier. Reach students through peers, counselors, schools, community partners, and interactive in-school experiences is increasingly essential before high-intent search begins. 13th Year™ is developing an extensive network of high school partnerships across the nation to serve this very need, and presenting those institutions to students on a daily basis.
Second, understand and measure student behavior and interest signals. Track verified presentations, voluntary interactions, information requests, inquiries, applications, and enrollment wherever possible. An impression represents an opportunity to see, but an interaction records a student’s choice to explore. Both matter, but they are not interchangeable. 13th Year™ provides aggregate behavioral insights that help institutions identify which messages are generating interest and refine their content around what students actually choose to explore.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, create constant opportunity and reminders for student to see, understand, and make meaningful, voluntary contact your institution. This is the premise behind 13th Year’s Student Pathway System™. A direct, interactive presence inside high schools creates a credible encounter while students are still forming their options, not merely after they know what to search for. It also makes part of the increasingly invisible first mile observable: what students were shown, what they chose to explore, and whether that interest became a request or inquiry. It does not pretend that one screen caused an enrollment. It restores evidence to a part of the journey conventional analytics routinely miss.
Kokomo did not run out of travelers. The route through it changed. Likewise, students have not stopped searching for college; their route has changed, too. Their path has shifted onto roads that dashboards built around clicks and late-stage actions cannot fully see. When institutions invest only in channels that can claim a clean last click, they pay more and more to capture demand after AI, social media, peers, counselors, or another unmeasured encounter has already created it.
The answer is not to build brighter signs along yesterday’s highway. It is to earn attention earlier, while students are still forming preferences, and to measure the signals connecting discovery to action.
The answer is not to build brighter signs along yesterday’s highway. It is to earn attention earlier, while students are still forming preferences, and to measure the signals connecting discovery to action. The institutions that adapt will do more than compete for existing intent; they will help create it. The first mile has moved. Enrollment strategy, and enrollment measurement, must move with it.
About 13th Year™
For colleges, universities, trades, the military, and other postsecondary and career partners, 13th Year™ provides a channel to reach students inside a trusted, high school setting where individual and measurable discovery occurs organically over time. Institutions now can gain access to and leverage early-stage behavioral insights that complement traditional recruitment tools, which enables more informed messaging, stronger brand presence, and improved alignment with student interests before inquiry or application behavior occurs.
This approach drives institutional understanding and expands their prospective pipelines, strengthen yields, and engages students earlier in their journey without increasing friction, or administrative burden on high school counselors. Armed with exposure and familiarity with different programs and pathways, high school students can plan confidently for what comes, following graduation, in their 13th year!
For more information, or to partner with 13th Year™, contact us at 13th-Year.com.
About the Author
Jason J. Christenson is Co-Founder and President of 13th Year™, where he focuses on helping students discover and confidently plan for what comes following high school. His work centers on improving how postsecondary institutions understand and support student decision-making earlier in the journey, enabling colleges, universities, trades, military branches, and workforce organizations to better align their messaging, presence, and opportunities with students’ evolving interests, strengths, and aspirations before traditional recruitment engagement begins.
Christenson is a seasoned entrepreneur, inventor, and writer with a diverse background in launching and leading national service-based businesses across multiple industries. Although born and raised in Indiana, Christenson now resides in Minneapolis with his wife, Brittany, their three children, and a lively crew of pets who collectively demonstrate a consistent disregard for household productivity targets, but whom he nevertheless loves anyway.
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