[00:00:00] Raffi DerSimonian: I know EAB had research recently that demonstrated in the last year the percentage of prospective students who are consulting AI before going to a website has something like doubled from 26 to 46%. Almost doubled. So what this tells us is that the purpose of a higher ed website now is less about providing the nuts and bolts facts, but more about providing that vibe check, that sense of connection, that ability for prospective student to within the first few seconds to say, you know what, I could see myself.
[00:00:40] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the Signal. If you've spent time at EDUEB or AMA higher ed lately, you've probably landed in a hallway conversation about AI that nobody wanted to leave. My guest today is usually at the center of one. Rafi Dursimonian is VP and Chief Strategy Officer at eri, a digital agency that has been building for colleges and universities since 2005. He came up on the institution side first alumni Relations and the Annual Fund at Becker College, then marketing and Communications at Maine College of Art. He's led work for Harvard Business School, Tufts, Trinity College, Worcester State, and Muhlenberg. His newest project is Ikiguy AI. It takes the Japanese concept of ikigai, the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what can be paid for, and turns it into a guided college search. Instead of handing a student a list of programs, it gives them a path and the reasoning behind it.
Raffi, it is great to have you today on the Signal. Thanks for being here.
[00:01:49] Raffi DerSimonian: Thanks so much, Jeff. I'm so pleased to be with you today.
[00:01:51] Jeff Dillon: So I want to start with your interesting background. You have three original albums out in the world.
When you walk into a discovery session with a college, who shows up? The musician or the strategist?
[00:02:05] Raffi DerSimonian: That's a fun question.
Well, I think the musician in me definitely comes through through this strategy work because it requires a lot of creativity and improvisation and the ability to lead a conversation and keep things with structure and format. And I would say both, but no question about it. The musical part of me informs the strategy part on an interesting level.
[00:02:34] Jeff Dillon: Well, I think the institution side explains experience changes your perspective permanently. I've been there. I spent years on campuses myself. And you learn pretty quickly that the org chart tells you who reports to who, but it doesn't really tell you how decisions are actually getting made. And you know, there are relationships and competing priorities and history and politics that you really don't understand until you live in it. You had that experience before moving to the agency side. You came up on the institutional Side alumni relations and the annual fund at Becker, then Marcos at Maine College of Art. What did you understand about how a campus really works that you never could have really learned from the agency side?
[00:03:18] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah, you know, I think part of the value of that experience is understanding some of the dynamics, the complexities that exist on the other side of the table, so to speak. And as someone who has led large scale initiatives representing an institution internally, I feel like it gives me. It gives us a bit of an advantage in terms of understanding the nuances and what folks are contending with and also understanding what good partnership needs to look like. You know, as someone who's managed these relationships, I have come to appreciate, you know, a great institutional partner, vendor and agency versus one that, you know, you have to keep taskmastering and managing, or as we call it, managing up. And I feel like this is something that it serves us well in our work. Understanding that and trying to make sure that we're delivering the best partnership possible. Unfortunately, consultants have kind of like a bad rap.
[00:04:20] Jeff Dillon: Right?
[00:04:20] Raffi DerSimonian: Like the word consultant in higher education almost has like a negative connotation.
So we like to make. Make it a priority to try to push back on that negative perception.
[00:04:30] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah. Let's move into. What I'm really excited to talk about is I first heard you talk about Ikigaid during your keynote. It was one of those ideas that really stuck with me afterwards. I liked it because I was familiar with ikigai and I was surprised how many people in the room weren't actually, because over the last few years it's just been so like, I just know so many people that have read that book. Then the concept, I'll let you talk about it, but it starts somewhere from a very different perspective from the college experience. Instead of asking a student what major they're looking for, it starts with who they are and where they might be headed. So this concept wasn't created for College Search, which I want you to talk about. Ikigai has been floating around business books for, for like 10 years, mostly as like a personal career exercise, I think. Talk about Ikigai and what made you take that four circle diagram and think this belongs in College Search?
[00:05:24] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah, well, ikigai as a concept came into my life about a decade ago. Dear friend of mine recommended the book and it was during a period of my life where the book made a huge impact. The concept of Ikigai is simply framed around the intersection of what you're good at, what you're, what brings you joy, what the world needs and what you can get paid doing. Over the years, I have read the book multiple times as just kind of a gut check and a reminder. And I've also given copies of it away to dozens of copies to friends, colleagues, family members. And one of the beautiful parts about it is the simplicity of it. And I love that about Japanese culture in general. It's just so simple, yet so sound.
