April is the cruelest month for admissions deans and enrollment managers. After overseeing many difficult decisions about acceptance offers and student-aid packages, now they must wait and see how many students will come in the fall. And while they wait, they must contend with inquiries from curious presidents and trustees, answer anxious telephone calls from students and parents, and field predictable questions from reporters.
But many admissions deans say April is also one of the most rewarding times of the year, when they can reflect on the rewards of assembling a diverse group of freshmen that (they hope) meshes with their institution’s mission.
In that spirit of taking stock, The Chronicle has assembled a list of 10 people who are making a mark on the admissions profession. Each is a thinker, with goals for improving his or her own college as well as the field of admissions in general. Simply put, people like them — and respect them.
They are also great communicators who have taken time to cultivate relationships with students, parents, faculty members, and alumni. And perhaps most important, they work at institutions that support their efforts.
Michael Barron
Slick admissions Web sites, glossy recruitment mailings, and state-of-the-art statistical models that promise to accurately predict a college’s yield numbers — Michael Barron, assistant provost for enrollment services and director of admissions at the University of Iowa, has seen them all, and many other new wrinkles during his 20 years at the institution. But none of those innovations have swayed his belief that admissions, despite its many complexities, boils down to one thing: the relationship between a college and its applicants.
“We can employ all the latest technology and marketing strategies to get our message conveyed to prospective students, parents, and school officials,” he says. “But one can’t beat the value of a consistent message that clearly conveys the values of our institution.”
Mr. Barron does not profess to represent a holier-than-thou holdout of an institution that never uses marketing strategies to attract students. But he believes the messages colleges send are more important than the methods they use to deliver them.
One message Mr. Barron tries to send about Iowa is that it’s a place where students can come to discover themselves, where there is no rush to declare a major, and where they can explore different options with the help of the intense academic-advising program. In recent years, Iowa has received a record number of applications and increased its yield rates, even as the state’s population of high-school students has declined. Under Mr. Barron, Iowa has steadily increased its proportion of nonwhite students to 9 percent — double that of the state’s population.
Fellow deans regard him as an idealist, but also as a no-nonsense thinker. And he’s known as a believer in professional development. “It’s important to keep broadening the view of people who work in admissions, so they don’t get tunnel vision and think they know all the answers to students’ problems,” Mr. Barron says. Last fall the National Association for College Admission Counseling gave him its highest award, which recognizes outstanding service in the profession. “His tact and genuine encouragement have been very helpful as I continue to grow in my higher-education experiences,” says Joel Weyand, director of admissions at Morningside College in Iowa. “Michael is a pillar of professionalism in college admissions.”
Dale Bittinger
Most admissions deans dread the inevitable task of rejecting students. Dale Bittinger, director of undergraduate admissions and orientation at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has found a way to make this chore a little less unpleasant: He helps those students find colleges that might be a better fit. And if he meets applicants who have the potential to make the cut at UMBC in the future, he will advise them to earn credits at community colleges and re-apply as transfer students.
“The most important thing we can do in those situations is give students other opportunities,” says Mr. Bittinger. “They need to know there are plenty of institutions out there where they can succeed.”
His talent for making everyone around him feel valued is one of the key reasons he has risen swiftly through the ranks at UMBC, according to Freeman A. Hrabowski III, the university’s president. When Mr. Bittinger joined the admissions staff in 1999 as an assistant director, he made his mark by cultivating close relationships with high-school guidance counselors in Maryland. Those relationships have been instrumental in helping him improve his institution’s academic reputation while attracting a sizable chunk of first-generation and low-income students.
Over the past nine years, average freshmen SAT scores have risen 50 points, to 1220, and the undergraduate population is now 40 percent minority and 33 percent first-generation students. Most of the credit, Mr. Bittinger says, should go to UMBC’s president, who has led the 40-year-old institution’s evolution from a commuter college 20 years ago to an honors college that can compete with the University of Maryland’s flagship campus for the state’s best and brightest.
But Mr. Bittinger should accept some praise, especially for his technological vision. It was his idea to equip all his admissions counselors with laptop computers to show prospective students the campus and dorm rooms via a virtual tour, instead of just handing out brochures. UMBC believes it was the first college in the country to send electronic newsletters to parents, and its admissions Web site is widely considered the industry standard.
