Meeting state-funded enrollment targets and attracting students on a fee-paying basis constitute a crucial managerial objective for any higher education institution. A university aiming to enroll applicants with high entrance scores must operate as a market entity: it is required to study applicant preferences and, based on these insights, build effective communication channels. The core challenge lies in the discrepancy between applicants' preferences when choosing a university and the existing structure of the admission campaign. This misalignment results in inefficient admission procedures, the loss of promising candidates, and the irrational allocation of the university's financial resources. The article examines data obtained from a survey of 112 applicants conducted in 2025 at the admissions office of Novosibirsk State Technical University. Employing cross-correlation analysis, the authors identified general behavioral patterns in applicants' university choice and distinguished homogeneous groups of applicants with varying expectations from the university: Researchers, Pragmatists, Seventeen-year-olds, Humanities-oriented, and Economics-oriented. Furthermore, age-specific and gender-profile clusters were identified. Based on the principle of targeting, the authors developed recommendations for organizing and improving the university's admission campaign. This approach implies that a unified campaign designed for an average applicant should be replaced by a set of differentiated communication strategies tailored to specific applicant segments. The findings presented in this article may be of practical interest to university administrations, executive secretaries of admission committees, and heads of university marketing departments.