Today’s enrollment officials need a mind for marketing and a nose for numbers. Thick skin helps, too. And they must accept that, at any moment, their heads could roll.
As the coast-to-coast competition for students intensifies, a profession that rides the whims of teenagers has become even more uncertain. Demographic shifts, declining family incomes, and rising tuition have complicated the task of recruiting and retaining students. On many campuses, shrinking budgets make revenue a daily worry. The belt is tight, and it hurts.
Meanwhile, another story is quietly unfolding. The men and women who run admissions and enrollment offices face growing scrutiny. Like football coaches, those in charge of bringing in students occupy hot seats watched by restless crowds. Presidents and trustees ask them tough questions: How do we get more applications? Where can we find more wealthy students? Why isn’t our campus more diverse? What could we do to improve our ranking?
When results aren’t delivered, dismissals often follow. Over the last year, dozens of enrollment and admissions leaders have lost their jobs. Others, worn down, have quit. “The expectations are that you’ve got to do these incredible, unrealistic things,” says an enrollment dean ousted by a private college on the West Coast this summer. No matter how many goals are met, he says, “it’s never good enough, it’s just never good enough.”
That refrain echoes far and wide. In interviews with The Chronicle, 15 current and former enrollment officials discussed their recent departures from top-level jobs. Although many of those forced out had signed severance agreements with confidentiality clauses, they spoke candidly in private conversations. Most described a relentless push by college leaders for more of everything. Applicant pools could always be bigger, tuition revenue greater, student bodies more diverse, test scores higher.
At very selective colleges, say some of those interviewed, the pursuit of prestige and higher rankings has warped perceptions of the enrollment office’s purpose. Elsewhere, colleges’ unwillingness to adapt to a weak economy and shrinking pools of high-school graduates has chained enrollment officials to what they see as impractical—or delusional—ambitions.
“There are institutions in denial about reality,” says an enrollment vice president recently fired by a small private college in New York. “There aren’t enough students to go around, and colleges need a scapegoat.”
Turnover is a constant in high-stakes professions. Enrollment has never given any guarantees—everyone knows that when they sign up.
The criteria for evaluating some campus leaders are fuzzy. Did the provost have a better year than last? Did the vice president for student affairs fall 17 percent short of her goal? For enrollment officials, performance is quantifiable: Each cycle generates metrics for all to see. And some people just can’t cut it.
Still, some veterans of the field say they haven’t seen so many of their colleagues on the move since the late 1980s and early 90s, if ever. Either enrollment officials aren’t as good at their jobs as they once were, or something else is afoot.
“There used to be a tenure mentality,” says Steve LeMenager, a former director of admission at Princeton University. “If you did a good job, met your goals within a range, you’d have a position. Now, institutions see greener pastures. There’s this concept that everyone is replaceable, that we don’t need someone who’s been doing this for 20 years—we need someone with success in marketing and recruitment.”
Mr. LeMenager, who left Princeton seven years ago to start a college-counseling firm, knows several longtime admissions officials who have soured on the profession and its competitive pressures. Some have shied away from leadership positions; others have changed careers.
The recent departures reflect a deeper shift in higher education, he believes. As more colleges come to see admissions and enrollment as engines of all-out competition—for status or survival—the work has grown more intense. “For better or worse, it just became a different profession,” says Mr. LeMenager. “There’s been a shift more toward a concern for the corporation, the university as a corporation.”
When a new president is hired, many gears are set in motion. Typically, he or she arrives with bold plans for improving the college. Enrollment, the lifeblood of any institution, is a natural place to start. That can mean changes in strategy, personnel, or both.
This past February, Wheaton College in Massachusetts appointed a new president, Dennis Hanno, formerly provost and senior vice president at Babson College. Three months later, Wheaton announced that its enrollment chief, Gail Berson, was stepping down. A news release described the departure as “Berson’s decision.” Only it wasn’t, she says: “I was told that the new president wanted to move in a different direction. That was sort of that.”
A spokesman for Wheaton declined to comment on Ms. Berson’s departure, though he noted that the Board of Trustees had recently voted to grant her the title “dean of admission and financial aid emerita.”
Her replacement? Also from Babson.
The move surprised Ms. Berson, who had worked on the campus for the past 30 years. “I wish Wheaton the very best,” she says. “I am sad to be separated from it.”
She started her admissions career there, spent several years at other institutions, then returned to the college in 1984. She helped steer the campus—which had enrolled only women—through the transition to coeducation in the late 80s and early 90s. Later promoted to vice president for enrollment and marketing, she significantly increased the diversity and academic quality of incoming students.
The collegiality of the small campus hooked Ms. Berson. So, too, did the evolving challenges of recruitment at a place that lacked the draw of nearby liberal-arts colleges with bigger names. Over the years she turned down offers from more-selective institutions, including, she says, one from Amherst College, widely considered a plum job.
