I recently had the chance to congratulate a colleague who announced her retirement on LinkedIn.  “Well done,” I typed.  “You made it out the other side unscathed.”

It was, of course, a bit hyperbolic, a knowing nod from me to someone who also worked in enrollment management at a large public university.  In our jobs, we don’t risk our physical safety the way firefighters or oil rig workers or liquor store clerks do, of course, but this profession does take its toll in other ways.

Eric Hoover has written about the stress admissions and other enrollment management professionals are feeling today.   About that same time, I wrote about the constant din that fills our head, as we worry about numbers and goals that seem to have been set in a vacuum without any concern with, or connection to, reality.  A university not far from mine, for instance, is facing a deficit this year in part because the budget called for a 17% increase in new, first-year, nonresident students, against a trend line that had been increasing by about 1%-2% per year.  Having been doing this job almost 42 years, I can only imagine that someone thought “all we have to do” to balance our growing expense lines is to recruit harder. See how easy that sounds?

The comment to my colleague came shortly after I announced my own impending retirement, which will take effect this spring or summer, upon the appointment of my successor.  I too, received gratifying comments from other colleagues, many of which were also laced with a faint sense of foreboding. If you don’t share my profession, you might not have noticed the underlying message: It’s not going from tough to tougher; it’s going from tough to impossible.

Since my announcement, something strange has been happening: Colleagues with whom I’ve had good, open conversations over the years have been spilling the tea in ways I hadn’t anticipated.  And not one of my colleagues is optimistic about the future of our profession, or, for that matter, the future of our industry.  The stories I’ve heard about the demands, expectations, and—perhaps worst of all the facile solutions put forth—would curl your hair.  They would certainly curl mine, if I had any left.

It’s perhaps cruel fate that I’m writing this as we watch the horrific wildfires in Southern California, which might be an appropriate metaphor for what we’re experiencing right now.  The fires, which seemingly came out of nowhere, come as no surprise to people who’ve been talking about the threats for years.  The responses from people with no background or experience in wildfire prevention or abatement seem at first blush to be reasonable, but fall apart under the weight of experience and reality.  And blame?  Everyone has someone to blame.

How do you weather our own internal storm?  Here are some important first steps I’d recommend, but even these, of course, don’t guarantee anyone that the fire won’t affect you:

• Attend quickly to things you can fix, like archaic processes and broken systems that fight against enrollment success.
• If you have good people in the enrollment management division, take care of them. If you don’t, someone else will.
• Develop better enrollment planning models. If the output of your current models is a single number, you need to understand that you don’t have “enrollment” but rather “enrollments,” all of which move and shift in different directions at different rates.
• Look at the market, and then look at what you provide them. There is no reason, for instance, that a traditional liberal arts curriculum can’t be infused with career preparation. It takes work that you should start right away.
• Get your trustees and your faculty acquainted with market realities. One side yelling “you just don’t understand” at the other is generally not productive; giving them both a common understanding of what we’re up against can help.
• Challenge every assumption. You should know by now that when you raise tuition by 4%, you don’t get 4% more revenue. What are the alternatives?

We are faced with putting out multiple fires in the short term. The biggest and most pressing question right now is how we plan to reduce fire risk in the future.