Recruitment teams across Canada are working harder than they have in years and still missing their targets. The cap is not the reason. New student arrivals fell 61% last year, below even COVID levels. Very few institutions have been maxing out their allocations. Student caps stopped being a binding constraint and instead demand and approvals took their place.

Students are choosing to go elsewhere. Post-graduation work permit eligibility has been narrowed, rewritten, partly suspended and then frozen, all within two years. Whatever you make of any individual change, a student committing four years and a family’s savings is not going to put everything on the line for a country that is so unpredictable. Instability is its own deterrent, and it isn’t something a recruitment team can out-work.

That is an uncomfortable truth for many institutional leaders. The numbers are down, the pressure is real and immediate, and the largest single cause sits outside the institution entirely. Canadian institutions have gotten used to operating in the growth-era during which a typical response was to push harder at the top of the funnel: more leads, more applications, more fairs. That’s why most teams are exhausted and still short.

What changed underneath the funnel

During the good old days, when you had several applications for every seat, losing one at a departmental handoff was just noise. You had surplus, and surplus forgives a great deal. Now the surplus is gone. Every new inquiry has to survive the entire lifecycle, because there is nothing queued behind it. That same handoff loss that cost you nothing before costs you the seat today.

You already know applications and inquiries are down; you didn’t need a dashboard for that. A question worth asking now is what happens to the interest you are still generating.

The answer lies mostly at the handoffs between units. Each unit tends to report its own stage as healthy, and it’s not wrong because inside its own boundary it usually is. Recruitment followed up on the inquiries it received. Admissions assessed every application and got the offers out on time. The registrar’s office enrolled every student who showed up. All three can still be true in your worst enrolment year. Each unit owns a stage in the lifecycle, but nobody owns the space between the stages.

Earlier this year, Capilano University commissioned a strategic enrolment management (SEM) audit. Mike Henniger covered international recruitment, Jody Gordon student success and retention, and I marketing, communications and conversion. Through the audit we built a checklist of more than 150 best practices mapped across 16 stages of the student lifecycle, from first inquiry to alumni giving. While the audit findings are confidential, the pattern the audit exposed is not confined to one institution.

The six gaps to check in your own lifecycle

Who chases the student who goes quiet? Recruitment owns the relationship until an application is submitted and then admissions takes over. Admissions chases documents and recruitment chases people, and a student who suddenly goes quiet because they’re still considering a competitor needs more nurturing from recruitment. Instead, they get a reminder about uploading their transcript.

What happens to an applicant while they wait? Most institutions track decision turnaround and have a service standard for it. Almost none has a clear owner for the weeks on either side of that decision. Many institutions cannot see the stage at all: with no mechanism for a student to accept or decline an offer, yield stays invisible until registration, which is far too late to act. Meanwhile, the things that would win the decision – course planning sessions, demo classes, a conversation with a faculty member – run in the wrong weeks or not at all. Your agents feel this stage hardest. They are holding a student’s confidence while your institution is silent, and they have no way to tell you where the delay is.

Who owns the stretch from deposit to first day? This is a stage that tends to get crowded. Recruitment and marketing are often still in touch, student services has begun onboarding, the registrar is sending registration details and finance is chasing tuition fees. Every team is watching closely, but nobody owns the sequence. A student who has received dozens of messages from six departments since the start of the process learns to stop reading your emails unless you take control over frequency, relevance and repetitiveness of your content. All that seems harmless until the one email that requires action or contains important information arrives looking like the rest of them. Yet on each team’s report, the messaging was fine.

Who owns the message when a student withdraws? Withdrawal and refund communications sit between the registrar, finance and marketing, but they are rarely governed by any of the three. Students who have a bad experience with a withdrawal and refund write about it publicly, and those complaints are now being repeated back to your prospective students by the AI tools they use to research you. That’s how an administrative problem becomes a recruitment problem.

Who owns the students who already left? I am not talking about your alumni. The students who paused or withdrew without finishing are a mixed group. Some ran out of money, some couldn’t get their visa extension, some left unhappy, some had a family situation, some struggled academically. A few institutions run re-engagement campaigns for this audience. In most, nobody owns them, and the reason is structural: the registrar holds the records, recruitment is measured on new inquiries, and no team’s targets include a returning student. Somewhere in that group is the cheapest enrolment available to you, and nobody has been asked to go and find it.

What is the true cost of your enrolled student? Marketing knows what it spent, by channel, by campaign, by agent. Institutional research knows who enrolled. Almost nobody can tell you what an enrolled student cost you through each channel. Most institutions capture a lead source in the CRM, which answers where someone came from, not how much it took to get them. So when finance comes to cut recruitment and marketing spend in a year like this one, nobody knows which agents, fairs and campaigns to keep, and the decision gets made on seniority and instinct.

Plenty of institutions already track two or three of these gaps. Very few track all six, and almost nobody has one person responsible for all of them. The ones that try usually stop at the first obstacle, which is definitions. Most institutions don’t have a shared answer to what good looks like at any stage. So you can measure one of these gaps, get a number, and still not know whether it is a problem. Eighteen days between submission and decision is either perfectly fine or a disaster, depending on a target nobody has set.

There is also a reporting-line reason these gaps stay hidden. Recruitment, admissions, the registrar’s office and student services usually report to different executives. By the time their numbers and reports reach an executive table, they have been summarised into stage totals, measured inside one unit’s boundary. That is the one format that cannot show a gap.

Three tests you can run this week

Trace twenty-five student files by hand. Pull twenty-five applications from last recruitment cycle at random and write down the dates at every stage: inquiry, application, decision, offer, deposit, registration. You are looking for the dates with the biggest gap between them. That gap tells you which of the six is yours.

Ask each unit head for their one number. Ask yourself: what is the one metric you’re accountable for? Then lay the answers along your institution’s lifecycle. The stages nobody names tend to be the stages that leak. Whatever nobody claims is where you start.

Mystery-shop your own inquiry form, then go quiet. Submit it from a top source market with a question a real student would ask, reply once, and then go dark. Watch who follows up, whether anyone follows up twice. Note which department the second message comes from. If it never comes, or it comes from a different team than the first, you have your answer.

If it’s everyone’s job, it’s nobody’s job

The fix is not a fancy dashboard or new funding. Name one person accountable for each of the six gaps. Publish them in a single report on a set cadence. Review them with every unit in the room, so no unit sees its number in isolation. Without assigned owners, these gaps revert to nobody’s job by the next intake.

This may look different for institutions running one centralised enrolment division. My sense is the gaps would move rather than disappear.

Capilano’s President, Jason Dewling, framed the question this way: “In difficult times, we should be asking ourselves, ‘are we doing everything we know to do?’”

There is very little new demand to find this year. The institutions that come through this in decent shape will be the ones that stopped losing the students who were already coming.

– Midya U runs , where she works with post-secondary institutions on marketing, branding, enrolment and AI strategy. She spent fifteen years inside Canadian higher ed marketing and recruitment, public and private - building award-winning teams, running eight-figure annual budgets through every regulatory curveball.