New York University Steinhardt Achieves 86% Enrollment Conversion Through Unibuddy Community

Challenge 

For years, New York University Steinhardt (NYU Steinhardt) relied on on-campus events, such as general admitted student welcome events and tours and program specific welcome events, to help admitted and deposited students connect with the campus community. These experiences gave prospective students the chance to meet faculty, interact with peers, and get a feel for student life. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted campus life and budget cuts reduced programming, many of those opportunities disappeared, leaving the admissions team without a reliable way to facilitate the peer-to-peer connections students valued most.

At the same time, arranging conversations between prospective and current students was far more complex than it appeared. Many graduate programs were only one or two years long, making it difficult to find available ambassadors in the right program when requests came in. Each introduction required staff to manually track down volunteers and coordinate the connection. “Something that should have been a simple request often turned into a lot of work for our team,” said Tom Kleinert, Associate Director of Graduate Admissions at NYU Steinhardt, “and sometimes we couldn’t make those connections happen quickly enough, which was frustrating for everyone involved.”

Solution

NYU Steinhardt first learned about Unibuddy through colleagues at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, who had already implemented the platform and reported strong results with their ambassador program. Around the same time, Tom Kleinert encountered Unibuddy again while attending a presentation at the NAFSA conference in Washington, where co-founder Diego Fanara demonstrated how institutions could scale peer-to-peer engagement. The Unibuddy platform quickly stood out as a solution that could replicate the student-to-student connections previously created through in-person events.

NYU Steinhardt ultimately implemented Unibuddy Community to create a dedicated space where admitted students could connect with peers and ambassadors before arriving on campus. The team opens the community each year from April through August, focusing on the critical period when newly admitted and deposited students are preparing for enrollment. Within the platform, students can join Spaces based on shared interests or needs, such as international students, housing and roommates, or their specific academic programs, making it easy to find relevant conversations and connections. “We realized we could give students a place to interact with each other without our team having to manually coordinate every introduction,” said Kleinert. “It created a much more seamless way for them to build connections before they even arrived on campus.”

Impact

In 2025, 86% of students using the Unibuddy platform ultimately enrolled, an outcome the admissions team attributes in part to stronger engagement during the months leading up to arrival on campus. By focusing their Unibuddy Community on deposited students, the team created a space where those who had already committed could stay connected, ask questions, and build relationships during the long period between admission and the start of classes. The result has been stronger follow-through and reduced summer melt, as students remain excited and confident about their decision.

The platform has also transformed how the admissions team supports incoming students at scale. With a recruitment team of just three people managing more than a thousand new graduate students each year from across the United States and around the world, manually facilitating individual introductions simply wasn’t sustainable. Through Community channels, students can now connect on multiple levels, creating group conversations that would have been impossible to coordinate one by one. Instead of relying solely on staff to make introductions, students can find relevant conversations and relationships on their own.

“It’s been great that we can simply share this resource with students and let them interact with one another without us having to do all that groundwork,” said Tom Kleinert. “Students want to stay excited about the program between the time they’re admitted and when they arrive on campus. This gives them that connection, and helps them find their community before they even get here.”