Most .edu sites answer with “what do you want to study,” and never make clear, in the first few seconds, what sets them apart.
Three to Five seconds. Max.
That’s about what a 17-year-old gives you before deciding whether to keep scrolling. In those five seconds, most .edu homepages say a version of the same thing. What do you want to study? A search box. A filter by degree type. A photograph of a quad in September.
It’s a reasonable question. It’s also the one question a large share of your prospective students cannot yet answer.
Start with the obvious. Did you know at 17? Did you change majors? Are you working in the field of your degree? Ask a room of two hundred higher ed marketers those three questions and almost nobody says yes to all three. We found our way through a mentor, an accident, a professor who noticed something, a job that was supposed to be temporary.
Then we turn around and ask kids for a certainty we never had. On a deadline. With a deposit attached.
We Moved the Question Earlier
In the U.S., the first question at a party is “what do you do.”
I spent six weeks in France with my wife and our young daughters last summer, and nobody asked me that once. They asked where I was from, about the girls, what I like to eat, what team I follow. Most of the trip was playground logistics and negotiating the exchange rate between croissants and ice cream. But what stayed with me was a different relationship to identity, and how uncomfortable it made me to notice how much of my own is bound up in work.
Then the higher ed version of it landed. We ask adults what they do. We ask 17-year-olds what they intend to major in. It’s the same question. We moved it earlier and attached a six-figure price tag to the answer.
A friend gave me the book Ikigai during a career inflection point of my own. It means, roughly, reason for being. The French have a parallel, raison d’être. Not what you do. Why you do it.
It gets drawn as four overlapping circles. What do you love, what are you good at, what does the world need, what can you be paid for. On a whiteboard that reads like career planning. It isn’t. Those are life questions in business casual. Who am I. Where do I belong. How do I contribute. What am I building.
That search doesn’t resolve at 17, or 27, or 47. But the college years bend it harder than almost any other stretch of life. First real failure. First real win. The professor who saw something before you did.
What They’re Actually Asking
On the surface she wants to know whether you have her program, what it costs, what campus feels like, where graduates end up. All fair. All answerable.
Underneath, she’s asking three questions your site probably never touches.
Do I belong here. What am I capable of. What kind of future opens up for someone like me.
That’s the real search. Not what do you offer, but what could this place make possible for me. And more information does not answer it.
If information created confidence, this would be the most confident generation in history. Rankings, Reddit, TikTok, virtual tours, reviews, outcomes data, and now AI. They have vastly more than we ever did and fewer than a third of them say they feel prepared to decide.
There’s a Cheesecake Factory in Providence I’ve gone to for years where the menu is a bound volume. Fourteen pages, all of it good, and I order the same thing every time, because choice at that volume stops being freedom. Our sites are that menu, handed to a teenager, with a deadline.
The problem isn’t ambition. It’s meaning-making.
The Website is now the Second Conversation
Here’s a five-minute exercise that will tell you more than your last analytics review. Go ask AI what your institution is known for, who thrives there, and what makes it different. Read the answer honestly.
If it came back generic, that isn’t a failure of the model. It read what we published.
Which is the clearest available proof that the website is no longer the front door. Students arrive after social platforms, rankings, a cousin’s opinion, and a chatbot summary. They show up carrying fragments, assumptions, and doubts. The site’s job stopped being presentation a while ago. It’s interpretation now. Helping someone make sense of what they already have.
Less filing cabinet. More compass.
Story Is How People Actually Find Direction
Human beings don’t find direction through data. We find it through stories, which is why storytelling is the most overused word in our field and still the right one.
A story pulls someone in and changes her physiology, which is not a metaphor. It makes a stranger’s experience feel relevant. Then, if it’s any good, she recognizes something of herself in it, and that recognition is the entire ballgame. Someone like me found a place here.
That sequence has an order, and the order is fixed. Story. Emotional connection. Empathy. Trust. Action. Each link earns the next and none can be skipped.
Which explains why so much institutional storytelling doesn’t move anything. It enters at trust and reaches for action. We lead with the mission statement. We put the president’s quote above the student’s face. We assert that we’re transformative and hope she takes our word for it. Trust isn’t something you can declare about yourself. It’s a residue.
And this generation has a finely tuned detector. They can smell committee-written from three scroll-lengths away, and they discount institutional claims almost automatically. What they don’t discount is a named person saying something specific. Unscripted. Occasionally rough around the edges.
