student-recruitment
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The Campaign Shop Behind the School Bond
School districts do not merely need better messages. They need to know which neighbors have not heard them, what those neighbors fear, and how to turn a civic proposal into a choice people can understand.
The Little Agency That Learned to Think Like a College
AccessU found its niche by treating colleges less like products and more like complicated communities. Thirty years later, its best work begins with a deceptively unfashionable move: listening before advertising.
Caissa K12 and the Campaign for the Empty Desk
Public schools once waited for families to arrive. Caissa K12 treats every empty desk like an undecided voter - and only gets paid when the student comes back.
Crizac built a ₹1,042 crore business behind the study-abroad desk
Thousands of education agents bring the students. Universities pay the commissions. Crizac connects the two - and is buying its way into more of the journey.
Ashley Safranski Put Career Services at the Center of the Campus Story
After years of hearing families ask what college would lead to, Ashley Safranski built a career around helping institutions answer - with clearer stories, useful data, and career support students can actually find.
Diego Fanara Turned a Lonely University Choice Into a Global Conversation
A teenager arrived in London with rankings, brochures and too few honest answers. Diego Fanara built Unibuddy so the next student could ask someone who had actually been there.
Jonathan Clues Took the Racing Line Into Higher Ed
A British racing champion learned that the laps were only a fraction of the job. The rest - sponsorship, storytelling and earning attention - became the operating system for StudentBridge.
Unibuddy Built the Wrong Product Twice - Then Universities Gave It a 500-Campus Playbook
The edtech started with a high-school dashboard, tried to build its own marketplace, and kept hearing one awkward question: where is the traffic? Its answer - live inside university websites - turned a student chat idea into an enterprise enrollment platform.
The College Visit Moved to a Phone. This Atlanta Company Got There First.
StudentBridge turns virtual campus tours into enrollments for 250-plus colleges. Its founder is a former race-car driver who thinks admissions offices have been showing recruits the wrong thing.
EasyUni
EasyUni is a Kuala Lumpur-based education technology company that runs a network of free university search, comparison and application websites for students across Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, and sells the resulting attention back to universities as premium listings, qualified leads, bespoke digital marketing and virtual-event software. Incorporated in 2008 and launched publicly in December 2010 after co-founder Edwin Tay watched his niece struggle to compare colleges in any systematic way, the company has grown into a multi-country portal group - eleven regional sites at last count - with counsellors who walk applicants through admissions, visas and travel at no cost to the student. Universities pay; students do not. Backed by Teak Capital (Series A, 2013) and the Axiata Digital Innovation Fund (Series B, 2015), EasyUni also builds Fairwiz, a cloud platform for virtual open days and education fairs that started development in November 2019 and landed just as campus visits stopped being possible.
Studyportals
Studyportals is a Netherlands-based education platform that helps students discover and compare study programs anywhere in the world. Through nine portals - including Mastersportal, Bachelorsportal, PhDportal and Scholarshipportal - it lists more than 240,000 English-taught programs from over 3,500 institutions across 110+ countries, drawing roughly 50 million student visitors a year. For universities, it turns that global demand data into recruitment, analytics and consulting services, and in 2024 it launched an AI Student Advisor named Sophia, built with AWS, to guide applicants in more than 20 languages.
Edwin van Rest
Edwin van Rest is the co-founder and CEO of Studyportals, the Eindhoven-based platform that helps students compare study programs across borders. He started the company in 2007 with two engineering friends after his own year abroad in Japan showed him how hard it was to find information about international study options. Today Studyportals lists hundreds of thousands of programs, reaches millions of students a month, and van Rest is a recognized voice in international education, a former EAIE Rising Star Award winner, and chair of the EAIE Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community.
Archer Education
Archer Education is a higher education growth-enablement company that helps colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and retain students for their online programs. Founded in 2006 as the college-search portal Campus Explorer and rebranded as Archer in 2018, the firm pairs enrollment marketing, admissions support, and data-driven advisory services so institutions can grow online enrollment without building the machinery themselves. Over two decades it says it has partnered with 200+ institutions, managed 1,000+ online programs, and reached more than 20 million adult learners.
Brian Hartnack
Brian Hartnack is the co-founder and CEO of Archer Education, a higher-education growth firm that helps colleges and universities recruit, enroll and retain online and adult learners. A Cornell history major who cut his teeth in the late-90s dot-com scene at eToys, Gifts.com and Rent.com (sold to eBay for $415M in 2005), he launched the company that became Archer in 2006. Two decades on, the firm has worked with 200+ institutions, managed 1,000+ online programs, and connected millions of students to degrees - with Hartnack arguing that the winners in education marketing pair data infrastructure with authentic storytelling.