As competition intensifies across India’s higher education sector, universities are increasingly looking beyond traditional admission-led growth. Rising customer acquisition costs, changing student behaviour and rapid digitalisation are forcing institutions to rethink how they approach marketing, sales and profitability.
Ankit Khare, Founder and CEO of UniBridge Consulting, believes the answer lies in moving beyond conventional consulting. His approach is simple: “Consulting with execution.”
With nearly two decades of experience across education, digital marketing and business consulting, Khare has built his career around helping education businesses grow. He began his entrepreneurial journey with UniPro Education, a digital marketing company focused on the education sector, which he ran for nearly 14 years before it was merged with CollegeDekho. He subsequently served as Chief Business Officer for the vertical for nearly three years.
His later consulting experience with a Bengaluru-based technology company operating in the online education space helped shape his vision for UniBridge. Ankit Khare saw a significant opportunity among universities that had the approval to offer online degree programmes but lacked the expertise or infrastructure to build and scale them.
From Lead Generation to Profitable Growth
For Mr.Khare, the defining shift came from understanding that student acquisition cannot be viewed simply through the number of leads or admissions generated.
“The most important metric for any business today is customer acquisition cost,” he says.
His experience showed him that as competition increases, the cost of acquiring students also rises. Managing and optimising CAC, therefore, can have a direct impact on an institution’s profitability. This insight became one of the foundations of UniBridge’s growth model.
Instead of functioning as a conventional admissions or lead-generation agency, UniBridge positions itself as an internal growth partner for universities.
Its model follows a Build, Operate, Transfer (BOT) approach. For institutions that have the required approvals but have not yet established an online education business, UniBridge helps build the function. For universities that already have the capability but want to scale, it operates and strengthens the existing business before eventually transferring it back to the institution.
Moving Beyond Vanity Metrics
Khare believes one of the biggest challenges in higher education is the tendency to celebrate admission numbers without examining the economics behind them.
Moving from 1,000 admissions to 1,500 may appear to represent strong growth, but the more important questions are: What was the cost of acquiring those students? Which programmes offer better returns? Which markets generate profitable demand? And what does the overall P&L look like?
UniBridge therefore focuses on mapping CAC across different channels and programmes and connecting these metrics with the institution’s P&L. According to Khare, this enables universities to make decisions based on unit economics rather than vanity metrics.
The objective, he says, is “growth with sanity”—achieving meaningful growth while maintaining healthy profitability. In its engagements, UniBridge has seen approximately 30% growth in admissions or revenue and profitability optimisation of nearly 20% or more in certain cases.
Consulting With Execution
What differentiates UniBridge is that its role does not stop at recommendations.
Khare describes the company as a consulting-with-execution business. Along with digital marketing expertise, UniBridge works on processes, CRM systems, technology infrastructure and sales operations.
Having previously worked with more than 200 universities, Khare says this experience provides UniBridge with an understanding of the dynamics of education marketing, lead generation and customer acquisition.
The company is also integrating AI into university sales processes, including using AI to follow up with and nurture incoming leads. Khare believes the combination of digital marketing, structured processes, technology and AI can significantly improve business performance.
Building Future-Ready Universities
Looking ahead, Khare sees substantial room for transformation across India’s higher education ecosystem. While leading institutions have already adopted sophisticated processes and technology, he believes many universities still operate through traditional and relatively unstructured systems.
UniBridge’s vision is to make these businesses more process-oriented, structured and AI-enabled while bringing its expertise in sales and digital marketing.
For Khare, the future is not about promising unrealistic admission numbers. It is about creating systems that allow universities to understand their economics, strengthen their processes and build sustainable growth.
In an education landscape where growth is becoming increasingly expensive and competitive, UniBridge’s proposition is to move institutions from simply chasing admissions to building a more disciplined, technology-led and profitable growth engine.
