The "Sameness" Problem in Higher Ed & How to Fight Back
This post is part of OnDeck & OffScript, our ongoing series that features the voices of today’s marketing, communications, and enrollment leaders across higher education. We love talking about awareness spending, budget tensions, AI in higher ed, and enrollment strategy. We're equally curious about whatever's on your mind. Got something to say? Tell us about it.
No one is more familiar with the demographic cliff than Andrew (Andy Murphy), Director of Marketing at Siena University.
Without hesitating, he can give you the stats: 96% of Siena University's deposits come from New York State, and New York's pool of high school seniors is on track to shrink by 26-27% over the next 10 years.
Those are the kind of numbers that could push a marketing team into playing it safe: protect what already works and spend less while the decline plays out.
Andy Murphy doesn't read it that way.
"Yes, that sets off an alarm bell for us, but it's also exciting because we can try new things," he said. "We can reach new audiences, we can test new messaging, and we can reach our goals if we are smart and we are proactive about it."
Trying something new only works if it's actually different from what every other school in the pool is also trying. And in a shrinking market, different is the whole game. The schools that survive this won't be the ones running the loudest awareness campaign. They'll be the ones running the one campaign nobody else could have run. That's the exact problem Murphy points to when asked what belief might ruffle a room full of his peers.
"I think higher ed has a sameness problem," he said. "Everyone says “community”, everyone says “professors know your name”, and everyone says “you're gonna belong here”. Plug any college into an email and you're gonna get the same thing."
He doesn't stop at naming the problem. He also has a specific answer for it.
"Yes, we have a community at Siena, but my top five competitors are also telling that exact same thing," Murphy said. "Being able to be effective storytellers is where we've taken this. You can run an awareness campaign, but if you say “hands-on learning”, or you say “faculty are experts in their field”, or “you're gonna belong in the dorms”, that's not differentiating you whatsoever."
His fix runs on going back to the reason the claim is true in the first place.
"Go back to the claims and get back down to the why," he said. "That's where I think we can have an advantage in marketing, because we can be creative storytellers. Yes, you do hands-on learning at Siena, but why does that matter? What does that look like? And why can you do it differently here than the other five schools you were looking at?"
A generic claim is the fastest, safest thing a marketing team puts on a page. It's also the reason so much awareness spend in this space disappears without a trace: the message sounds like every other school's message, aimed at a pool of students that gets smaller every year. The alternative, an actual story specific to one school, takes longer to find and harder to repeat, which is exactly why a competitor can't copy it.
"You gotta think about what's truly gonna get them to stop scrolling, what's gonna get them to open that email, and what's gonna get them to engage with you," Murphy said. "Not just one time, but hopefully 2, 3, maybe even a dozen times."
That's easy to agree with and harder to act on. Talking to Murphy, though, it becomes clear that doing things differently at Siena runs on a structural habit, one that shows up at every level of how his team operates, from a single phone call up to an entire institution rebranding itself.
It starts with noticing what everyone else misses
Most days, Murphy is behind a desk running media strategy, not answering phones. But the front desk at Siena also serves as the switchboard for the whole university, and one afternoon, with the receptionist away and Murphy walking past on his way outside, it started ringing.
"I've hardly ever answered the front desk phone," he said. "I was just going out for a walk and the phone was ringing and nobody was there, so I picked it up. It ended up being a family from California who wanted to register for a tour and didn't know how to do it. The first light bulb moment for me was, okay, this is clearly a pain point in the user experience."
He booked the tour on the spot. The more interesting part happened after he hung up.
"I've got someone having a problem trying to figure out how to get a tour," he said. "So obviously I answered the phone and registered them for a tour, but behind the scenes we then said, okay, we have to make registering for a tour way easier for our families."
The gap was invisible to Murphy until he stepped outside his own routine long enough to notice it.
"I'm on our website every day. I know exactly what buttons to click," he said. "But it was a great reminder that not everybody is on our dot-edu every day, all day long, like I am. Being able to think about that user journey and make that registration process as seamless as possible was really important for us."
That's the smallest version of the pattern: a specific, unglamorous fix that nobody outside the building will ever see, made because someone bothered to listen.
