Recently, I was at a meeting where I was discussing my
school’s enrollment numbers for the Summer term. The numbers were solid,
considering the pandemic and our city’s strict Shelter-in-Place rules, but
lower than original projections. I discovered later that a number of the
members of the Enrollment Management team who had been in attendance perceived
my remarks as criticism of their efforts. I was sorry to have conveyed that
impression, as it was not what I intended, and it was not how I feel. The
Enrollment Management team work hard to bring new students to the university,
and I have praised them several times (though I could do better in that regard).
This is what I had been thinking: If they are to blame for
the low enrollment numbers, it would suggest that the only way my school can
get people to enroll is through their persuasive efforts, and that there is no
other reason why anyone would come here to get an education. If that is the
case, I could stop trying to develop new programs. I could stop trying to
improve the end-to-end user experience as students try to navigate the website,
take a placement test, meet with an advisor, register for classes. I could give
up on developing new partnerships that would create pathways for new students.
Marketing could stop advertising our programs. The Financial Aid office could
go home, and the Senior Leadership could abandon its efforts to set appropriate
tuition prices.
Really, this is a mindset issue and an incentives issue. The
only way to hold them responsible for our enrollment numbers is if I were to
see them as merely salespeople, engaged in a series of transactions in which they
are somehow failing to close the deal. But this would be the wrong way to think
about it for several reasons. If the enrollment team members are salespeople, they
need to have a product or service to sell. They would need to understand the
thing they are selling, to really know its value proposition inside and out. They
would need to have tools at their disposal to help them sell the “product.” They
might need to be able to negotiate with potential customers.
However, I strongly believe that we should not view our
Enrollment Management team as salespeople. They are not selling a “product.” They
are building a relationship with people. That means they should be listening to
them and working with them to make sure that what the school offers can benefit
them. If it would not benefit them, we should not want to bring them here. Enrollment
counselors should be helping prospective students (in our case, all of them are
adults and working people) figure out how to achieve their life goals—a
university degree is not the means to that end for everyone. We need to orient
them to what a university education is all about. We must make clear to
prospective students how the process works, and how they will navigate it and
make use of what is available to them throughout their time here.
If the Enrollment Management team is good at what it does, they
will not work to admit everyone who inquires about our programs. I would not
judge their success by sheer numbers of admitted students. Some people are not
ready for this experience, and they can return later. Some people don’t
understand what we provide, and will not benefit from it at all, maybe ever.
Those people should probably not be admitted here. One important way a
university is evaluated, by its accreditor and the federal government, is by
its retention and completion rates. If we bring in students who cannot succeed,
and we don’t provide the right scaffolding to help them succeed, those numbers
are affected. A good admissions process should be measured not by how many
people enroll in that first course, but how many enroll in a tenth course. Our
enrollment management work has to be informed by that.
On the academic side of the house, I do not see our work as
simply creating a product. We create an experience for students based on a set
of assumptions about who our students are, and what they need from us, and what
our community needs from us. It is more than the sum total of the classes they
take. Our effectiveness is not measured by how many people show up here, but
how many of them achieve their goals, and then apply them to their lives. My
general assumption is that our students are working adults, or people otherwise
occupied by something besides school: raising children, paying their own
expenses, managing a household, returning to civilian life. This is our niche:
people who want to better themselves, maybe economically or in terms of
status, and they see education as the way to get there. Some of them know what
they want, and what an education means, and others need guidance in figuring
that out. Not all of them will need the same thing: some just need a single
course, others a certificate, and still others a bachelor’s degree or a
master’s degree. This is a huge decision and a huge commitment for them to
make: maybe not as important as who they marry, but probably just as crucial as
buying a house. It will shape the rest of their lives, whether they succeed or
fail. It is important to me that in our approach to admissions, our work aligns
with this sense of who our students are and what they need from us. They need
to be adequately prepared for what they will find here, by the enrollment team and
by others. If I were ever to be concerned about Enrollment Management, it would
only be if our enrollment team did not create the right set of expectations in
our new students, and they were to fail as a result. All of my interactions
with this group, which does not report to me, have had to do with trying to
create this alignment in our goals and getting us all to a shared sense of what
we do and why it matters. I do think we understand each other.
With that in mind, I am much more interested in a
qualitative measure of our enrollment management efforts, not a quantitative
one. Some numbers do matter: How many of our students succeed? How many make it
to their goals? But also, what obstacles can we remove in order to help them
succeed? Quotas and conversion rates don’t measure that, and these numbers are
not a measure of who are staff are or what they do.
My school cannot succeed if the students can’t use what we
offer them. What I describe here might require a change from how things were
done in the past, but all we have to do is look at how our world is changing
over the past few years to see that some sort of internal change has been
necessary. That is my goal—to create structures that work, so that we not only
attract students, but we keep them here and we help them reach their goals.
What I am describing here is part of that process, which is a shared
responsibility.
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