The Graduate Student Journey, Rewritten: What Students Tell Us (and Where Institutions Still Miss the Mark)

Graduate enrollment teams are working harder than ever.
Students notice; they just don’t always respond the way we expect.

This session shares updated findings from Halda and NAGAP’s ongoing study of the graduate student enrollment journey, combining fresh survey data and interviews from prospective and enrolled graduate students. We compare what students say they want with how institutions believe they’re showing up, and where those two stories collide.

To ground the data in reality, we layer student insights alongside responses from graduate enrollment leaders and real interaction data from Halda’s platform, drawn from millions of student engagements across higher education websites.

The result is a clear, sometimes uncomfortable, picture of how graduate students discover programs, evaluate options, and decide whether to engage or quietly move on. You’ll see where digital recruitment strategies are working, where attribution breaks down, and which assumptions no longer hold up in a student-first, digital-first environment.