Ken Anselment likes to talk about admissions, the profession that threw its arms around him back in the 1990s and never let go. He likes to listen to other folks talk about the work, too, which is to say he’s a generous conversationalist. Give him a few minutes and you won’t even notice when an hour gallops away.
Anselment, a former vice president for enrollment management at Lawrence University, in Wisconsin, is the host of Admissions Leadership Podcast, known as the ALP, which he started in 2019. Since then, dozens of enrollment leaders and prominent players in the admissions realm have joined him for in-depth discussions of the high-stakes profession and its challenges. Often, guests discuss how they’ve learned to manage their demanding jobs without losing their morals or their marbles. (Full disclosure: This reporter has twice been a guest on the podcast.)
A while back, Anselment decided to turn the collective insights he had gathered into a book. This fall, he self-published Climbing the Admissions Leadership Peak: Lessons from the ALP. It’s full of quotes and anecdotes from people who’ve joined him for more than 80 episodes of the podcast. There are chapters on using data, ethics, networking, communicating effectively, and promoting college access and equity.
And the book contains vivid snippets of personal stories about dealing with self-doubt, learning how to say no, and infusing admissions practices with empathy. “At the end of the day, if you’re screwing kids over and not doing it the right way,” one enrollment official asks, “why are you even doing it?”
In another passage, a former enrollment leader reflects on a world where some high-school students can access the internet in the comfort of their own rooms at home while others must rely on McDonald’s for WiFi. It isn’t enough to acknowledge such disparities, she argues: Admissions leaders must also try to understand and diminish their impacts.
Anselment is now vice president for enrollment management at RHB, a higher-education consulting firm. Recently, he spoke with The Chronicle about professional challenges, lessons in leadership, and why enrollment officials should pick up their megaphones.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Podcasts are a 21st-century medium. Why create a dead-tree compendium of insights?
Angel Pérez [chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling] kindly offered to do the forward. He calls the book a love letter to the profession, and that’s what it is. I think about all the people I have learned from — and the reason I did the podcast, and why I’ve done the book, is to distill some of that knowledge, wisdom, and advice from those who have done this work, who have struggled with it, who have thrived in it.
I wanted to present this to people who are either in leadership roles or aspire to leadership roles in college admission and enrollment. I want them to really see this as a profession that has a profound impact on other human beings. I’ve had the power of being able to meet a lot of wonderful people in this profession, and it feels like my responsibility to share that with everybody, whether it’s a president, a chief enrollment officer, or a team of admissions officers.
I interviewed you last year for an article about the pressures pushing some enrollment leaders out of their jobs. Since then, it’s been an especially difficult stretch for folks in this profession, who are grappling with demographic shifts, the end of race-conscious admissions, and the still-unfolding federal-aid crisis. When you look at the field now, what do you see?
It took going through all of those episodes over the past several years to restore my faith in where things might be going. The problems are hard; they’re getting harder. Any one of the things that happened this year would be enough to deal with. But to get all three of them in one was sort of an accelerant.
But many enrollment leaders are sticking around. As terrible as the pandemic was — and it burned a lot of folks out — it also created the resilience for many of the people who have stayed. I have faith in this profession and the people in it. I believe that they’re still gonna find a way. And if that makes me some sort of cheesy, corny, overly hopeful person, so be it.
Many people who work in higher education don’t understand what enrollment leaders do. What should folks on college campuses know about the job?
Often, especially in times of institutional stress, people will look at the admissions office either with gratitude or with, “You need to do more.” You’ll hear chief enrollment officers and admissions directors say “We’re not miracle workers.” But the pressure is put on the front-line recruitment team to make miracles happen when, quite often, there are things that make it difficult to recruit to that environment.
What kinds of things?
It goes back to the four Ps — product, price, promotion, and place. We throw a lot of energy at promotion and price, but sometimes forget the all-important P of product, which is: Are we offering what the market wants or needs? And how do we know that? Is it a modern, relevant curriculum that students want to pay what we’re asking them to pay for?
Sometimes those difficult conversations on campus keep getting kicked down the road, and, meanwhile, the pressure is put on front-line admissions folks to keep doing what they’re doing, but do more of it and do it better. And, oh, by the way, cut the discount rate.