The lack of adequate college preparation at many high schools is a common complaint of admissions deans, but Mr. Bittinger is one of the few taking action to fix it. He regularly brings high-school teachers to the campus to talk about UMBC’s academic expectations, and he serves on Maryland’s K-16 Task Force on English Composition.
Arlene Wesley Cash
As a senior in high school, Arlene Wesley Cash was asked to speak to a group of younger students about her experiences in Upward Bound, the federal college-preparation program. After her talk, she looked around at her audience.
“I saw a lot of students who were like me when I was in ninth grade, not knowing much about college,” Ms. Cash recalls. “At the end of that presentation, people were saying, ‘Hey, maybe I can go to college.’”
Ms. Cash, vice president for enrollment management at Spelman College, believes that moment inspired her to seek a career in admissions. She believes her mission is to help all students see their educational possibilities, including those who cannot — or choose not to — attend the college that pays her salary.
“She’s a dedicated educator,” says Lloyd Thacker, director of the Education Conservancy. “She’s interested in serving her school, but also in serving the bigger cause in admissions.”
A graduate of Keuka College, formerly an all-women’s institution, Ms. Cash has become one of academe’s most passionate advocates for women’s colleges. “For women who perceive themselves as leaders,” she says, “having that women’s-college experience can be the tipping point in the process that helps them find their voice, without being edited.”
At Spelman, Ms. Cash has helped improve the orientation program, working with faculty members to better meld academic affairs and student affairs in an effort to smooth students’ entry into campus life. She has also revamped the student-aid program so students know they can count on the same level each year as long as they maintain their grades. And she has supported Spelman’s efforts to promote financial literacy among students.
“People look at admissions as a door opener,” Ms. Cash says. “They forget thatit’s also about providing a community that will nurture students.”
Some 79 percent of Spelman students graduate within six years, the highest rate at any historically black institution. Ms. Cash is proud of that number. But she thinks hard about the applicants who do not win one of Spelman’s 550 spots. She estimates that each year, she spends less time drafting the college’s acceptance letter than she does composing the rejection letter.
“It’s very important that that letter is affirming in some kind of way,” Ms. Cash says. “It’s a hard thing to do. We have a generation today that hasn’t been exposed to a lot of rejection, and you don’t want to devastate them.”
Monica C. Inzer
Behind closed doors, some admissions deans jokingly compare merit aid to crack cocaine: Because these scholarships are an effective way to attract high-achieving students, they can be addictive. At the same time, they are often unhealthy because they prevent a college from meeting the full financial needs of its accepted students.
Monica C. Inzer, the first female dean of admission at Hamilton College, surprised many of her colleagues this March by just saying no. Although the small college in upstate New York devoted $1-million to merit scholarships this year, Ms. Inzer announced she would discontinue the 10-year-old practice beginning with the class that matriculates in 2008.
Hamilton, she says, does not lack qualified applicants, and it made her increasingly uncomfortable to give part of the college’s limited aid budget to students who do not need it. Unlike Harvard and Princeton — two institutions that abolished early decision this year while proclaiming hopes that other institutions would follow their lead — Ms. Inzer says her college will be just fine without imitators.
“I would get calls from reporters who would ask me: ‘Do you hope everybody follows you?’” says Ms. Inzer. “And I told them, ‘That’s not why we’re doing this.’ All I hope is that other schools have a reason for doing the things they do, and don’t just make decisions based on what other colleges are doing.”
According to Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton’s president, Ms. Inzer showed her persuasive powers by spending countless hours persuading trustees and influential donors to support the change.
“One of the reasons she’s so influential is that she’s a rare combination of being data-savvy and people-oriented,” says Ms. Stewart. “That gives her so much credibility, and at the same time, she’s such a pleasure to work with.”
Ms. Inzer’s colleagues at other institutions also describe her as fun to be around, especially during their extended travels to high schools. Her cheerfulness on the road may come from fond memories of one visit to a Connecticut high school early in her career, where she met Steven Inzer, then a young admissions counselor at Boston University. He is now her husband.
Working with colleges, Ms. Inzer says, is another extended romance. When she was appointed the director of admissions at Worcester Polytechnic University (at age 29), she became enamored of engineering education. Later, at Babson College, it was the institution’s entrepreneurial spirit that won her heart.
Working at Hamilton, however, was a happy homecoming. Ms. Inzer is a self-professed “townie” who grew up near the college in Sherrill, N.Y., and spent her high-school days hanging out on the campus.
