Enrollment Managers’ No. 1 Job: Communicating With Campus Leaders and Professors

Enrollment leaders must always look ahead to the next semester, the next recruitment cycle. So Pamela T. Horne feels a bit strange now that she has no more projections to study. This fall, for the first time in decades, she won’t be part of an elaborate campaign to land new students and retain existing ones.

Ms. Horne, formerly vice provost for enrollment management at Purdue University, retired in June after more than 40 years in higher education. Way back, she fell for admissions work because she wanted to help students through the crucial transition between high school and college. In her first admissions job, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, she learned how to crunch the numbers that help colleges attract and evaluate applicants. Soon she was hooked.

As King Data came to rule the enrollment field, as technology took over the industry, Ms. Horne absorbed everything she could, moving from one public university to another before settling in at Purdue.

One big lesson: An enrollment leader must communicate well, educating campus officials about the complexities and trade-offs that define the profession. Because leaders come and go, and institutional goals shift, that communication never stops.

Scrutiny, too, is constant, Ms. Horne learned. Everyone watches the enrollment scoreboard. “Many faculty members couldn’t care less about football,” she said, “but they care if their classes are full, about the quality of students.”

Ms. Horne, who is 65, spoke with The Chronicle about the importance of understanding data, being transparent about institutional challenges, and keeping higher education affordable for middle-income families. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your field is often described as mix of art and science. How did you manage the inherent tension between qualitative and quantitative aspects of the job?

I’ve never felt as if they’re mutually exclusive. Twenty years ago, I tried to show admissions counselors how data might help them with a high-school visit, saying, “Here are the students with extremely high test scores, here are the women interested in engineering, you might want to reach out to them.” It was using data in ways that could personalize the visit.

At Michigan, I had some rural districts I got to visit, and there was a small high school where kids just didn’t get high test scores. A young man who had done all he could in that environment applied to the engineering program, but he didn’t have strong ACT scores. I went back to the data and found that every year there were one or two students from that high school who went on to succeed in engineering at Michigan. So when I went to advocate for this student, I had the data to support that he could be successful. He was admitted, and I recall that he was successful.

That’s a great story. But in a world where test scores often matter a lot, is that story an exception to the rule?

We have a tendency to forget that the vast number of colleges admit more than 50 percent of students who apply. And so that story is actually going to be more the rule than the exception. In the end, it depends on what the goals of the institution are. Sometimes the goal is the metric.

Like when a college seeks more applications just to have more applications. Are we too fixated on some metrics?

One thing that concerns me a little bit is that right now we are so worried about the number and percentage of Pell-eligible students at selective and highly selective institutions. I worry about low- and middle-income students who aren’t eligible for Pell, but who can’t pay the full freight. They aren’t counted in that metric, and we might be missing the full picture.

Did that concern prompt you to change anything at Purdue?

We did find that families with incomes over $100,000 were somewhat overrepresented, but so were those who had family incomes under $30,000. Those in the middle, particularly around the $50,000 to $70,000 mark, were underrepresented.

What we decided was to create some scholarships for middle-income Indiana residents. We started with $2,000 a year, and we recently doubled it. We’ve seen somewhat of an increase in students enrolling from those brackets, and an increase in yield among those students as well. And our cost-of-attendance freeze has helped with that over the last five years.

The costs of attending college are among the reasons many Americans are deeply skeptical of higher education. What else explains that skepticism?

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One reason is indeed sticker price, and I do think we can be lowering our sticker price or holding it steady. I also think we haven’t done a good enough job of talking about higher education. We need more higher-ed leaders out there telling the truth about what happens on campus, who can recognize some of our flaws and challenges, who can tell more of those stories about how graduates’ lives have been changed. We need to share data more, about earnings as well as other outcomes, such as those related to diversity.

Then there’s the relationship between the coursework students take in high school and college success later on. We’re not connecting those dots. Taking one math course beyond Algebra II is associated with doubling your chances of graduating from college. We’re not sharing those things enough with students and parents, even school boards.

Some teenagers don’t want to end up on a college campus. What about them?

There’s a message that gets lost in the “Gee, not everyone has to go to college” conversation. I agree that not everyone needs to go to college, but I want my carpenter to understand geometry! We forget that students have to master some of the basics in education before they can be successful in the trades. We’ve lost the conversation about how higher education benefits more than just the individual graduate.

I would always tell my admissions officers, particularly those who worked with school districts where there were real challenges, to talk about rigorous courses, about why academic preparation is really important, about why hard work, perseverance, and asking for help up is important. We trained our staff to know what to say when a 15-year-old came up to them at a college fair and said, “I don’t want to take chemistry, it’s hard.”

Admissions officers often have captive audiences. And they have a big responsibility to talk about getting students from here to there. Communication is a big part of it.

Why is communication so crucial — particularly with other campus officials?

Faculty can be somewhat removed from the whole enrollment function. I came to believe that transparency with our data was really important, so that deans and faculty leaders knew what we were doing and why, and what the pressures were in terms of limited resources. Sometimes that meant talking about things that weren’t going well, like the yield rate for a particular college was down. Faculty appreciate seeing data, even if it isn’t news they want to hear.

Also, we shared what financial-aid packages looked like for in- and out-of-state students. Seeing what, say, a family that makes $70,000 a year would have to pay can come as a surprise to trustees, especially if they are people of some means. So we put data out there in a visual way.

Let’s pretend I’m a frazzled, midcareer admissions director hoping to move up the ladder and become an enrollment chief. But I’m also anxious about all the challenges that come with the job. What would you tell me?

If you find joy in your relationships with counselors, in mentoring staff members, in talking to students and families, in making public presentations, you may want to stay an admissions director and be the very best admissions director you can be.

If, however, you think the complexity of how admissions relates to the academic offerings of an institution is really intriguing, and how it relates to the financial-aid and student-success program is really intriguing, then go for the enrollment job.

What about this rumor that enrollment leaders never sleep?

(Laughs) You don’t get a lot of sleep between April and May 2nd. I have seldom lost sleep over the numbers, though. It’s been more over how my office, and, perhaps, myself are being perceived.

You might lose some sleep because there will always be critics, no matter how great your numbers are. The successful enrollment manager makes everyone a little bit unhappy. If you make the chief financial officer really happy by overshooting your enrollment target, you’re going to make the director of housing unhappy. If you can’t live with occasionally ticking someone off, it’s probably not the job for you.

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.