My work with Cintana Education

Because the decision takes months, involves people who are not the applicant, and almost never happens on the first visit. Three things follow from that, and they change what is worth working on.

The buyer is not one person. The student wants the course. A parent wants the outcome and the cost. A counselor wants the admissions record. A page written for one of them loses the other two, and all three are reading it in the same chat thread. The practical version of this is not three pages. It is one page that answers the cost question plainly where a parent will find it, instead of burying it behind a form.

The deadline belongs to the institution, not to the campaign. Intakes are the only real urgency in this funnel. They also mean an inquiry that arrives in the wrong month is not a bad inquiry, it is an early one. Score those two the same way and you will switch off the channel that brings your best students, because its leads look cold in the quarter you measured.

Nobody agrees what an application is. Started, submitted, fee paid and offer accepted are four different numbers, and in meetings all four get called applications. Until one of them is written down as the number the campaign is judged on, every report is defensible and none of them are comparable.

The first question I ask a university is none of these. It is: what share of inquiries get a reply from a person on the same day? The answer decides where the next month goes, and it is almost never the ads.

What do you fix first when the inquiry goes quiet?

Reply time. Before creative, before budget, before the page.

When a reply took days, a good campaign could not make up for it. The inquiry was sent at the top of someone's interest, and interest does not hold still for a week. A page can be improved by a few points with real work. A reply moved from three days to three hours changes the shape of the whole funnel, and it costs nothing but a decision about who owns the inbox.

After that, the order is stable:

1. Who replies, how fast, and with what. One named owner per program, a first response that answers a question rather than confirming receipt, and a rule for what happens when that person is away.

2. What the program page promises. It should answer the same four things the follow-up answers, so the two do not contradict each other.

3. The sequence that follows. The questions arrive in a reliable order: can I get in, what will it cost me, what happens at the end, and who else like me has done this. Most pages and most sequences answer them in the reverse order, because that is the order the institution thinks in: the institution starts with its rankings and gets to fees last.

4. Then the ads. By this point you know what a good inquiry looks like, which means you finally know what to buy.

One more thing that does not survive being generic. The same program raised different questions in Malaysia, London and Delhi, so each university needed its own answers. A version written to work everywhere answers a question nobody asked, and a reader can tell within a line that nobody has thought about their situation specifically.

How do you work inside nine different institutions?

By accepting that the tools are not the interesting part.

The rule I would keep: work inside their systems rather than beside them. A better tool that nobody in the admissions office will own is worse than an older one they already open every morning. The win is not a new stack. It is that the person who handles inquiries on a Tuesday morning can see what was promised, what was sent and what is owed.

The second rule: the handover is the deliverable. Admissions has a hard annual rhythm, and anything that lives in one enthusiastic person's head is gone by the next intake. So everything gets written down in their language, and their team runs it once with us watching before we stop watching.

The third: pick one program as the pilot, finish it completely, and only then copy it. Nine universities starting at once produces nine half-built funnels and no proof of anything.

Who built Cintana, and who backed it?

Doug Becker, who founded Laureate Education and co-founded Sterling Partners, started Cintana with Arizona State University and its president, Michael Crow. Its co-CEO, Ricardo Berckemeyer, was previously President and COO of Laureate.

Sterling Partners is a Chicago private equity firm founded in 1983. It has deployed more than $5.5B across more than 120 deals, and its education companies include Laureate, Connections Academy, which it sold to Pearson, School of Rock, Shorelight and Keypath. Arizona State University holds a stake in Cintana. The World Bank Group's IFC made an equity investment in September 2026.

What are the alliance's numbers?

The ASU-Cintana Alliance has 32 universities in 27 countries and more than 330,000 students, as of September 2026.