Why Prospective Students Bounce From Your University Website (It's Your Org Chart's Fault)
By John Azoni, founder of Unveild — a video production company for higher education.
TL;DR:
Your university website is probably organized around your org chart — president statements, department-named navigation, internal jargon — instead of the questions prospective students actually show up with. That mismatch costs you. Students today arrive already informed; they're validating, not discovering. If they can't find answers fast, they move on. The fix isn't a full redesign — it's auditing your jargon, surfacing information where students are already looking, and building around what they need to know rather than what leadership wants to say.
Most university websites share a telling detail: somewhere near the top of the homepage, there's a welcome message from the president or vice chancellor. Maybe there's a carousel of sweeping drone shots. The navigation bar lists the provost's office, the bursar, the dean of this and that.
None of those things are what a 17-year-old wants when they land on your site for the first time.
That's the argument Robert "Pez" Perry makes, and he's been doing content and UX strategy for higher education institutions for over a decade — now as a principal consultant at Squiz. His take isn't that university websites are badly made. It's that they're made for the wrong audience. They're organized around how universities think about themselves, not around what prospective students need to find out.
The Org Chart Problem
Perry's shorthand for diagnosing a student-hostile website: look at the navigation. If the menu structure maps to your internal departments — schools, faculties, administrative offices — that's a dead giveaway the site was built to satisfy internal stakeholders, not to answer student questions. Jargon is the same story. Terms like "bursar," "provost," and "vice chancellor" mean nothing to a 17-year-old who has never set foot in a university. The site is speaking the institution's language, not the student's.
The president's statement on the homepage is perhaps the clearest version of this problem. A prospective student who hasn't even decided whether to apply has no relationship with your president. That statement matters to people already inside the institution — faculty, donors, current students. As an opening move for someone who just wants to know whether your school has the program they're looking for, it's useless.
Perry's point isn't that this content is wrong — it's that it's in the wrong place, serving the wrong priority.
Students Arrive Already Informed
One thing that's changed in how students research universities: they don't come to your website cold anymore. By the time someone lands on your homepage, they've already done research. They've seen you in social media feeds, looked you up in college search tools, maybe watched videos. They're not discovering you — they're validating you.
That shift matters for how you should structure what they see first. They have specific questions. What does it actually cost? What are the outcomes for graduates in my program? What does campus life look like day to day? If those questions can't be answered quickly, the student moves on — not necessarily because they've decided against you, but because another school made the information easier to find.
Perry describes this as a pressure that will only grow. The students applying to college five years from now are 13 today. They've grown up expecting to type a question and get an answer. The institution that learns to work that way first is going to have an advantage over the ones still designing around their own org charts.
What a Better Website Actually Looks Like
Perry points to the University of Edinburgh as a model. Their course pages embed relevant scholarship information directly — so a student researching a program doesn't have to navigate to a separate financial aid section and cross-reference. The information they're most likely to need is where they're already looking. Edinburgh also regularly surveys prospective students using webinar registration forms and site pop-ups, asking what questions matter most to them. Not students who already enrolled — prospective students actively in the decision process.
Monash University in Australia takes a different approach but with a similar logic: a prominent search function that accepts conversational questions, not just keywords. Someone who types "how much does tuition cost" gets relevant pages back, rather than a wall of navigation to dig through. It's not a fully AI-powered interface, but it's a step toward one that meets users where they are.
Perry's suggested minimum viable improvement for any institution: audit your jargon. Go through the site and flag every acronym, every internal title, every term that assumes the reader already knows how a university operates. Strip it out. That alone would make most university websites more navigable for prospective students, even without redesigning the structure.
The Irony Worth Sitting With
Universities are where research happens. They're home to the people pushing the boundaries of medicine, technology, and social science. And yet, as Perry puts it, they tend to be among the most conservative institutions when it comes to adapting their own communication.
Part of that is prestige culture — the instinct to look like a centuries-old institution even when what students need is a site that functions like a good search engine. Part of it is internal politics, where leadership visibility on the homepage is a real consideration. But the cost shows up in bounce rates, in students who can't find what they're looking for, and eventually in enrollment.
The answer isn't to throw out everything and build a chatbot. It's to start asking what students actually want to know, and build the site around those answers — rather than building it around what the institution wants to say.
This post is based on Episode 104 of the Higher Ed Storytelling University podcast with John Azoni. Listen to the full conversation with Pez Perry at unveild.tv/podcast/ep104.
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