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Gen Z stopped being the next generation to “figure out” quite a while ago.
By now, most higher education teams have tried the TikTok campaigns, recruited student ambassadors, built automated email journeys and invested in more student-led content.
You probably already have a Gen Z strategy that you developed a few years ago, but is it still doing the job?
It's easy for things that once worked well to become routine.
Maybe you're still using the same student ambassador formats you introduced a few years ago, or sending an email journey that hasn't had a proper review in a while.
You might also be posting regularly on social, but not necessarily covering the things prospective students are most curious about now.
And student behaviour hasn't exactly stood still.
So rather than adding another channel or campaign, this might be a good time to revisit some of the things already in your recruitment mix.
1. Make “authentic” content more specific
Higher education has been talking about “authenticity” for years, to the point where the word itself doesn't tell us very much anymore.
Most prospective students already expect to see real students, campus videos and ambassador content. The difference now is often in the detail.
Instead of another student saying they “felt at home straight away,” could they talk about the module they found unexpectedly difficult? The society that helped them meet people? What they wish they'd known before arriving?
The same applies to your higher ed institutional messaging.
“Supportive learning environment” is easy to say.
Average class sizes, adviser availability, examples of academic support and real graduate outcomes give students something much more useful to work with.
You don't need to make your content deliberately rough around the edges, you just need to give students enough detail to believe it.
2. Think about what students are searching for on video
Short-form video isn't only something students scroll through anymore, it's increasingly part of how they research.
Someone considering your university might search YouTube or TikTok for your accommodation, a particular course, nightlife, campus food or what a normal week actually looks like.
That should change the kinds of videos you make.
For example, you could create video on what biology students do in a week, which will be more useful than another general campus montage.
The same goes for questions around cost, commuting, placements, accommodation, or student support.
Recurring formats (series) can help here too.
A regular “Ask a student” series, course-by-course walkthroughs, or short accommodation tours give you useful content that keeps answering real questions long after the original post goes live
The videos should be easy to understand without sound, with clear captions and on-screen text which help students watching silently and make the subject of each video immediately obvious.
3. Stop treating parents as an afterthought
Parents often have very different questions from the student they're supporting.
They may be thinking about fees, accommodation contracts, safety, employability, financial support and what happens if their son or daughter struggles once they arrive.
Yet parent communications can still end up looking like the student campaign with a slightly more formal email subject line.
It might be worth giving parents their own route through your recruitment content.
That could mean a dedicated parent page, clearer information around total costs, Q&A sessions at key points in the cycle, or emails that arrive when decisions about deposits, accommodation and finance actually need to be made.
Think about what a parent would need to know at this stage that the student may not be thinking about yet.
4. Read your automated emails again
Not the workflow diagram, we’re pretty sure that works. But read the actual emails.
If your CRM journeys have been running for a few years, there's a fair chance some of the language, links, or assumptions inside them haven't aged particularly well.
Read the journey from beginning to end as if you were a prospective student receiving it today.
Are you repeating information they've already seen? Are you still pointing them towards content that mattered three recruitment cycles ago? Does the personalisation feel useful, or does it just insert their first name into an otherwise generic email?
Check your engagement data can help here too, and look at where students start dropping away across your main nurture sequences (rather than relying only on just the overall open rate).
Sometimes the problem isn't the channel… it's email number six.
5. Look for changes in behaviour, not only campaign performance
Most recruitment teams already track traffic, opens, clicks, enquiries and conversions.
But it's also worth checking whether students are behaving differently from this time last year.
Maybe students are finding your course pages through different channels than they were last year.
Perhaps certain email topics are getting less attention, while a particular type of video or student story is suddenly doing much better; even the questions coming through live chat can tell you whether priorities are shifting.
A quarterly look at those shifts can tell you a lot more than simply asking whether this year's campaign beat last year's.
Gen Z isn't a fixed audience.
The 17-year-old you're recruiting in 2026 doesn't necessarily behave like the 17-year-old you were recruiting in 2022.
Keep reviewing the playbook
Gen Z will still be a major audience for higher education recruitment over the next few years.
But the way you reach them will keep changing.
Some of the easiest improvements might come from revisiting what you're already doing.
Maybe the ambassador programme needs a refresh, or the CRM journey hasn't been looked at in a while. Your video content might still look polished, but is it answering the questions prospective students actually have?
And there's another reason to do that work now.
Gen Alpha is already coming up behind them, watching campus videos, using AI tools to research courses and forming opinions about universities long before they appear in your enquiry data.
We've looked at that next shift in "Gen Alpha won't browse your website: here's what universities need to build."
When did you last take a proper look at your Gen Z recruitment strategy? Tell us on LinkedIn.