Jess H. Lord
Haverford College is known for cultivating homegrown talent. In the college’s 174-year history, Jess H. Lord is only the second nonalumnus to serve as admissions dean, and he landed the job at the age of 32.
Although Mr. Lord, a graduate of Brown University, has only been at Haverford for two years, his colleagues are already impressed by his commitment to preserving the institution’s unique identity while helping the college address modern-day challenges.
“He’s reassured Quaker alumni that Haverford can still be a place where Quaker students can come and find an atmosphere that reveres their traditions,” says Greg Kannerstein, dean of the college (and a 1963 graduate). “At the same time, he’s been able to help us move forward on issues of diversity and adapting our mission with changing times.”
The college is already improving its geographical diversity, with a population of international students that has grown from 5 percent to 15 percent over the last five years. Students from California now outnumber those from either Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Mr. Lord has built momentum for those initiatives by reaching out to more alumni around the country and world, and he is particularly adept at motivating them to find students who will be a good fit for Haverford.
Some of the best ideas, Mr. Lord says, come from alumni. One dedicated graduate started hosting receptions for students after they had submitted their applications to celebrate that achievement. It was the type of gesture, Mr. Lord says, that his own office could not offer for fear of leading students on, but when hosted by alumni, gave prospective students a forum in which to learn more about the college.
The thought Mr. Lord devotes to each application he reviews and his natural leadership abilities have not gone unnoticed by those beyond Haverford. “He is simply one of the finest, most ethical, engaged, very smart people I have had the privilege to work with,” says Bruce J. Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College and Mr. Lord’s former boss. “Jess brings substance to everything he does and says.”
Although his infant daughter, his first child, limits the amount of time he can spend on professional pursuits right now, Mr. Lord says he plans on becoming a vocal leader in many of the national groups that influence his field, including the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the Common Application, and the College Board.
“There is a national conversation you can be a part of, and that is one of my primary motivations in doing this job,” says Mr. Lord. “If I don’t get any further in that, I will have failed.”
Jerome A. Lucido
In 2005, Jerome A. Lucido taught a seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill called “College Admission and the Public Interest.” Then UNC’s vice provost for enrollment policy and management, Mr. Lucido asked students to pretend they were admissions deans in the year 2015.
Based on what they had learned about population trends and admissions policies, the students had to determine what types of students they would admit, who would receive financial aid, and why. One requirement: Their solutions had to further the public’s interest, not just that of their own institution.
Mr. Lucido was impressed by his students’ ideas. Now vice provost for enrollment policy and management at the University of Southern California, he is working to create USC’s Operational Center for Enrollment and Research Policy and Practice, which will allow researchers and big thinkers to share ideas about issues related to higher-education access. Mr. Lucido hopes it will help academe’s leaders better understand how demographic, economic, and global trends shape admissions policies and practices.
“We have a bright shining light on the entry point of higher education,” Mr. Lucido says. “I wanted to create a place where we could bring people together and say what it all means.”
Mr. Lucido is a trustee of the College Board and chairman of its Guidance and Admissions Assembly Council. Education leaders describe him as an expert with a keen view of higher education’s future. “He thinks deeply about admissions as a social responsibility,” says Gaston Caperton, the College Board’s president. “He can talk about the big picture, but he’s also a great practitioner. That’s a powerful combination.”
After starting his career at Kent State University, he helped guide prominent state institutions through periods of growth. At the University of Arizona, he expanded outreach programs for low-income and underrepresented students while increasing the enrollment of the honors program. At Chapel Hill, he drew national praise for ending the university’s early-decision program, in 2002, because he believed the practice was encouraging students to think more about admissions strategies than about finding the right college.
Mr. Lucido believes that as the demand for higher education increases, the responsibilities of admissions and enrollment officials will continue to grow. He believes they must look for ways to better communicate with an uncertain and skeptical public. He describes a good admissions professional as someone who can see the big picture beyond his or her own campus gate.
“You can’t just talk about how to read a file or how to interview a student,” he says. “You have to understand sociology, political science, and the economics of it all. Otherwise, how do you read the student in context?”
Paul Marthers
When Paul Marthers came to Reed College five years ago, he decided to learn all he could about the campus. He read about its history, absorbed its culture, and attended classes to better understand its students and professors. He studied everything, even the coast pines, northern red oaks, and dozens of other trees that grow on the grounds.
