I mentioned to someone the other day that I was continuing to see a lot of VP EM jobs coming into my email. The tone and the timbre of these emails is changing: It’s still an “exciting time” to join College X, and the president and trustees are still “fully committed” to the enrollment function as the institution “forges ahead” with a new strategic plan. But there is often also as sense of “please recommend someone….anyone…for this job” that comes through in personal follow-ups.

Good people in good roles at good institutions are less inclined to take on the “challenge” of a place that just lost (actively or passively) its last VP, because you can never tell if the vacancy is a function of the person or the institution. That’s a risk people are less likely to take these days, it seems.

I said I thought it was only going to get more pronounced as we head into uncertain times in higher education. So few people really understand enrollment dynamics, as witnessed by the “helpful suggestions” everyone in the VP seat tends to get from time to time. It’s easy to be cynical about these, of course, until you realize that it’s a lot better to have people interested in enrollment, trying to help, than to have lots of experts criticizing things they really don’t understand.

For over 15 years, I’ve been presenting to anyone who would come to my conference sessions that this was going to be an issue: We tend to hire young people in admissions or financial aid whose skill set is often complementary (or diametrically opposed) to that of a VP EM. Thus, we sabotage our own pipeline of potential VP candidates by selecting them out of the pool early.

And let’s not overlook “The Admissions Industrial Complex” whose members pay big sums to secure a presence at national admissions, financial aid, and enrollment management conferences. They not only operationalize and sell “solutions” to the problems colleges are facing (often, it must be admitted, selling the same solution to competitors), but they are also siphoning off talent because they offer higher salaries and fewer headaches to boot.

I’ve been contacted about several Interim VP roles since I retired from my full-time job, and it’s not something I’ve generally been interested in; I wrote in 2023 about how “the number” is the constant companion of the VP EM, and it’s a burden I’ve been glad to get rid of, just two weeks post-departure.

Recently, I’ve had inquiries about Fractional VP services, where one person is the VP EM at three or four different institutions on a part-time basis, spending a day or two each week or a week each month doing the critical VP functions; while I don’t think that’s something of interest to me, either (“the number,” times four or five), I do wonder if the idea has legs, if it might not be the solution especially at small, tuition-dependent institutions, and whether someone is going to get rich off this idea.

I’d love to hear what you think. Send me an email or post a comment below and tell me if this makes sense. I know there are at least a few college presidents who subscribe to this blog, and I’d be especially grateful for their responses. And if you work in EM, do you think this is a great idea, or does it cheapen the value of the VP EM role? Is it a viable solution for smaller institutions who need experienced, senior leadership, or does it denigrate the importance of the work we do?

Or, is it all just spinning our wheels, because, as one person I know recently wrote, “AI can EM”?