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 […]
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 […]
This week much of the admissions and enrollment profession will be heading to Columbus, Ohio, for the NACAC Conference. I hope to see many of my colleagues there. If you listen to conventional wisdom, you’ll frequently hear that you need more data, better data, and–especially this year–more AI. (Just be sure not to mix it […]
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 […]
If you’re like a lot of people in higher ed, you have a lot of people outside higher ed who want to help you with your enrollment goals (full disclosure: I do too.) But too often, the companies that have convinced themselves that they’ve cracked the code–that they’ve reduced complexity to simplicity–will hire young, completely […]
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 […]
Of all the things we’re asked to worry about, now people are concerned about men. Like my post earlier (the one with the headline in Russian that people were afraid to read, apparently), you should realize that the narrative about male enrollment is true, but maybe not so dire as you think. It should come […]
Enrollment VP 