Ep. 81 - Devin Purgason: Who Owns the Student Journey in the Age of AI

Most institutions, I feel like they treat these

as very different functions, right?

So marketing gets the student interested,

admissions gets them enrolled,

and then student services handles everything after that, right?

Every handoff is another place

where a student can fall through the cracks.

So we deliberately try to collapse those walls, you know,

at Versite Tech, marketing, recruitment, onboarding,

student care, they report through my division,

and I know that that sounds like an org chart detail,

but it's actually philosophical, I think.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Welcome to another episode of The Signal.

Today's gas is someone I've known for quite a while.

I've been following the innovative work he's doing

at the intersection of student success,

marketing, and technology in higher ed.

Joining us today is Devon Ferguson,

the AVP for student experience marketing and outreach

at Versite Technical Community College.

In his role, Devon leads teams responsible

for student care, onboarding, recruiting,

and college relations, bringing together

strategy, storytelling, and technology

to improve how students discover, enter,

and succeed in college.

Devon is known for building student-centered systems

that combine data-driven marketing

with meaningful support services.

His work is our insignificant recognition,

including marketer of the year honors,

as well as leadership awards, such as triad business

journals 40 under 40.

Beyond administration, Devon also

serves as an adjunct English faculty member,

giving him a unique perspective that bridges both leadership

and the classroom.

Today, we'll explore how marketing, student care,

and emerging technologies like AI

are reshaping the future of community colleges,

and how institutions can better serve

the students who need the most.

Well, welcome to the show, Devon.

It is great to have you today.

Thank you, Jeff.

I'm so excited to be here.

So let's start off and talk a little bit

about your background.

You've held several marketing leadership roles

before even becoming the AVP for student experience

and marketing outreach at Versite Tech.

What experiences shaped the way you approach

student-centered marketing today?

Absolutely.

So I think one of the biggest ways for me was honestly,

I lost my job during COVID, and honestly,

that was one of the most formative things

that really I think ever happened to me professionally,

because it forced me to ask what I actually believed

about the work.

And so what I kept coming back to was was this,

marketing in higher education is often

done to students, not for students.

So in marketing, we build campaigns around what we want to say,

but not really around what students actually need to hear.

And so coming to Versite Tech, I had the chance

to build something different from the ground up.

We built a student care model that puts student support

services and marketing really in the same organizational unit.

So the same leadership, same meetings, same accountability,

and that really, I would say, forced us

to reckon with the entire student journey.

So not just the moment that someone necessarily

fills out a form, but what happens in the weeks after.

So that structural decision really

changed everything for me.

I think community colleges often say they're student first,

but the student experience actually

spans really multiple teams.

Marketing kind of shapes the expectations

and before even the student applies.

Where it really becomes real, I think,

is the student care really needs to have them feel

supported once they start.

Yes.

And like when the groups are in sync,

the whole journey feels a little more intentional than fragmented.

So Versite Tech has built this reputation

for putting students first, I think.

How do marketing, onboarding, student care

work together on your campus to improve

that overall student experience?

Yeah, so you hit the nail on the head, Jeff.

Most institutions, I feel like they treat these

as very different functions, right?

So marketing gets the student interested,

admissions gets them enrolled,

and then student services handles everything after that, right?

Every handoff is another place where a student

can fall through the cracks.

So we deliberately try to collapse those walls.

At Versite Tech, marketing, recruitment, onboarding,

student care, they report through my division.

And I know that that sounds like an org chart detail,

but it's actually philosophical, I think.

So we're accountable for the student

from the moment they first hear of our name

to the moment that they complete.

So practically, this is, we're using the same data,

the same CRM, the same communication cadence.

When a recruiter promises a student something

in an outreach email, a student care team,

they know about it, right?

So there's no version of us where the brand promise

and the actual student experience are disconnected.

You know, I think community colleges,

they often serve incredibly diverse student populations.

How do you design the outreach strategies

that truly reach students from all backgrounds?

Well, I think the first thing I'd say to that

is to listen to the students that are actually there.

Versite Tech, our students are not only 18-year-old,

fresh out of high school, you know, tons of time,

tons of flexibility, parents who went to college,

we have single parents, we have people

who've been in the workforce for 15 years

that are now just coming back to get retraining.

Recent immigrants, people who are nervous

that college really isn't for someone like them.

So our outreach has to speak to that reality.

So that means that we're using

various communication strategies, texting, you know,

we're not just emailing, it's not just a college fair,

we're trying to meet people at their workplace

or their community organization,

having student ambassadors who look like the students

that we're trying to reach.

And it means to me honest messaging.

So we stop saying things like,

take the step in your next journey

and instead we're like, hey, here's what it cost.

Here's how long it takes.

Here's what our graduates are earning.

So I think a big part of it is respecting people's time

and intelligence and they pay attention.

