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 […]
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 […]
The more I read about this admissions and enrollment cycle, the farther back my mind goes: Sometimes it wanders all the way back to my first college fair program in Eagle Grove, Iowa, and the first student I ever talked to (I remember his unusual first name, so I went to Classmates, but that particular […]
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 […]
I was talking with a colleague about the search for an academic dean, and about participating in the interview process with candidates. I confided that–while I found it helpful to see if the candidates seemed collegial, and to tease out what their relationship with EM at their current institution was like–I really had no sense […]
Enrollment VP 