This book helped me crystallize the importance of setting out to focus on my consulting practice. Our building this agency in a time where, you know, I was. I had a great job at making College of Art Design. I loved it. It was part of a great community. But it gave me the confidence to realize that my best purpose, that intersectionality for me was not necessarily serving one institution, but taking that experience and helping guide other institutions. Now, in terms of where it emerged as an inspiration for an idea, for a tool, was, believe it or not, when I was recently took a family trip to France this past May, and I brought a copy of it with me as I was reading it, it occurred to me that the college search process is largely predicated on one singular question, which is, what do you want to study? When you go to any institutional site, it's kind of. That's like the leading question. And what I noticed was that there's a lot of parallels between that being a part of our culture, the American culture, how we're kind of, I don't know, obsessed is the right word, but very much focused on what we do vocationally, and a lot of our own kind of definition and personal association comes from that. And I realized this through conversations with folks in France, because I realized that people don't really care what you do for work in France as much. I mean, they do, but it doesn't really come up for a second in conversation.
[00:07:44] Jeff Dillon: Not the question, right? It's not the question they ask. And that's what I wanted you to. Yeah, that clicked to me when I heard, say, in Japan, they don't ask people what they do, they ask you what your purpose is, which is what that means, right?
[00:07:54] Raffi DerSimonian: Exactly. Yeah. So there's something really, I thought, powerful about centering this notion of purpose with what we want to study, because ultimately, that's why we're going to school, right? We're all taking steps, actively trying to walk towards our greatest sense of purpose.
So it occurred to me that with new technologies, this could be a really powerful mechanism to get people a little bit more centered in a more dynamic way around getting them closer to whatever their sense of purpose is. So we built this tool around asking a slightly more.
A different set of questions. And our thinking is that this could be a powerful way for students who don't really know exactly who they are or what they want to do to explore what options might be a good fit for who they are and what gets them excited, what makes them tick and where they want to go.
[00:08:50] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, and. And it's going to be a challenge on the podcast to get through what your tool does, but we'll put a link to your, to the site in there. I think part of what, what I like about ikiguide when I saw it is that like you say, it's asking better questions than what major are you at are you interested in? But the better and more personal those questions become, the more responsibility you take on with the answers. So there's an interesting tension here between the institution helping a student find their path, who ultimately wants a student to enroll. You know, if this is what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for.
These 18 year olds can barely answer some of these questions. How do you keep the tool honest when the entity asking the questions is also the one selling the program?
[00:09:38] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah, I think that's a really fair question. And I believe that ultimately prospective students, I think anyone, it doesn't matter whether how old you are, but people want to feel seen, right? They want to feel heard and understood.
And what this tool does is it provides a little bit more of a meaningful framework for students to self selectively articulate who they are and what their disposition is, what their interests are, what they're already good at. So I think that one of the key attributes of the tool, which is to conjure results that extend just curricular offerings, but also pulls in clubs, organizations, activities, travel, abroad opportunities, basically the whole ecosystem of offerings that any college or university has, along with corresponding stories, stories, profiles, news articles of students, faculty, alumni who have walked a similar path or maybe had some crossover with what any prospective student who's using the tool might have had. So the idea is that it creates a much deeper connection out of the gate than just kind of the traditional navigational experience where you kind of know where things are and you kind of know how to get around. And nowadays most schools are pretty intuitive and how to get there. So that's one part. The other part is that from a enrollment standpoint, providing some really powerful data for admissions teams to follow up with students that have expressed interest and to be a little bit more to meet them where they are in terms of just as opposed to. Look, we know that you wanted to study biology. Here's a link to our biology program. We think that by offering a more full suite of congruent opportunities that there creates opportunity for a more powerful connection between the institution and the student. Now the final part of your question that's the tricky part, right? Like how do you not cross that line of people feeling like there's been some sort of breach in trust?
And I think personally, Jeff, that this particular application of artificial intelligence is quite literally, you know, it's very much, it's a positive thing, right? Helping people get closer to their sense of purpose.
So I think we're so accustomed in the digital landscape of being cookied and tracked and conversations followed where this to me feels like because people are opting in the information themselves, it's almost expected that that data is going to be used and the hope is that it's not perceived as a breach of trust or anything along those lines, but more seen as an opportunity to be seen and heard.
[00:12:31] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love that answer. I mean that's the important distinction. If you're going to ask these students deeper questions, I think the experience has to do something meaningful with answers. I've spent a lot of time looking at higher ed search and discovery and most of the tools are still very transactional. You pick a major, choose a degree level, filter the results. It's useful, but it's a long way from helping someone really figure out who they might become. So you've really reframed the students real questions into these buckets. Where do I belong? What am I capable of? A program finder doesn't answer those. What did you have to build differently to get at them?