Right.

I think so many schools are,

especially community colleges,

are working hard to reach students,

but the way they communicate,

it still reflects the institutional organization

rather than how students actually live

and interact with information.

Yeah, because the messages will come

from different offices and three different channels

like we're talking about.

And so it does feel fragmented.

From your perspective,

what are community colleges still getting wrong

about communicating with today's students?

Okay, so two things, I think.

First, I think we're writing for ourselves.

If you go and read the average community college website

and you'll find the word transformative

about six times before you find anything

that really tells a student,

a prospective student specifically,

what their life is gonna look like in two years

if they enroll.

We need to care about their decision

and care about reaching those students.

I think secondly,

one thing that has emerged more recently

is that we are,

we're really underestimating how students are discovering us

or not discovering us.

So I'm sure Jeff, you've talked about this

or thought about this a lot.

The conversation that we're having right now

about Google and social media

and AI and when a prospective student

uses chat GBT to find programs in their area,

does our institution show up

or even doesn't show up accurately?

So I feel like a lot of community colleges

don't really have an answer to that question

because they haven't even asked it yet.

So the whole idea about agente to AI

and the moving to AEOGEO,

I feel like universities are really doing a great job

in investing in AI strategy.

Ed tech vendors that they are building for AI

or already have lots of AI tools,

community colleges who, in my opinion,

serve the students who have the least margin for error.

We're sort of watching from the sidelines.

And so I think that has to change.

Yeah, it's an interesting point

when you talk about,

it's as you're subriding about themselves

instead of the student or for a student.

And I hear that,

I think once you say that,

people have heard that before and they know that,

but it usually shows up in the language and the channels,

even how quickly they respond.

And I think we're getting into AI,

every podcast I've done in the last six months

we get into AI.

We're about nine minutes in,

and so we're into it every time.

Yeah.

What's exciting now is I think these AI tools

are starting to help colleges flip the model

by analyzing student questions, personalizing messaging

and responding in so many ways

they're a much more student centered,

even using like personas.

Like people now look,

you are not the person,

just create a synthetic persona

and ask your synthetic student

like what they think about your messaging,

there's so many ways.

So building on that idea,

I want to talk more about the AI.

What are some tools or approaches you think,

you're doing or you think colleges should be exploring

to communicate with students in a way

that reflects their needs and behaviors?

Yeah, I mean,

we've been building AI enrollment stack,

I would say for the last two years,

I feel very fortunate to be at Forsythe Tech.

Our president is incredibly AI forward.

She has helped us create an AI committee

as soon as honestly when ChatGBT

became publicly available in early 23.

And that was one of her first things.

So that tech stack includes AI-powered chatbot,

we call that blazebot,

and handles student inquiries around the clock.

And when we launched that,

the chatbot answer rate,

like being able to answer the question

without human escalation was about 53%.

And now it's pushing 85%.

That's like thousands of student questions getting answered

at 11 PM that would have just sat in an inbox

until the next morning, typically,

AI search on our website.

So rather than just having the keywords correct,

it's more conversational.

It takes a little bit more understanding.

It pulls up in that dashboard all the links that they need

and creates follow-up questions for them

and really interacts with them like an LLM.

Because we're seeing this all the time,

especially SEO folks are freaking out

because of all of the zero-click answers

that people are getting Google with their AI overviews

and things of that nature.

But I do want to be honest about what AI does

and it doesn't do here.

In our institution, AI has not replaced

the human relationship.

It handles that transactional layer.

So humans on our team can focus on the relationship.

So the student who needs to know how to park

or where to park blazebot handles that.

But the student who is afraid to come back

to school after a decade away,

that student can have a person that has the bandwidth

to actually listen to them.

It makes so much sense to just,

at least those first use cases you use it for,

use it for those rote, tedious tasks

that as human probably is gonna get burned out doing

or as it doesn't make sense.

A lot of colleges are interested in AI right now.

We know that many are still waiting for the technology

to feel perfect before they start using it.

I mean, it's hard not to think that way,

because the stakes are so high.

But the institution that seemed to be moving faster

are the ones that are experimenting early

and learning as they go.

And that's what I appreciate about foresight

than what you're doing.

You are an early adopter.

It feels like you're ahead of the curve in this area.

How are you approaching AI and these new technologies,

even when the tools are still evolving?

What's allowed your team to move forward

without everything being perfect?

I think there are different ends of the spectrum on this.

I am very much a person that thinks failure

is a way to learn and a way to adjust and optimize.

So I have very experimental nature.

I am someone who wants to try things.

If it doesn't work, we see, okay,

well, that's not the way to do this.

I've done that with marketing campaigns.

I think that testing is so important

because we don't know what we don't know.

So I have been lucky enough to work in an institution

that has allowed that.

