The Problem with University Websites

Brian Fleming Ed.D
Sep 16, 2025
10 min read

How Higher Education Loses in an Attention Economy

My new book, The Solution Trap, comes out in March 2026. It's about why college leaders keep rushing to solutions without first understanding what problems we're trying to solve.

The Website That Almost Got Approved

The room buzzes with excitement as a university's marketing team unveils a new (and highly anticipated) website redesign. The presentation is solid. The mockups are stunning. The user experience improvements are impressive.

"Mobile optimization will be perfect," the digital marketing manager explains, clicking through responsive new layouts. "Load times should be 40% faster. The virtual tour integration will feel seamless."

"And look at this new program finder—students will be able to filter by interest, location, cost, and more."

Everyone nods approvingly. The president leans forward, clearly pleased. "This is exactly what we need to compete. It's clean, modern, and user-friendly. Wonderful job on this team! Now let's get to work and roll this thing out."

Everyone stands ready to approve what will end up being a six-figure investment in branding, marketing, and growth. And on paper, the ROI is obvious. The new website solves all the issues they've been fretting over for years, like the fact that the current site is clearly dated, that its navigation is clunky, but also that competitors have been launching sites with much sleeker designs for years.

In many ways, this is a project about catching up and, at best, leveling the playing field.

But then someone speaks up, almost hesitantly. "Can I ask something? When we surveyed students who didn't apply, how many actually said our website was the reason? Clearly, we need a new website, but do we really need this website?!?"

A pause.

An awkward silence.

A few cross looks from across the table, but a few curious ones as well.

The marketing team shuffles through old documents. "Well, we didn't specifically ask students about the website. But we know from analytics that prospective students spend an average of only 3 minutes and 12 seconds on our site, and that felt off to us."

"Got it, so where are they spending their time instead?"

The room falls quiet as it becomes obvious that they'd all been so focused on building a better website that they hadn't actually stopped to ask what problem a new website might solve.

Why Universities Are Losing in the Attention Economy

This scenario plays out in conference rooms across higher education every week. Universities spend enormous resources perfecting their digital presence, their messaging, their competitive positioning, all while operating under a fundamental misunderstanding of what they're actually competing for.

And they’re losing because they're still competing as if it's 1995. They assume prospective students will give them focused, sustained attention during the decision-making process. They craft 12-page viewbooks assuming students will read them cover to cover. They design elaborate campus visit experiences assuming students arrive with genuine curiosity about institutional differences.

But in today’s digital landscape, none of these assumptions hold. Students aren't comparing university websites. They're consuming hundreds of hours of content that questions whether college is necessary at all. They're not researching your programs. They're building their worldview through micro-interactions with creators, entrepreneurs, and professionals who are collectively rewriting the narrative about success and career development.

The fundamental problem isn't that university websites are poorly designed or that campus tours aren't engaging enough. The problem is that institutions are competing for attention they no longer automatically receive, using strategies designed for a world where they controlled the information flow about careers, learning, and success.

What the Marketing Team Missed

They hadn't considered basic questions like:

Where were prospective students actually getting their information about college?
What sources were shaping their thinking?
Who were they trusting for guidance about their futures?
What content was influencing their decisions about whether college was even necessary?

The team realized they'd been operating on assumptions rather than understanding their students’ actual decision-making processes.

The president, sensing the shift in the room, postpones the approval. "Let's take a week to understand what students are actually doing during their decision-making process."

What They Found Changed Everything

The enrollment team spent the following week tracking where prospective students actually consumed information about college decisions. And what they found wasn't other university websites. Instead, they found:

Reddit threads with titles like "Is college actually worth it?" where students share real experiences with debt, job searches, and post-graduation disillusionment. Students read these threads and feel anxiety about their financial future and uncertainty about whether a degree will actually pay off.
TikTok videos from recent graduates showing their student loan statements alongside their entry-level salaries, making the math look impossible. Students watch these and feel fear about taking on debt and skepticism about promised career outcomes.
YouTube channels run by successful entrepreneurs who dropped out or never attended college at all, detailing exactly how they built their businesses and income streams. Students watch these and feel excitement about alternative paths and FOMO about "wasting" four years in school.
LinkedIn posts from industry professionals sharing what skills actually matter in their field, often listing things not taught in traditional programs. Students read these and feel doubt about whether their coursework will be relevant and confusion about what employers actually want.
Podcasts interviewing people who built careers without degrees, sharing specific strategies for breaking into industries through social networking, portfolios, and apprenticeships. Students listen and feel empowered by alternative approaches and frustrated with higher education’s relentless gatekeeping.
Instagram accounts of “digital nomads” and other content creators documenting their location-independent lifestyles, showing monthly income reports and daily routines that look nothing like traditional career paths. Students follow these accounts and feel drawn to freedom and flexibility, viewing traditional routes to employment as restrictive and perhaps even out of touch.
Discord servers organized around specific interests or industries where students connect directly with working professionals, getting unfiltered advice about college and career realities. Students participate and feel more trust in peer-to-peer guidance than institutional messaging.
Facebook groups for parents sharing their experiences with college costs and their children's post-graduation struggles, creating echo chambers of doubt about higher education's value. Students see these shared by their own parents and feel pressure to justify their educational choices.

Each of these sources wasn't just providing information compared to their websites. They were shaping how students felt about college, career development, financial decisions, and their futures. And they were doing it with immediate, authentic, unfiltered content that feels more trustworthy than a polished new website.

A Profound Shift

The most profound shift in higher education recruitment isn't happening in marketing departments or admissions offices. It's happening in the daily media consumption habits of prospective students and families. And universities that figure this out will be far more competitive.

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

While you might spend weeks perfecting something like a website user experience, your target students are consuming hundreds of hours of content that not only shapes their beliefs about where to go to school, but may even lead them to question the fundamental value proposition of higher education altogether.

Meaning, you're competing not just with websites that might make your institution look more or less favorable compared to competitors, but against a sea of content that suggests college might not be necessary at all.

And that content is persuasive. It's powerful. And it's far more pervasive than you might think.

It's Time We Started Talking About the Attention Economy

What the university leadership team discovered was that they were operating in a fundamentally different competitive landscape than they realized. Sure, they probably needed a new website. And certainly, what they were mocking up would've been well worth the investment, but it wouldn't have been enough.

Because they weren't just competing with other universities for enrollment. They were competing in what economists call "the attention economy"—a concept first articulated by Herbert Simon in 1971. Simon observed that:

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”

That idea was later popularized by Michael Goldhaber in the mid-1990s, who argued that:

"Transactions in which money is involved may be growing in total number, but the total number of global attention transactions is growing even faster."

The attention economy recognizes that in a world of infinite content, human focus has become the scarcest resource. Every platform, creator, and organization competes for the same finite asset: the hours in someone's day and the mental bandwidth they have available to process information and make important decisions.

When Netflix competes for evening viewing hours, they're not just competing with other streaming services. They're competing with sleep, conversations among family and friends, Audible, exercise, and any other way someone might spend those hours between dinner and bedtime.
When TikTok's algorithm serves video after video, it's not just competing with other social platforms. It's competing with reflection time, boredom, and the natural mental downtime that used to happen before the days of scrolling.
When Amazon's recommendation engine suggests purchases, it's not just competing with other retailers—it's competing for the moment when someone first realizes they might want something but feels tempted to look elsewhere, usually before they even fully form the intention of where to go.

For higher education, the attention economy does not just represent a new way to think about marketing. It represents a fundamental shift that should reshape how every university thinks about competition entirely.

Universities compete not for daily engagement like entertainment platforms, but for what we might call "decision-making attention,” the focus and mental energy students dedicate to forming opinions about their futures during the critical months of college consideration.

In other words, we're competing with every source of information, guidance, and inspiration that shapes how young people think about success, learning, and career development during these crucial influence periods.

Why the Attention Economy Changes Everything

The issue for higher education has always been one of information asymmetry. Students needed institutions to access career knowledge, social connections, and credible signals of competence. University websites are designed entirely with this assumption in mind.