[00:13:11] Raffi DerSimonian: Well, I think the biggest part was stepping back from the kind of traditional pathways that most higher education websites are adhering to and kind of rethinking the notion of personalization. Basically the tool that we've built, it revolves around a database of these opportunities and news items, articles, stories, videos, curricular offerings and the AI pieces that it's scraping the back end of any site and then conjuring, connecting corresponding opportunities that are somewhat in the strike zone. Now I think this is much more of a common approach with consumer on consumer platforms. I'm thinking specifically around the Amazon model right now. Whereas if you like this, then you might like this. And I think that we as humans really respond well to that. And I don't know about you, but I feel like oftentimes it's pretty much on the money, right? It's. If not exactly on the money, it's pretty damn close.
So I think that similar logic applied to the higher ed website experience can only make it a little bit more robust and hopefully more personalized and tailored for folks who are using it.
[00:14:26] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, that's a great metaphor. It works so well in these bigger brand sites that we don't even realize how well it's working. It's just like, oh, yeah, I do need that.
[00:14:34] Raffi DerSimonian: Okay, right.
[00:14:36] Jeff Dillon: And this is where I think it's really interesting and important for marketing leaders.
We've treated the university website as the center of the digital experience.
Get students there, help them find the right content, move them toward an action.
But more and more students are forming opinions, comparing schools and narrowing these choices before the institution even knows they exist. So that has some pretty significant implications for where we spend money. And you draw a line between the first conversation, which happens on Reddit or TikTok and ChatGPT and that second conversation, which happens maybe on the website. You know, if institutions have spent a decade and a lot of money optimizing the second one, what does that mean for how a budget should be split now?
[00:15:19] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah, well, I think that first of all, college right now, it is one of the largest investments that we make right throughout the course of our lifetime. I think probably besides only real estate from a cost standpoint at least, never mind time spending two or four years or however many years significant investment.
I think that the overall, the landscape, how it's been shifting. I know EAP had research recently that demonstrated in the last year the percentage of prospective students who are consulting AI before going to a website has something like doubled from. From 26 to 46%. Almost doubled. So what this tells us is that the purpose of a higher ed website now is less about providing the nuts and bolts facts, but more about providing that vibe check, that sense of connection, that ability for prospective student to, within the first few seconds to say, you know what, I could see myself here. There's something about this that makes me feel a sense of, I don't know, connectivity. And for that reason, I think the role of the website needs to be more around allowing students to see themselves there. The higher ed is notorious for having websites that all look and feel exactly the same. So the notion of differentiation, I think is very much diluted. Now in our estimation, the strongest websites out there are clearly articulating what sets them apart. What is it about their mission that is unique and distinctive and resonant, and what makes it cut above the mix of the Thousands of other schools out there. I just finished Chris Raposo and Rob Clark's Attention Gap book. And historically we say I've used the term the stat six seconds before people bounce or continue. According to this book, it's three seconds. And I bet that that's true, people, because as our attention spans continue to diminish. That sounds about right. So making sure those first few seconds on a site accurately convey the points of differentiation, I think is absolutely key. Whereas historically, before AI, before those other points of validation, it may be different. Maybe more about kind of fact collecting and stats and data versus that differentiation.
[00:17:44] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, it makes me think of.
I've spoken a little bit about, like, what will a website look like in a few years, in 2030? And I really think we're going to get to the point of like, a query or a search, probably initiated by voice or something, will create a very personal experience. Like, we know so much about these people. It's like, here's everything you need to know about this part of this university or this situation you're in, and that's kind of in a few years. I think we're. We're pretty close. And what really gets me about this situation is how fast it's all moving.
[00:18:15] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah.
[00:18:15] Jeff Dillon: Because I've seen higher ed move through social media and mobile and SEO and plenty of other shifts over the last 20 years, and none of them felt quite this compressed or urgent. If students are increasingly doing their research with AI before they ever come to this website, they're coming with context and comparisons and probably some assumptions already formed, and that changes what the website really has to do. So I guess what I would ask, put this into a question for him, is what breaks first on the EDU site when half your prospects already show up briefed by a model?
[00:18:50] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah, well, we have this belief in the emotive power of visual storytelling as a tool to drive measurable engagement.
