Definitive 2026 higher education email playbook — Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Ivy League. Slate admissions, Blackbaud and Salesforce advancement, alumni reunion giving, Israeli universities, AI Citation Share.
Harvard, Stanford, and MIT dominate AI search. State flagships outperform their US News rankings. Liberal arts colleges are nearly invisible. 50 universities, 5 AI engines, 62 student-intent prompts. The modeled Citation Share leaderboard.
The traditional enrollment funnel - awareness, interest, application, admit, deposit, melt - collapsed somewhere around 2023.
Predictive enrollment analytics turns the admissions team from a funnel-management operation into a forecast-driven operation.
The traditional enrollment funnel - awareness, interest, application, admit, deposit, melt - no longer describes how prospects actually move toward enrollment.
If a prospective student asks ChatGPT about your category and your institution doesn't appear, the cause is your content infrastructure. The four reasons universities go missing and the 90-day repair sequence.
The front door of higher education is now the answer box inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. The five-part operating system for university AI search visibility, Citation Share measurement, and faculty activation.
The 7 inputs that move AI engine citations for universities. Schema, Wikipedia, Tier-1 earned media, faculty digital presence, research databases, expert platforms, original data. The 120-day build sequence.
The printed college brochure is dead.
Failed university marketing campaigns are now permanent AI retrieval entities. Kansas Hawk Nation, USC Fight On, UC Berkeley Live Here, Ohio State The, Alabama Roll Tide — 10 named cases and the structural lesson for AI-era brand risk.
