I’ve written before about what it means to be “data driven” in Enrollment Management. Since I posted this about ten months ago, people have asked me to clarify: If knowing stats is not data driven, what does it mean? To me it means seeking, finding, and learning from the patterns and trends you see in […]
If we were starting the college admissions process today, no one would design it the way it is. There is a lot wrong with the process of obtaining something that many of us believe to be a public good, and while I’ve written thousands of words about the other problems, the worst part is almost […]
Admissions and recruitment (two different functions often combined into one office) are hard: Much harder than people on the outside can understand. That, of course, doesn’t stop everyone from having an opinion about how you should do your job. Trustees, faculty, staff, and even students have lots of opinions. To be sure, some of them […]
If you follow admissions, you’ve heard by now about the Tulane University decision to “put a reluctant pause” on Early Decision admission offers to students from schools where some students had violated the terms of ED in the past. The article identifies only one, Colorado Academy, but suggests there are at least a few more. […]
You’ve almost certainly heard people who say that their job is mostly “putting out fires all day.” Unless you’re a firefighter (the kind that puts out literal fires), a police officer, or an Emergency Room Physician, it’s not optimal to always be focusing on the “tyranny of the urgent.” But knowing it’s becoming the way […]
Too often, people assume Enrollment Management is just a fancy name for admissions, or that it’s just recruitment on steroids, or that it’s a sign of never-ending administrative bloat. With regard to the first and last observations, well, let’s save those for another post. But with regard to recruitment, it’s among the first, and perhaps […]
If your university enrolls a lot of undergraduates, April can be the cruelest month. Typically, May 1 is the deadline most institutions use as their candidate’s reply date, when students offered admission must let the college know if they plan to accept the offer to enroll or not. The percentage of students who accept your […]
In case you’re not watching March Madness, Drake is the darling of the NCAA basketball tournament this year, with good reason. It’s a great story; everyone loves a plot like this. They just beat a higher-seeded team from the SEC by ten points in their first-round game. It goes to show how hard it is […]
In January, 2017, in the middle of a rare snowstorm in Memphis, I presented to the students and parents at three private high schools. Part of my talk focused on the paradox of complexity in college admission: Everyone says we hate it, but the institutions that introduce more of it tend to be rewarded with […]
As many as a dozen or so colleges and universities have returned to requiring the SAT or ACT for admission to the first-year class, after almost the entire country went to a test-optional admissions approach in response to COVID, when testing opportunities dropped dramatically. Should you? That depends. First, you probably know that imitation as […]
Enrollment VP 