Mr. Marthers believed that as Reed’s dean of admission, he could not meaningfully promote the college unless he had lived and breathed the place. For good measure, he enrolled in Reed’s liberal-studies program and later earned a master’s degree.
“What’s guided me is to understand what Reed is, to present Reed authentically, and assume the right kind of students will be attracted,” he says. “A lot of admissions marketing is, ‘Let’s try to figure out what the customer wants, and let’s try to think and talk like a 17-year-old.’”
Mr. Marthers has revamped Reed’s viewbook, turning it into an award win-ner. He has encouraged his staff to present the college, with its quirks and warts, in their own words. He has developed several distinctive links on Reed’s Web site about the college’s rich lore, including a mock interview with a talking dog named Buster, who confirms a campus legend that after dying, some Reed alumni return as one of the beloved canines that roam the campus.
Riffs on interspecies reincarnation may not impress all prospective students, but Reed has not wanted for interest. Since 2002 applications to Reed have nearly doubled. Its admit rate has dropped to 40 percent from 71 percent, while the proportion of minority students in the freshman class has increased to 25 percent from 14 percent.
As a high-school student in Vermont, Mr. Marthers worked in a cheese factory to save money for college. When he graduated from Oberlin College, in 1982, he became the first in his family to earn a postsecondary degree. That perspective, he says, frames his view of the applications he reads each year.
“I try to imagine myself,” he wrote in a recent essay, “back when I was enthralled with the possibilities available though the simple, yet seemingly risky, act of stepping up to college, when doing so was a hope far from certainty.”
Mr. Marthers has published nearly 20 articles on a range of educational issues, including the SAT writing test (he’s not a fan), and has won admirers for articulating Reed’s antipathy to college rankings (the college has long refused to participate in U.S. News & World Report’s data collection). He has become a national voice for the value of a liberal-arts education.
“He knows where admissions is and has many creative ideas for where it could go,” says Sonya K. Smith, assistant dean of admission at Princeton University, who worked for Mr. Marthers at Reed.
Theodore A. O’Neill
Theodore A. O’Neill, dean of college admissions at the University of Chicago, asks people to call him Ted. But some of his colleagues have other names for him, like “guru,” “philosopher-king,” and even “the god of admissions.”
Mr. O’Neill is a deep thinker at an institution that prizes deep thinking, and his insights have won him many listeners. Take “You Must Re-Member This,” an essay he wrote for College Unranked: Affirming Educational Values in College Admissions (Education Conservancy, 2004), a book that examined the causes and costs of ultracompetitive admissions.
In that piece, Mr. O’Neill ruminated on the commercialization of admissions: “Somewhere along the way, the College Board or ETS, or we as members, decided that education in this country could be defined, analyzed, and sold as AP courses. Why romanticize college education? Romance is, after all, antique and relates to mere human storytelling.”
The sarcasm was not lost on those admissions deans and high-school counselors who believe academe’s emphasis on numbers — test scores, selectivity rates, and rankings data — has warped the college recruitment and application process.
During his 25 years at Chicago, Mr. O’Neill has preserved the university’s personalized admissions approach even as he has helped expand its applicant pool. Each year many prospective students (about four-fifths of admitted applicants) accept Chicago’s offer for a personal interview, in which administrators, professors, or alumni meet with students to delve into their intellectual interests and attempt to determine if each applicant is a good match for the university and vice versa.
Mr. O’Neill, who earned his master’s degree at Chicago, personally interviews between 50 and 100 candidates each year. “They don’t all work,” Mr. O’Neill says of the chats. “But the reason they’re so good is that they’re so human.”
Recently Mr. O’Neill helped start an overnight-visit program for prospective minority students. Last year Chicago decided to accept the Common Application, to appeal to more diverse students, but the university will continue to require distinctively quirky essays (such as a response to “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there,” a quote by Miles Davis) on its cherished “Uncommon Application.”
“One of our issues is to keep this a human and small-scale enterprise,” Mr. O’Neill says.
High-school counselors praise Chicago’s admissions staff for being clear about what Chicago is — and is not — when they talk about the university. “He’s always been candid and open about the admissions process, and he tries his best to demystify it,” says Dave Mouldon, a counselor at St. Louis University High School, about Mr. O’Neill. “He’s very clear about his institutional mission, how Chicago isn’t a place for everybody.”