Think about how your website is structured: program pages that exhaustively detail curriculum and faculty credentials, as if students can't find industry insights elsewhere. Career outcome statistics presented as proof of value, as if students aren't getting unfiltered career advice from working professionals on social media. Alumni success stories carefully curated to demonstrate institutional impact, as if students aren't following creators who document their income and lifestyle in real time.

Every page assumes students will give you sustained attention to absorb institutional messaging because, for decades (if not centuries), universities controlled the primary channels through which people learned about new educational opportunities and developed their career thinking.

In turn, students gave universities their attention because there weren't readily available alternatives.

That monopoly is over.

Students can now access college and career insights anywhere, including directly from industry professionals. They can see unfiltered documentation of different life paths through social media. They can learn practical skills through online platforms. They can build networks through interest-based communities. They can demonstrate competence through portfolios and personal projects rather than institutional credentials.

Consider what this shift means: every hour a prospective student spends researching university programs is an hour they're not spending consuming content that might convince them college isn't their best option. Every moment they focus on institutional messaging is a moment they're not engaging with alternative narratives about success and career development.

So the competition isn't just other universities anymore. It's every source of information and inspiration that influences how young people think about their futures.

A Different Approach

Now I know what you're thinking. Maybe just create a website that mirrors those same engaging elements. Add more videos, make things more interactive, hire some social media specialists to make our content more like what students are already consuming.

If you ask me, you probably should do some of that. Better videos, more interactive content, stronger social media presence—these things matter. But they're not going to solve the fundamental problem of how to compete in an attention economy.

Because you're not going to out-create creators who build their entire careers around capturing attention. A 19-year-old entrepreneur documenting their monthly income will always be more compelling than your carefully produced alumni success video. Stop trying to out-TikTok TikTok. You will lose.

The institutions that succeed in the attention economy won’t try to mimic digital platforms. They’ll do something much smarter: focus on providing the kind of sustained, deep value that digital alternatives simply cannot replicate.

Think about what you can uniquely offer that no YouTube channel or TikTok creator can:

Sustained intellectual community over months and even years.
Access to expensive equipment and specialized resources.
Mentorship from experts who aren't trying to build personal brands or sell courses.
The structure and accountability that supports deep learning through difficult material over extended periods.

Here's the reframe: don't position your institution as an alternative to the content students are consuming. Position yourself as the place where they can act on the ambitions and interests that content has sparked. If they're excited about entrepreneurship after watching those YouTube videos, offer programs where they can start real businesses with institutional support and expert guidance. If they're interested in digital marketing after following influencers, provide opportunities to work on actual campaigns with measurable results and professional mentorship.

The goal isn't to capture every moment of student attention. The goal is to earn the specific types of attention that justify sustained institutional engagement and create outcomes that digital alternatives simply cannot provide. You can't win by being more entertaining. You win by being indispensable.

Ask These Four Questions

The next time you're talking about recruitment strategies, designing marketing campaigns, or competitive positioning, consider these questions:

What specific attention are we competing for? Not what attention do we assume we deserve, but what particular focus and mental energy are we asking prospective students to give us, and what else is competing for that same attention during their decision-making process.
Who else is trying to capture that attention? Not just other universities, but every source of information, guidance, and inspiration that influences how students think about their futures, including content creators, professionals, platforms, and communities they trust.
What can we uniquely provide that justifies sustained attention? Not what can we provide that's similar to digital alternatives, but what requires our specific institutional capabilities, resources, and structure that cannot be accessed elsewhere or replicated through individual content consumption.
How do we earn attention rather than assume it? Not how do we convince students to pay attention to us, but how do we make what we offer so distinctly valuable that students choose to focus on us despite unlimited alternatives competing for their mental bandwidth.

Because once you accept that every moment of prospective student focus is a choice in a competitive marketplace, you realize something powerful: The institutions that win aren't the ones with the best websites, the most impressive facilities, or the slickest marketing campaigns. They're the ones that become genuinely worth paying attention to in a world where attention itself has become the most valuable currency.

And that's not just a better recruitment strategy. In an attention economy, it's the only strategy that works when students have unlimited alternatives competing for the same finite resource: their focus, their time, and their mental energy as they make some of the most important decisions of their lives.