Blackhawk College's Jeremy Thomas on Meeting the Consumer Student

How many of us close out of a website that doesn’t load quickly, complain when an automated customer service agent can’t solve our problem, or shop around different sources for the best deal? These are habits we exhibit on a daily basis, so why shouldn’t we apply them to prospective students? Dr. Jeremy Thomas, President of Blackhawk College, sees it as his duty to reimagine how students interact with the systems, people, and finances of higher education. Thomas leads the two-campus institution based in Moline, IL, and breaks down what today’s student is looking for, what he would like to see change, and how Blackhawk is leading the charge.

Articulating Value to Today’s Savvy Shopper

Compared to previous generations, today’s students possess an elevated expectation for their college experience. Students want to know the cost upfront and how their program will translate into a career. While most institutions still have catalogs hundreds of pages long with a laundry list of available programs, students don't want to sort through endless options. The sentiment Thomas hears from students is closer to: "I know what I want, and I want you to help me get there. I don't want to hear about a thousand choices. I want to hear about the choices that interest me." Students want to know how the college will help them get to their end goal, rather than waiting until graduation to understand how their degree connects to a career.  

To satisfy students’ consumer instincts, Blackhawk aims to build clarity into every interaction the student has with the institution. For example, rather than using a typical fees structure that varies from program to program, the college completely eliminated fees. "We don't have tuition and fees; we just have tuition," Thomas said. This transparent pricing structure allows the college room for "deeper conversations around career choices" with the cost question settled up front.

While transparent, straightforward pricing is critical, students also expect a return on their dollars for every class they take. When students ask, "Why do I need this class?" Thomas doesn't treat it as a nuisance question. "You've got to be able to articulate that to this generation, otherwise they don't buy it. They just think you're saying that to keep your job." While the course requirements may be the same, what's changed, in his view, is the expectation that faculty and staff can explain it in terms the student finds credible.

Stop Asking Prospective Students About Majors

If there's one habit Thomas wants higher ed to move away from, it's leading with major instead of destination. "One thing I've really been pushing our staff on is to quit asking about majors. I need to know about where you want to go," he said, framing the college itself as a means rather than an endpoint: "Community colleges in general are not your destination — it is not where you're headed, it's a vehicle to get you to where you need to be." However, he noted that most systems haven't caught up to that thinking yet. For example, he points to application systems that still ask students for their major rather than career choice.

This distinction is especially important for the majority of students who don’t understand the jargon that defines higher ed degrees. A student who says they want to be a lawyer doesn't need a lecture on degree types to get started on the right path. Thomas argues that the mapping should happen behind the scenes, not in front of the student. "They don't need to know what an associate of arts is. That's irrelevant to most, except for those of us who talk the lingo all the time." He's blunt about why: "A first-generation student does not understand the difference between an associate of arts, associate of applied arts, and associate of science. All they know is what they want to do."

A Personal Touch, at Scale

Thomas’s belief that faculty and staff need to meet students where they are doesn’t stop there. He writes a personal message to the student body and sends it out every Sunday night. The message is short, designed for phone reading, and, by his account, has an open rate email marketers would envy. "My open rate is a little over 20%," he said. But the habit isn't just about an email. It's about resisting the instinct to automate the relationship away. "I really think students were tired of the robotic ways of doing things and wanted that personal touch," he remarked. This is particularly true with many students seeking connection in the face of a world that has moved toward virtual and automated interactions in the post-pandemic era.

This instinct puts him at odds with the trend toward automation as he pushes for more direct human contact, rather than less. "I got a lot of really weird looks when I started saying, 'We're going to personalize this, and by the way, we're not just going to let AI do it for us. It's going to require more work on our parts, some nights, some weekends — personal touches, phone calls, texts, emails.'" He's equally direct about what happens when a campus skips that step. "I don't care how nice the campus is. If the people are horrible to you, that's going to wear off pretty quick. Then word gets out, and then you have a bunch of beautiful buildings that just look nice but are empty."

Thomas compares this approach to a standard a former college president once shared with him — one that has stuck ever since: "You recruit every student like you're recruiting a national athlete." He credits this mindset for helping the college achieve real, measurable movement. "This year we're up in double digits in enrollment. That's bucking the state average, bucking the national average, and it's not a fluke. It's because we're being strategic, really thinking things through."

Showing Students Who Stopped Out That You Still Care

While Thomas constantly strives for better systems and more authentic interactions, he acknowledges that students still face barriers beyond the college’s control. He’s seen enrollment gaps become more common, a pattern he says accelerated with the pandemic. When his staff called every student who had stopped out to ask why, the answer surprised him less than it might have. "Two-thirds of them, it was for non-academic reasons. So what that tells me is these students can make it. They have the ability, they were passing their classes, but life gets in the way." Free tuition, he pointed out, still doesn't solve for a student who can't put food on the table.

Winning some of those students back, in Thomas's experience, starts with contact rather than a program. "It's simply first off reaching out to them and showing them that somebody cares. We all get stuck in our heads that the world is mean only to us when we're having down moments. The truth is there's probably somebody who's gone through something very similar." From there, the college tries to match students with specific resources to help close the gap: a scholarship they didn't know existed, a connection through the foundation, or a local partner.

"I'll continue to say the personal touch goes a long way. We can't AI everything. We've got to show them we're human, that we've been through these trials, and we need to show them that it's possible to make it through," Thomas emphasized.

Pricing Tuition to Avoid Creating a Crisis for Future Students

Transparent tuition is just one piece of how colleges need to think strategically about their finances. Community colleges often face a conundrum that Thomas describes simply: raise tuition and enrollment drops, hold it flat and the gap between revenue and inflation compounds year over year. "If you hold your tuition flat or low, and there's inflation every year, and you don't bring in the funds to offset even just inflation, you end up in a backwards downward spiral." The more common outcome, he said, is deferral followed by shock. "Community colleges are known for holding their tuition flat for three years, five years, six years, ten years at a time, and then we're desperate, we've been dipping into reserves, and tuition jumps all at one time." However, all this does is defer a bigger tuition jump to future students who will bear the consequences.

Blackhawk's answer is to trade unpredictability for small, disclosed increases planned three years out — roughly $2 per credit hour at a time. Thomas acknowledges this is not a substantial amount of money, but he hopes to avoid pricing out future students. "We're not talking about loads of money, but if you have none, then $2 a credit hour is a lot, and we're very conscious of that." During this trial period, he’s asking his finance team to hold to the number: "I'm really pushing my finance people not to come back and ask for more, because I want to hold to that at least through the first three years and see if we can't make it work."

Thomas's approach across pricing, advising, and outreach shares a common thread: none of it happens by accident. Simplifying tuition, mapping degrees to destinations, calling students who stopped out — each is a deliberate choice to close the distance between institutional operations and student needs. As more colleges compete for a shrinking pool of prospective students, that kind of intentionality may be the differentiator that informs where, and if, students choose to enroll.