So because of that, what you just mentioned, and by the way, I think you're absolutely spot on with that forecasting. I think it's a matter of, you know, years that you can count on maybe a couple of fingers before that is going to be the user experience. And also the voice piece, I think is really important. And I want to mention that we have built that feature into the tool to really make it as intuitive and as humanly possible. But going back to the emotive power visual storytelling, we think that the most effective websites are ones that draw audiences in through the power of visual storytelling. Creates a sense of providing some points of Validation, we call them evidence points that kind of support these large claims, these blanket claims that are so easy to say but more difficult to substantiate through examples. And then finally, and perhaps most simply to create a really clear path forward to take action, to click, to inquire, to apply to whatever it may be. So I know that's a really simple kind of methodology, but that is a lot of what drives our best thinking around effective user experience.
And keeping the human component front row center, I think is just, is really what sets great sites apart from mediocre ones.
[00:20:20] Jeff Dillon: Agreed. And it's really raising this other interesting content question. I think. For many years we've told higher ed teams to write for humans, not for search engines. But now we have AI systems sitting between the institution and the student interpreting that content. Deciding what gets surfaced suddenly. Right. For humans isn't quite as simple as it used to be. If a model is summarizing an institution before a student lands on the page, is the job now writing for the student or writing for the machine that reads on the student's behalf?
[00:20:57] Raffi DerSimonian: That is a great question, Jeff. And you know, ultimately I think it's, it's both right now because the fact remains that without writing for findability and current contemporary visibility, it's, you know, the old if a branch falls in the forest, does anyone hear it type thing. Right. With that said, what's remarkable is how much AI has come along in terms of emulating human tonality. Right. This is something that even since it's come out several years ago, it's just been remarkable where I think I used to be able to say with confidence, I can tell if it's AI. And there have been more and more moments where I've just been like blown away and humbled by the fact that I, I don't know, duped is the right word per se, but that line is more difficult to detect. The end of the day, I believe that humans are, we're going to be carrying forth the objectives of AI. We're going to be the beneficiaries and the recipients of AI's kind of positive output of AI. So I'd like to think that the human part maybe precedes, at least by a hair, the machine part. But it's interesting to see how that relationship has evolved. And I know it's going to continue to evolve as the months continue to unfold.
[00:22:17] Jeff Dillon: I think when we talk about personalization, Higher ed sometimes misses something is that the tech can get really good at creating this one to one experience on the front end. But the institution still has to fulfill that experience on the back end. And if those two don't match better, personalization could really magnify this expectation that the student has. If it has a promise problem and the tool tells a student, here's your pathway, here's your next step. You've automated this promise of scale. What keeps that from happening?
[00:22:51] Raffi DerSimonian: That's largely why we often advise clients to approach personalization with a great deal of judiciousness and reserve. Because of. I think you run the risk of going too far out on a branch that might snap. Because people are like, wth, this is wrong. They didn't hear this right. So it has the ability to have more of a negative impact.
And that's exactly what we want to try to avoid. So our thinking, at least with ikiguide, is that by making sure that the inputs are coming directly from the user themselves, that it eliminates some of that opportunity for misfiring and pointing people in the wrong direction. Also, the purpose of the tool is, you know, there's some soft boundaries between different programs, right? Let's say somebody wants to work with kids in the future. They have a passion for youth development. Well, the responses that are generated from the geeky guide could very well range from pediatric medicine to early childhood education.
So I think the tool itself is designed to better accommodate complexities, realizing that we as humans are complex beings and very rarely are thinking about or acting with this kind of very dogged linear approach to the way that we're approaching search or seeking information and results.
[00:24:25] Jeff Dillon: You made me think of talking about personalization and how an institution may struggle to keep up with that. 27. I'm going to date myself here. I got to tell you this anecdote. I don't know if I'm talking on this podcast. 27 years ago, I was a webmaster at large school. We bought a CMS that was this latest and greatest. I remember who it was. It was called Liquid Matrix, later sold to Datatel. And we're like, guess what? They have personalization. We're going to load it up with all of our. Ask the student a question. What are you interested in? What will have preloaded photos and messages, and then they come back and they'll browse the site and it'll feel more like it's for them. We have these majors. We'll just show them the right imagery. So we launch it. And guess what? The chemistry department and biology department said, hey, those photos are not accurate. We don't have that equipment that's not right. And SA said, okay, well, you update the photos, we'll hand it to you. And guess what? That's when it all died. Like, you cannot keep up. But we've solved that problem. But this is 27 years ago.
[00:25:17] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah.
[00:25:17] Jeff Dillon: So we've had personalization for a while. It's just tricky now.
[00:25:21] Raffi DerSimonian: Jeff, have you noticed, I feel like the personalization conversation was much more full throttle, like eight or nine, seven years ago, and then it kind of backed off. My assumption there is that. I think other people ran into a similar dynamic that you just shared about, like, the practicality of it.
