Admissions leaders are facing a structural throughput problem: applicant volumes and expectations for rapid, personalized response outstrip human review capacity. A report by Noodle’s Meredith Purvis argues that counselors may manage tens of thousands of applications while having roughly 90 seconds for initial review, widening the risk that students drop out of the funnel before institutions respond. The piece pinpoints a “speed gap” in which students move within hours after submitting inquiries, while schools often reply in days. It also highlights that many applicants build perceptions before engaging directly—accelerated by AI tools that let students compare programs and costs, enabling shortlist decisions without early contact. Purvis frames enrollment as a series of solvable operational leaks, recommending investment in tools that improve response velocity and better connect early engagement to recruiter workflow capacity. The analysis is aimed at enrollment teams juggling near-constant demand against finite staffing and meeting timelines. For higher-ed operators, the takeaway is that recruitment underperformance may be less about counselor effort and more about system design and tooling, particularly when institutions need to respond faster than traditional engagement models allow.