Evidence, not adjectives.
From Directory to Compass
Our sites are organized the way we’re organized. Schools, then departments, then offices, then acronyms, then a list of degrees sorted alphabetically. It’s why the program finder is one of the most consequential pages on the entire site, and why it works beautifully right up until it doesn’t.
When she knows what she wants, it’s excellent.
But picture the one who doesn’t. She likes working with kids. She’s decent at chemistry. Her family runs a small business and she’s watched what that costs. She has real inclinations. She just doesn’t know what they add up to yet.
Try typing that into a program finder. You’ll get nothing, or forty-one results starting with Accounting.
She isn’t confused and she isn’t a weak prospect. She just learned that this site wasn’t built with her in mind. And a directory can’t help her, because a directory tells you everything we offer. A compass points toward pathways worth exploring. It doesn’t promise certainty. It helps someone take a confident next step.
Meaning Architecture
None of this means abandoning information architecture. Navigation, accessibility, performance, search, governance, all still non-negotiable, and twenty years of that work was real.
But helping someone find the page is not the same as helping her understand what it could mean for her. Information architecture organizes what exists. Meaning architecture connects it to the questions she already walked in carrying.
It takes three things, and most institutions have the first one only. Make the possibility visible, which a strong messaging platform can do. Back it with evidence, because a claim about transformation isn’t transformation. Then give her a pathway, because evidence with no next step leaves a teenager connecting the dots alone, which is exactly the task she arrived unable to perform.
Claims don’t create belief. Evidence does. Evidence without a pathway is just a nice story.
That’s the definition, if you want one. A purpose-driven website is organized around what the student is trying to figure out rather than around how the institution is arranged, and it’s honest enough to prove what it claims.
Most of the institutions I’ve worked with don’t need a story invented. The story is hidden in plain sight, buried three layers down, said too quietly, or written in a voice nobody actually uses. The work isn’t invention. It’s finding the evidence and having the nerve to lead with it.
Our job is not to manufacture purpose. It’s to reveal it. Real is rare enough to be strategic.
Four Questions That Tell the Truth
We evaluate every site through the same four. You don’t need us to run them.
First impression. In five seconds, what does this place stand for? Ask someone outside the institution. Their answer is your actual homepage message, whatever you intended it to be.
Findability. Can she find what she came for without already knowing your vocabulary? Watch a real 17-year-old try. Humbling, and the cheapest research you’ll ever run.
Visual storytelling. Real people with names and stories, or beautiful strangers on a quad in September?
Distinctiveness. Cover the logo. Change the colors in your head. Read the homepage as a stranger. Could this be any college or university in the country?
That last one decides whether the other three matter. If the answer is yes, you don’t have a design problem. You have a clarity problem, and another redesign will not touch it.
Where the Four Circles Land
Ikigai is really a framework for alignment, and in this work the alignment is between four things.
What she’s actually searching for. What you can truly make possible. The proof that makes it believable. And the next step that helps her move.
When those four line up, information becomes direction. Not certainty. Just enough clarity to keep moving.
That’s the whole idea. A better compass doesn’t have to be software. It could be better content, clearer pathways, more thoughtful advising, a program finder that starts with her language instead of ours. What matters is that we stop asking her to contort herself into our categories before we’ll tell her anything useful.
Purpose is a Direction, not a Destination
Not for students. Not for institutions. Not for us.
I care about this more than a homepage deserves, partly because I’m the son of an Armenian immigrant who landed in Maine in 1967, and I’ve watched across two generations what access to this system does to a family. Higher education at its best is uniquely qualified to help people ask better questions. The meetings and the friction and the trend of the month are in service of that, even on the days it doesn’t feel like it.
Somewhere right now there’s a kid in Worcester. A kid in North Adams. A kid in Waterville whose parents never went to college. She’s searching, and she isn’t looking for more information.
She’s looking for a sign that someone is listening. That someone sees her.
So let’s ask better questions. Let’s tell more stories. Let’s build better compasses.
Curious how the IkiGuide framework can shape your institution’s story? Explore IkiGuide →
Ready to talk through what a purpose-driven website could look like for your institution? Schedule a conversation with Raffi →
Raffi DerSimonian is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at ERI Design, a strategy, design, and development firm working with higher education and mission-driven organizations. This piece is adapted from his eduWeb keynote, “The Purpose-Driven Website.”