You know, there's a saying

and I don't know who to attribute it to,

but I've heard it colloquially many times

and it's don't let perfect be the enemy of great.

And I think that is something that we do at foresight tech.

We don't let perfect become the enemy of great.

And we learn from our mistakes.

There have been AI tools that I've implemented

that after a year, I've said this is not working,

this is not good, this is not what our students need.

But I tell you, I learned so much in that experience.

I've learned what to do, what not to do,

how to eat the meat and spit out the bones, if that makes sense.

Well, I have to give you kudos.

You might not give yourself the kudos,

but it has to take a champion like you

that wants to get things done,

but also that's brave enough to like push the envelope

and it convinced leadership,

or you have to have the support of leadership to like you.

But you have to have maybe of sometimes people

that are new in their roles either they're too afraid

or they're like, this is my chance.

And it really depends on how long they've been in the role.

What is that environment?

I often, I'm hesitant to say this by a say it once in a while,

I was like, I was in higher ed for 20 plus years

and I felt like after a while,

I was kind of told to just bring my C game.

Like just stay in your box,

just you know, you're kind of penalized sometimes

for trying to think.

You know, kudos to you and the team for like trying

new things or making progress.

My version of that quote,

and I don't know where it came from either is,

perfect is the enemy of progress is the way I like to say it.

I love that, I love that reframe.

A lot of colleges collect marketing data

like search behavior, campaign engagement,

website activity, but it often stays inside the marketing team

and I think the real opportunity is when that insight

gets shared across the institution

and starts shaping how onboarding or you know,

advising and student support actually works.

You've talked about using data driven insights

to improve the student journey.

Key share an example of where marketing data

directly influenced a better outcome for students.

Yes, I say the clearest example that I can point to

is what happened when we started tracking

where students dropped off between inquiry and enrollment,

not just how many inquiries we were generating.

So we found that like a number of students expressed interest,

they were stopping at a specific point

in the onboarding process and for us that onboarding process

that had people stuck was financial aid.

Not because they lost interest,

but because that process was confusing.

So the gap really wasn't marketing.

The gap was the experience that we were handling them to, right?

So that data actually was what helped us form the argument

for reorganizing our division

and creating this onboarding team.

So we used it to show leadership

that this wasn't a top of the funnel problem.

It was a mid funnel experiential problem.

And so adding that onboarding team to the umbrella was the fix.

So people who are there to take them from application

to the first day of class and walk them through

the checklist of everything that they need to move forward.

So we have gone since 2019 from a 19% completion rate

to a 45% completion rate.

And that doesn't really happen by accident.

It happens when you follow the data, pass the enrollment.

And really, I would say stay accountable

for what happens after.

You know, we talk about the data

and like it can reveal what students actually need.

Yeah.

And the insight is what makes many of these AI tools

possible in the first place.

So I think as colleges start using these new tools

or using, you've been using AI to analyze behavior

or personalized communication to guide the journey.

It raises these bigger questions about where the real value is

and where we need to be careful.

So kind of talked about this already.

What's your perspective on where you think the biggest

opportunities are for adopting AI?

And what are the risks that we should be thinking about?

I think the opportunity is in scale.

Community colleges, we run lean, right?

So my team, I would say we do the work

of what would be a much, much larger staff

in a flagship university, right?

AI gives us the capacity to do more

without adding a headcount.

So you know, better personalization, better responsiveness,

better data.

But on the other side of that, I think the risk

and we kind of mentioned this earlier as well is avoidance.

So institutions that are nervous about AI

and decide to wait it out.

I think they're going to find themselves

in a really difficult position.

Because AI is not coming for your marketing department.

It's already reshaping how students make decisions.

It's reshaping what content gets surfaced

and what content gets ignored.

And so sitting out to me is not really a neutral choice.

So yeah, I would say that those are waiting till.

Yeah, waiting till it's perfect.

It tells perfect or like, oh, it'll be clear later.

Let's just wait until the dust settles.

Yes, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Absolutely.

The dust gets kicked up every day.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, let's shift a little bit here.

Most people working in enrollment or marketing

or student services don't get to see students

in the classroom every week.

I think the distance can make it harder

to understand how students are actually experiencing

college day to day.

So you also teach as an adjunct English faculty member, right?

I do, yes.

How does being in the classroom influence the way

you think about student engagement and messaging?

Huh.

Well, I would say it keeps me honest, you know?

When I am sitting across from my English students,

many of whom are definitely taking a class

because it's a requirement not because they chose it,

I get a very quick reminder of who we're actually serving.

You know, these are not just abstract prospective students.

They're real people.

They have real jobs.

They have real families.

Real reasons to be tired, you know, on a Tuesday night.

And so that reality, I think, has shown up in how we write,

how we email, how we design this onboarding process.

