I once knew an Enrollment VP who was dedicated to his data: He could tell you the inquiry-to-applicant conversion rates by geo-market. He knew how SAT and GPAs varied by gender. His financial aid expenditures? Three, maybe four years off the top of his head.

Having recall like this is impressive, and given the choice between having it and not having it, you’d probably pick it every time. But it doesn’t make you a data person.

Just like memorizing all the presidents in order doesn’t make you a historian, or knowing all the books of the bible doesn’t make you a priest, being able to recite statistics about your enrollment doesn’t make you an enrollment manager.

People are surprised I don’t know my institution’s yield rate off the top of my head. Every year I tell myself I’m going to remember our fall headcount number, but I fail. This morning I had to look up how many first-year applications we received (my guess before looking it up was within 2,000, so that’s a victory.)

When I’m asked these questions, and confess my ignorance, someone always says, “Hey, I thought you were a data guy.”

Being good at remembering statistics and being a good enrollment manager are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they’re not the same thing, either. You can spend a lot of time memorizing your statistics, or you can look them up in a minute. Better yet, you can spend some time thinking about what the data mean: What are the patterns people might not otherwise see? What makes sense? What doesn’t? What’s the easy cause-and-effect answer? More important, what’s the real story people are missing?

And most important, how can you turn the data into insight, and then into action? That’s what makes a data person. And it’s what can make you a good enrollment manager.

Without that skill, a photographic memory can help you name the three state capitals that start with the letter D (Denver, Des Moines, and……..Dover), but that’s not going to get you elected governor.