[00:25:40] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, it's not possible. Yeah. We would try personalizing our portal. Hey, won't everyone want to drag and drop their own channels everywhere? And guess what? No one did. No one wanted to personalize their own portal. Plus, it created a nightmare for the IT team when they had to support. Where's your channel? I'm trying to help you with. There's so many reasons why we think we know what people want, but actually pulling it off. You're right. And then chatbots came on and we're like, ooh, let's look at this. This is. This is a version of AI personalization. And maybe that's the bigger responsibility behind personalization. Like, we're asking young people to make an enormously consequential decision at a point when many of them aren't even confident they understand the options you know, in front of them. A better website or AI tool can help, but it can't really make certain so many things. So I'm curious where you think the institution's responsibility begins. The Gallup and the Walton Family foundation found that fewer than 30% of Gen Z students feel prepared for what comes after high school. And it opens up in K12. It lands in your client's funnel, though. So is this a higher ed problem to fix? Or just.
[00:26:43] Raffi DerSimonian: Just be honest about that stat that you just cited from the Walton Family foundation and Gallup polling. To me, what that indicates more is that very few students who are entering higher education or getting ready to pivot from high school to college know exactly what it is that they want to do. They might have a hinting. They might have a general sense of that. And this, of course, you know, 30%. Right. So some students already have this fierce conviction. I know I want to be this. I've known this since I was, you know, a wee lad or lass, whatever. And I think for the other 70%, what that tells me is that there needs to be a more effective way for that exploration to occur. And we think that a college website is a great way to, to deliver that exploration. Ultimately, we know that even people that choose a certain path, they may calibrate after several years in that industry. And I think that's part of the beauty of our existence, is that we have the ability to pivot when we need to. And I know I have in my career, I'm sure you probably have, maybe at different points in your career. But the premise here is that if we can create an opportunity for the exploration to occur earlier on, then there's a benefit in being that much closer to connecting with our true ikigai, our true sense of purpose, what drives us. And at the end of the day, I think there is still a really important place for traditional navigation. You know, we're not suggesting that we blow that up on sites and that, you know, if people want to still go to the landing page that has a repository of all the different academic disciplines or clubs, activities, you know, there's still an important place for that in the architecture of a site. But what we're suggesting is that this interface could provide a very unique mechanism to explore and to find out what opportunities are out there for someone like me.
[00:28:41] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love it. Rafi, I want to give you one last question to wrap it up. I think there's an interesting way to turn the whole premise of ikiguide back on higher ed itself. Colleges are facing many of the same questions about relevance and value and where they fit in a world being reshaped by AI. So I want to ask, what are colleges going to be uniquely for? Like, what does an institution ikigai look like five years, five years from now?
[00:29:05] Raffi DerSimonian: That same set of questions I think can apply to any institution. What we're seeing is the closure of a lot of schools that don't have big endowments, that are entirely tuition driven. I'm not a big fan of this term, but everyone is aware of the demographic trends, the enrollment cliff that we're facing. So because of that, Jeff, I think that there's an opportunity for schools to ask themselves some really difficult questions and to have some difficult but honest dialogue with their communities and leadership teams around what is it about the fabric, the DNA of this institution that we can confidently assert is unique, is different, is special. And I think that every school has their own unique value proposition, and every school's value proposition is a little bit different. I think the moment that we or institutions try to contort themselves to meet audiences where they think they might be is when we start losing the teeth of that value proposition.
So my encouragement would be to really give that some thought.
Do your three or four unique differentiators sound like they could be at any school, any town, usa? If so, it's time to go back to the drawing board and dig a little bit deeper.
[00:30:27] Jeff Dillon: Great. Faculty to teacher ratio, vibrant campus. All of you.
[00:30:32] Raffi DerSimonian: Yeah, which are important, right? But it's about the examples.
[00:30:35] Jeff Dillon: Rafi, thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you've given us a way to look at AI to student discovery and ultimately what it means for someone to find the right path, not the right program. We'll include links to Rafi and ERI and Ekiguide in the show notes. And thanks again for joining me and for listening to the Signal. We'll see you next time.
[00:30:53] Raffi DerSimonian: Thanks so much, Jeff.
[00:30:55] Jeff Dillon: That's a wrap of this episode of the Signal. If today's conversation sparked a new idea or challenged your thinking, that's exactly the point. This show has been about cutting through the noise and helping you see what's actually shaping higher ed right now. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found this valuable, leave us a quick review. It helps more higher ed leaders find the Signal. For deeper edtech insights, news and trends delivered monthly, subscribe to the Signal monthly
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