You know, if I'm building a communication

that would confuse my students,

I know that it needs to be rewritten.

I also think the classroom keeps me

from over investing in the marketing side of things.

So like, at the end of the day, what matters

is whether students persist and complete

all the clever campaigns in the world to me,

they don't mean much if the experience they lead to

is not worth it.

And honestly, this is one of the reasons that we have marketing

with our student care team, with our onboarding

because it gives us a direct pipeline

to student facing individuals.

So we can change course right in the middle, you know,

if we hear something from our student care representatives

or our onboarders.

Yeah, I don't know how big your classes are,

but you almost have your own little test group out there

to ask real quickly, how many of you are doing this?

How many, you know, and you almost normalize

the use of these tools.

So they're not afraid to, I mean, ask for English.

Another question comes up for me is that,

I've seen this kind of evolve over the last couple of years

where people using I are very proud to say,

I coded this with AI, look at this thing, I coded it,

I'm not a coder, I put this website together,

I coded this, cloud code is becoming amazing,

it's a badge of honor almost.

But in English side, if you're writing something,

it's still a little bit of a secret,

a little bit of like, I don't want to actually tell people

how much AI I did here.

Like, right, you know, I'll do it.

Everyone's kind of notes is happening, but why is that?

Why is it that it's so accepted?

Am I wrong or what do you think?

No, why is that for English?

I definitely agree with you there.

I don't know if it's because I feel like

one of the first red flags for AI was this part.

It was, oh my goodness, what are we gonna do?

Because people can use this to write all their papers,

this is plagiarism, you know, that was such a hot button issue.

People, they're, oh, coding, it's cool, we can do that.

So I think that that has continued on,

that idea of this is plagiarism, this is wrong,

whereas in some of the other areas,

it's seen as much more of a help.

Like the internet would be, or a library would be,

or something of that nature.

So one quick follow up on that,

if you got a paper turned into you

that was grammar mistakes and sentence structure was terrible,

would you think or say anything?

Like, why didn't they just run this through AI

to fix it up?

I would almost expect that.

For years, I had instructors tell me,

you have to use spell check, right?

You gotta use spell check.

So that's AI, it's at some level.

So yeah, exactly.

Well, higher ed marketing has really changed fast,

teams are now expected to manage brand

and digital experience analytics and aroma messaging

and increasingly AI-driven communication.

And I think it can make the modernization feel overwhelming

for a lot of institutions.

We've worked across communications and PR

and digital media and marketing strategy.

So for leaders trying to modernize their marketing teams

in higher ed, where should they start?

I would say that leaders, to modernize their marketing team,

they need to start with metrics

that you're actually measuring, right?

So if your marketing team is being held accountable

for inquiries and applications and nothing else,

that's the conversation to have first

because the incentives shape everything downstream.

I would say second is it's structural.

So look where the handoffs are in your student experience

and ask yourself honestly, who owns that gap?

Does anyone own that gap?

You know, the gap between marketing and emissions,

the gap between emissions of financial aid,

enrollment in the first day of class,

where do students disappear?

And marketing, I think, done well,

has a role to play in all of it.

And then I would say third,

and I know this might sound counterintuitive,

but I say invest in your content

before you invest in your tools.

So you know, AI tools, CRMs, chatbots,

all of them are only as good as the information

that you're working with.

So if your program pages are out of date

and your FAQs are three years old,

that technology is really just going to automate

a bad experience.

Yeah, that's a good tip.

You can even use AI to help you with that.

Exactly.

Focus on your content first.

Exactly.

Well, to wrap it up one last question,

looking ahead, what excites you the most

about the future of higher ed

and how technology innovation can help students thrive?

So I would say what excites me

is that the enrollment cliff narrative, you know,

the idea that community colleges are terminal decline,

demographic shifts,

it is really not matching reality right now.

Community colleges are growing.

They're doing great, right?

Yeah.

Students are choosing us,

adult learners are coming back.

And so the idea that we're a sector on the way out

or something like that is not really what the data says.

And then technology, I think if we use it well,

it gives us a chance to serve those students

at a level we could not have managed 10 years ago.

You know, personalized communication at scale,

the predictive support before a student stops showing up,

AI insisted help hold those things.

They don't require such a weight anymore.

So you know, what I'm most excited about

is community colleges are the institutions right now

that I think are being best positioned to capitalize on this

because our mission is already student first.

You know, we're not trying to retrofit

research university culture into a student's success model.

We're sort of built for this.

We just have to show up for the technology conversation

with the same urgency that we bring to the classroom.

And I think genuinely we're getting there.

You are great insights, Devon.

I will put links to the Forsyth Tech website

and you're linked in the show notes.

Awesome.

But great, great catching up with you, Devon.

See you at the next conference.

Thank you, Jeff.

Bye bye.

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