I’ve written about how early-career admissions officers are often underpaid, overworked, and eager for training and mentoring that they don’t get. What questions should institutional leaders be asking if they care about the well-being of their front-line admissions staff and helping future leaders develop?
In one of the footnotes in the book, I went on a mini-rant about professional-development budgets. When institutions are feeling constrained, they often look at those as extraneous expenditures. But those are investments institutions need to be making in people who are responsible for generating a significant amount of the institutional revenue.
Should we be paying better salaries? Yes, of course. But we also should be investing in professional development by sending people to conferences and making sure they’re getting connected with professional organizations. It’s important for them to realize that there’s a bigger, broader network of professionals outside their own institution. Sometimes it can get pretty myopic when you’re doing that work you have to do. So it’s good to be connected as often as you can to thousands of fellow travelers.
You describe the prevalent notion that colleges can “simply market and recruit themselves into a stronger position.” How does one push back on that?
It’s a long game — you can’t do it in a meeting. It takes a concerted effort.
In my previous role, when a news story came out that I knew institutional leaders would read, I saw it as partly my job as a chief enrollment officer to also be the chief translator of what journalists often write about. You get to be the instructor and help your colleagues understand the rest of the story. It’s a persistent game of educating people who don’t live in your world. Your job is to help them understand enough of it so that they can be your partners rather than your antagonists.
You write that top jobs in admissions and enrollment come with a “megaphone,” a responsibility to educate stakeholders, including the public, about their work. Over time, and especially since the end of race-conscious admissions, I’ve found that more enrollment officials are reluctant to speak publicly. Now, some colleges won’t even let them do any interviews. Does this worry you?
I can see that there’s some of that fear of saying the wrong thing, especially in a highly litigious environment. And I get why some institutions are deciding that they’re not going to comment on world events that aren’t necessarily directly in their purview.
But when it comes to enrollment issues, to things that directly affect students and their access to institutions, they’re missing an opportunity if they’re not talking about that. Some of the hesitancy has to do with trust and training. You can help the former by investing in the latter. It may even be just training your chief enrollment officer on how to talk to journalists, how to talk to community groups — how to represent your institution, as well as the industry and the profession.
Now, more than ever, it’s important for colleges to let enrollment leaders either have those conversations or help their presidents become more informed speakers about enrollment issues. If we’re not telling our own story, someone else is going to tell it for us.
What can a college president do, or stop doing, to better support their enrollment leaders?
I think it starts with asking rather than telling, respecting the professional perspective that people in those roles are bringing to the table, and showing empathy. This job is really hard work, and it takes an entire institution for it to be successful. So it’s important to ask: How can we help and support you?
And it’s important to treat admissions folks as more than just the people who know the numbers. We’re more than just an ATM for the institution.
OK, we’ve talked about what enrollment officials are up against. But let’s hold up a mirror to the profession, too. What can enrollment leaders do to better position themselves to use their knowledge and influence to spark changes in strategy or prompt important discussions?
As cliché as it might sound: Control the controllables. You can’t control demographics, the Supreme Court, or the FAFSA. But you can control even just the basic daily blocking and tackling of being a good human being to your colleagues.
Also, some folks hesitate to put their oar in the water when it comes to having a voice. But when you get to a certain level at your institution, you get the opportunity to speak up. Is it going to be 100-percent great, or magic, every time you open your mouth? Probably not. I speak from experience as someone who stuck his foot in his foot in his mouth a few times.
What’s something worth speaking up about?
Many of us lament how much attention is focused on hyper-selective institutions. But you can either lament that, or you can, on your own, start to tell the story of the institution that’s highly tuition-driven, or the regional college that’s serving this so-called nontraditional population. Whether you’re educating with your megaphone or you’re educating the parent who is going through the college-search process for the first time, we get to be representatives of “the rest of the story” when it comes to college admissions.
Let’s brighten things up. What are the most meaningful rewards that sustain enrollment leaders?
I had an example of this while I was visiting an enrollment VP at a college. We went to lunch in the café, and as we were walking out, a family recognized him. The dad started chatting with him, and the student was kind of hanging out there. The VP asked her questions, and then I started asking her all sorts of questions. That reflex just kicked in, and I was back to 23-year-old me, when I started in this profession, feeling the excitement and the joy of helping a student get excited about their own college journey.
That’s nothing you can do at scale; you do that one-on-one. But that’s the thing that keeps bringing a lot of us back.
