AI is reshaping how prospective students discover and choose colleges while campus leaders wrestle with operational adoption challenges. EducationDynamics found that 78% of education searches now yield Google’s AI Overviews, reducing click‑throughs to institutional pages and raising the stakes for universities to be cited as authoritative sources in AI summaries. At the same time, a separate analysis outlines three practical hurdles to AI/ML adoption in higher education—closing the AI talent gap, addressing data governance and privacy, and building faculty and staff capacity for AI‑driven workflows. Enrollment leaders and CIOs must coordinate content strategy, privacy safeguards, and workforce development to convert AI‑driven interest into enrollments and sustainable campus deployments.