Higher Education
No More Flying Blind: Introducing Social Intelligence Advisory Service
We hear it regularly from enrollment leaders across our member institutions: they’re worried students are making inaccurate comments about their campus online, and they feel like they’re flying blind when it comes to a lot of the information that’s shaping how prospective students make college decisions. Helping make those insights visible is why College Board just launched strategic advisory services for higher education, built on the expertise of Campus Sonar, which joined College Board earlier this year.
Social Intelligence for Enrollment
The new services use social intelligence to help institutions eliminate the guesswork and tell an authentic story. Social intelligence is different from social media monitoring tools or brand-tracking dashboards that enrollment and marketing teams may be using.
Social Intelligence is the disciplined analysis of relevant conversations happening publicly online—on Reddit and social media where prospective students are turning for advice, in the news that influences public perception, and the comment sections where students and families talk to each other.
For over a decade, trust trends have shown a consistent pattern (2026 Edelman Trust Barometer): Prospective students and families trust their peers’ guidance more than they trust any institution’s own messaging, and that gap has only widened—especially among lower-income families. Access to peer conversations can help institutions make strategic decisions based on a complete picture of the market they’re trying to reach.
Social intelligence closes the gap between perception and reality. What enrollment leaders know from their own campus visit feedback, admissions funnel, outreach data, and the real discussions happening around all of these, are the comparisons students make to other schools, the questions they ask each other, the stories they tell about their experience.
Building on What’s Public
The work is built on College Board’s commitment to privacy. Insights are derived from publicly posted content students and families have chosen to put into public view. These high-level trends and patterns are paired with deep expertise in consumer behavior, communication strategy, and industry trends to contextualize the discussions.
Add These Insights to Your Strategy
As of September 1, College Board members can purchase offerings that meet a range of their institution’s needs. Some engagements are a great baseline and starting point to help a campus understand how it’s currently perceived and where it stands against named competitors. Others go deeper, helping institutions define a strategic position grounded in what audiences actually say. And for institutions ready for an ongoing partnership, there are options built for continuous insight rather than a single point-in-time study.
This is advisory work, so institutions aren’t left with a report to receive and file away. Every engagement includes facilitated discussions with strategists who’ve spent their careers in higher education, working alongside your team to translate what students and families are saying into actionable decisions. I’m eager to bring the work to College Board. Here’s what you can expect, as shared by our longtime client at Duquesne University.
Early on we saw how [this service] could shape the strategy. That insight helped us shift tactics—legal, employee relations, student life, and marketing communications—to manage each issue to a successful resolution. The value of our work together now is well past a dashboard and some reporting—[the team] has become a partner we learn with, bounce ideas off of, and turn to as we develop new approaches.
Gabriel Welsch, vice president for Marketing and Communications
Institutions don’t have to sit in a strategy meeting and wonder what their prospective students are actually saying about them when they’re not in the room. That conversation already exists. It’s just happening where many institutions are not positioned to listen.
Learn more about our new social intelligence offerings at Our Solutions.