James Steen
People who love crunching numbers usually become accountants, stockbrokers, or sales executives. James Steen, a self-professed “numbers guy,” planned on pursuing one of those careers after earning both undergraduate and master’s degrees in business administration at Baylor University.
Although he worked in Baylor’s admissions office right after college, he never expected to stick around long. The field of admissions, however, changed drastically in his 16 years there, and Mr. Steen found that his penchant for analyzing statistics fit well with the evolving demands of an enrollment manager’s job. In fact, those talents made him a pioneer in the field.
Most colleges have started using some statistical models to determine which high-school students are most likely to apply to their institution and ultimately enroll. Under Mr. Steen’s guidance, Bay-lor’s admissions office developed 15 models, and constantly experimented with new types of data.
Critics of this new, more business-oriented approach to recruitment worry that a hyperfocus on statistics reduces applicants to mere numbers. But Mr. Steen’s numbers helped Baylor’s admissions office identify which applicants were the most interested in the institution, and allocate more resources to developing personal relationships with those students.
From 1999 to 2006, Baylor’s acceptance rate plummeted 37 percentage points, to 42 percent, because of a rise in applications. It also saw a 10.5-percent increase in the number of minority students, and a 26-point increase in the mean SAT score of entering students.
Some of Mr. Steen’s models even helped reduce the attrition of entry-level admissions staffers, many of whom had burned out within a year because of the endless traveling their jobs required. Mr. Steen used data to determine how his staff could travel more efficiently and was able to drastically reduce the amount of time they had to spend on the road.
They now stay on the job for an average of at least two years.
Mr. Steen’s accomplishments, along with his genial manner, made it impossible for Robert B. Sloan Jr., Baylor’s former president, to imagine running Houston Baptist University without him. When Mr. Sloan left Baylor for Houston Baptist last August, he wasted no time in hiring Mr. Steen as vice president for enrollment management. “When our student recruiters here heard that we were getting him, they cheered,” says Mr. Sloan. “He’s got a low-key management style, but he’s very persistent and ambitious.”
In April of last year, the university had 600 applicants for 268 available spots. Since arriving in November, Mr. Steen has already increased that sixfold, to 3,600 applicants, and says he is on schedule to double the size of the freshman class, to 500. The average SAT scores of students enrolling next fall have risen 70 points over last year, to 1148.
Dawn Valencia
Dawn Valencia knows that many of the local high-school students she meets will attend California State University at Fullerton. She knows many others will not. Her job is to help them all.
As Fullerton’s director of university outreach, Ms. Valencia works in collaboration with the admissions office. But many of her efforts affect students long before they prepare to apply to college.
Ms. Valencia and her staff work closely with local middle and high schools, which serve a high proportion of Hispanic students. In one precollege presentation, they divide younger students into groups — they are asked to play the roles of high-school graduates, two-year-college graduates, or four-year-college graduates — and instruct them to design household budgets based on their fictitious salaries, which vary with each degree. The exercise shows students that the more they learn, the more they earn.
Her office places Cal State Fullerton students in 14 schools, where they volunteer regularly as peer advisers. They help high-school students design course sched-ules, prepare for standardized tests, compare colleges, or fill out admissions and financial-aid applications.
Ms. Valencia has emphasized the importance of recruiting parents and relatives, and not just the student. “These are the students who are going to help lift their entire family from one economic range to another,” she says. “The whole pursuit of higher education is just life changing, and those parents ask quality-of-life questions. They want to know what we’re going to do to help keep that student in school.”
Fullerton graduates more Hispanic students than any other institution in California. Fullerton officials attribute that fact in part to its strong network of academic and cultural support.
It’s a network that Ms. Valencia has helped build. When she first came to Fullerton four years ago, she determined that while community schools knew her office well, too few people on the campus did. So she started building relationships with faculty members, as well as administrators and staff members in other campus offices, inviting them to attend recruiting events.
Marlen Rivera-Martinez, a college adviser at Santa Fe High School, in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., which sent about a fifth of its graduating seniors to Fullerton last year, says many of her students feel a strong connection to Fullerton by the time they must choose a college.
“Being able to put a face and name, knowing they have someone whom they can ask questions, it gives them security, and it makes that next step for them easier,” she says. “A lot of directors, when you call them, you have to talk to their secretary. When you call Dawn, she picks up the phone.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Admissions & Student Aid Volume 53, Issue 34, Page B4