The most deliberate rebrand in recent memory
The same instinct shows up at the biggest scale Siena has attempted in years: becoming a university at all. Most schools that make that jump treat the announcement itself, a new name and logo revealed on a single launch day, as the marketing moment. Murphy's team spent years getting ready before they said anything publicly.
"You'll see that some colleges who transition to university use it primarily as a big promotion," he said. "We took the opposite approach and did a phased rollout instead. First was the redesign of our logos. Second, we started changing campus signage, and as soon as things needed to be replaced, we dropped 'college' from the name entirely."
The team pulled "college" off the school's primary marks 4 years before the state approved the official designation change, which meant alumni had already started dropping the word themselves long before the news became official.
"For probably the last 3 to 4 years, people were saying, 'I went to Siena,'" Murphy said. "The fact that people were dropping 'college' off naturally made it easier for us to promote."
That patience mattered most with the audience least likely to embrace a sudden change.
"It wasn't like we were ripping off the band-aid. It wasn't a huge pain point," he said. "We knew this was coming, so we took a phased approach, and that worked well for us, specifically with our alumni and our donor base. They were more receptive to it because they had seen a gradual change."
A visible awareness campaign still ran on top of all that groundwork. The tagline "Saints Rising" showed up on billboards, paid digital, and the school's website during the last recruitment cycle, timed to coincide with a conference basketball championship that gave the message extra reach. But the campaign only worked because it wasn't the whole strategy, and Murphy is clear that the tagline alone was never going to carry the message on its own.
"The claim wasn't strong enough without the story or the why behind it," he said. "It's like saying that we're one of America's 15 most beautiful campuses, but what the heck does that mean to a 17 year old?"
The rebrand campaign ran for one recruitment cycle. The groundwork behind it started four years earlier, with new logos, new signage, and alumni already dropping “college” before the state made it official. That’s structural presence: built years ahead of the moment anyone sees a campaign.
The budget fight that ends itself
The same discipline shows up at a much smaller, messier scale: 2 graduate programs at the same campus competing for the same student. Siena's MBA and business analytics programs draw from an overlapping pool of applicants, which means every dollar split between separate campaigns for each one dilutes both.
"My MBA audience and my business analytics audience are likely the same," Murphy said, "so I'm competing for the same person if we're splitting up our campaigns. I'm diluting some of my marketing spend because I'm splitting up those audiences."
Most teams solve that fight the same way every budget cycle: whoever makes the strongest case in the room gets the bigger number, and the argument starts over again next year. Murphy's team built a formula instead, one that settles the question automatically.
"What we've been able to do is figure out what's actually driving seats for us," he said, "then look at what percent of total graduate enrollment each program represents, and split the dollar amounts based on that percentage. We let the data lead us instead of letting this program director's opinion win out over that one."
A win in a budget meeting only lasts a cycle. A formula lasts as long as the team keeps using it.
Why the org chart matters as much as the campaign
None of this, the phone call, the rebrand, the budget formula, means much if the pieces don't work together once the attention actually shows up. That's the last place Murphy points to when explaining how a school this exposed to a shrinking pool still expects to win.
Marketing, admissions, financial aid, and operations at Siena all sit in the same building, reporting toward 1 shared outcome instead of 4 separate ones.
"I think that's one of the reasons why we can win against the demographic cliff," Murphy said. "All 4 parts of the operation are in the same building together, and we're all working toward the same goal."
An awareness campaign that lands with a student and then hits a disconnected admissions process, or a financial aid office working off a different message, wastes the exact attention it worked to earn. Structure is what makes the campaign worth running in the first place.
What fighting back looks like
None of what Murphy described, the phone call, the phased rollout, the budget formula, the org chart built ahead of a demographic threat, reads as a marketing win in the moment it happens. That's exactly why higher ed's sameness problem is so hard to shake. The generic claim, and the generic org chart behind it, is available to everyone immediately. Instead, schools have to build the alternative one unglamorous decision at a time, long before the pool of students gets any smaller.
None of it looked like marketing in the moment it happened. That’s the actual shape of structural presence: built years before anyone outside the building notices, and still standing long after a single campaign would have faded.
Andrew (Andy) Murphy is the Director of Marketing at Siena University. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with leaders across higher education. Got something to share? Join the conversation.
