How do college students’ Regulatory Focus shape their behavioral outcome towards institutes of higher education? The role of Cognitive Flexibility and Social Perceptiveness

Colleges and Universities across the United States are witnessing a decline in overall freshman enrollments. The latest data suggests that in 2023 there was an overall decline in enrollment of 5% among first year incoming freshman students across the country (Wood, 2024). To generate favorable attitude among current or potential students, institutions of higher education have adopted the use of social media channels for communication with students (Perera et. al., 2023). Through this paper, we address the critical question of how institutes of higher education can maximize students’ commitment, sense of belonging, as well as positive word of mouth intentions by strategically altering the content of their social media communication with students. We utilize the regulatory focus as well as cognitive flexibility theory to develop novel hypothesis and empirically test the assertions utilizing a lab experiment.