Why prospective students care more and what to do about it
There’s been a noticeable shift in the way prospective students are researching universities in 2025. We took a look at the Prospect’s Early Careers Survey and The Ambassador Platform’s latest research shared at IDP’s Insight Day and noticed something important.
🎯 Facility virtual tours matter more now than they did in 2024.
The rise of facilities as a decision factor
According to Prospect’s 2025 Early Careers Survey, facilities have jumped to #3 in the list of most important factors when students are deciding where to study. That’s a big leap from 2024, when facilities were close to the bottom of that list.
So what’s changed?
We think it comes down to a few things:
- 💸 Rising costs, rising expectations. With the cost of uni life increasing, students want to feel like they’re getting good value, and that includes value from your facilities.
- 📲 Influencer expectations. With uni spaces being shown off on TikTok and Insta, students expect visual proof that your spaces measure up.
- 😎 The Brat Era effect. There’s a subtle shift in how students present their lives. ‘Brat’ culture is more curated, more aesthetic. It’s a whole lifestyle now beyond the trend (take a look at the latest Youth Trends Report for more on that). They’re imagining how the uni fits into their story.
Virtual tours are an essential tool
Data from The Ambassador Platform (2025) shows that 36% of students rate virtual tours as one of the most valuable content types, and that’s up from 31.5% the year before.
Happily, that’s something our customer base of over 30 UK universities already knows and have invested in a platform that allows them to show off their facilities in confidence; but we do still hear the occasional view that virtual tours are a ‘nice to have’. They’re wrong. It’s a basic hygiene factor for student recruitment in 2025 and beyond.
A good virtual tour gives students what they want:
- 🧭 Control. Let them explore the bits that matter to them, not sit through a 15-minute flythrough.
- 🎥 Real life. Show students using the space, not just empty rooms. It builds trust and confidence. The qualitative data from our on-platform surveys tells us that students are often ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the facilities on offer when they’ve had a chance to look around in 360 and interact with the space for themselves.
- ⚡ Quick hits. Make it snackable, clickable, and easy to embed across course and subject pages, which in turn keeps engagement levels strong across your site.
What this means for your content strategy
In summary, we think 2025 is the year to rethink how you showcase your facilities. And here are our top tips on how to do so:
✅ Capture your facilities in use. Whether it’s 360s, short clips, or stills, the key is showing students interacting with the space. It shows how they’ll get to use it and they can start picturing themselves there.
✅ Break it down. One big tour isn’t as useful as several smaller ones, even better if they’re subject or campus-specific.
✅ Make it personal. Use tools (like Vepple 😉) that let you tailor facility content to the student’s interest. E.g. Make sure an engineering student sees labs, not film studios.
✅ Reuse and embed. Don’t hide your best content on a single page. Plug it into your website wherever it’s relevant. Vepple’s Guided Tour Embeds and 360° Group Embeds make it really easy to maximise your best content across lots of locations.
And don’t forget what we said about accessibility in our last blog, either!
TL:DR
Facilities are not a passing priority, they’re a fundamental part of how students assess the value, experience, and fit of a university. They’re looking for more than just what a place looks like, they want to understand how it works for them.
Show them spaces that feel alive, useful, and theirs to help them picture a future with you.
Want help making your facilities content actually work?
We’d love to show you how we do it at Vepple. See a demo here.