Many admissions folk of her generation shun the “M-word"—marketing. But Ms. Berson had taken to it, earning a master’s degree in marketing and communications. Sophisticated recruitment plans are essential for colleges like Wheaton, with high price tags and modest endowments. The small, tuition-driven institutions need enough students whose families are willing to pay—a lot—for the experience. That demands a competitive mind-set.
The challenge, Ms. Berson believed, was to balance each new campaign—glossy booklets, email blasts—with traditional aspects of admissions work, like mentoring staff members and building one-on-one relationships with high-school counselors and students. Even after becoming a vice president, she would spend three weeks a year on recruitment trips, in the United States and abroad. “I always thought being in the trenches,” she says, “made you a more successful admissions person.”
Ms. Berson is widely respected among admissions officers and high-school counselors, some of whom were rattled by her sudden exit. After all, it proved that long-term success doesn’t deliver job security, and neither do the results of the last admissions cycle. Ms. Berson finished strongly. This fall’s freshmen at Wheaton were chosen from the college’s largest applicant pool ever: More than 4,000 students applied, a one-year increase of 18 percent.
Colby College also saw the departure of a prominent enrollment official this past summer. Terry Cowdrey, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, left in July, soon after the arrival of a new president, David A. Greene. Colby officials say Ms. Cowdrey left voluntarily. She tells The Chronicle the same but declines to comment further. In recent months several members of the admissions staff have left the college; two of them say Ms. Cowdrey and Mr. Greene held different views of what the admissions strategy should be.
Mr. Greene had come from a job as executive vice president at the University of Chicago, which, through an expansive recruitment campaign, has tripled its applicant pool since 2006, lowering its acceptance rate in the process. Before arriving at Colby, Mr. Greene said he wanted to double the number of applicants there—a big goal for a small liberal-arts college in Maine.
For this fall’s incoming class, Colby got roughly 5,100 applicants, accepted 28 percent of them, and enrolled about 480. Some presidents would give their last Brooks Brothers suit for a 10:1 ratio of applicants to seats. So why does Colby want so many more?
Mr. Greene sees the goal as a means to an end: attracting more talented students from all over. “For decades and decades, the way admissions was done was largely with a handshake,” he says—maintaining relationships with a small group of high schools. Now, he says, “our mission would dictate that we try to reach a much broader group of students, who are in Albuquerque or Mumbai, in Shanghai and in Boise, as well as in New York City and Boston.”
The quest for 10,000 applications is a way to measure the college’s progress in expanding its reach. “It’s somewhat ambition-setting,” says Mr. Greene. “I want to make sure,” he says of all efforts at Colby, “we’re thinking not just about marginal improvements here or there. We need to think more ambitiously about what we can become.” (He would also like to see the college raise twice as much money per year.)
The goal of doubling applications, says a former member of Colby’s admissions staff speaking on the condition of anonymity, is unnecessary—and unrealistic. “The admissions numbers are very healthy, but every place is going to hit a ceiling at some point,” says the former employee. “There’s unreasonable pressure to produce large numbers of apps, and it’s because schools want to be something they’re not. If you’re Colby, you want to be Dartmouth. If you’re Dartmouth, you want to be Harvard.”
Arrive as the savior, leave as the scapegoat. Admissions and enrollment officials who’ve spent their careers at less-selective colleges know that routine. The annual campaign to fill beds—shoveling in enough revenue while striving to improve the class—defines the experience of many who work outside the narrow band of wealthy, super-selective institutions.
After starting at Saint Martin’s University, in Washington State, three years ago, Scott A. Schulz developed a long-term plan to accomplish numerous goals: attract stronger students, maintain diversity, improve retention, and raise the profile of the small institution.
Mr. Schulz, who became dean of enrollment in 2012, knew that such changes would not happen overnight. The years he spent as program director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice convinced him of that.
“There’s a sequential nature to transforming enrollment,” he says. To attract more students—to apply and to come—the university first had to serve them better, he believed, to show that the campus was a place where students succeed.
Last fall first-year enrollment fell by nearly a third from the previous year, he says, to 158. Yet other indicators were positive. From 2011 to 2013, incoming students’ test scores and grade-point averages increased to the highest levels on record at Saint Martin’s. Its retention rate jumped by 10 percentage points. And the university was enrolling a greater percentage of out-of-state students.
This past spring, inquiries for the fall 2015 class were way up—a sign, perhaps, that Mr. Schulz’s plan was working. But come June, he was cleaning out his office.
Mr. Schulz, who says he resigned, is now looking for another job. His position at Saint Martin’s was eliminated, officials there say. The provost and vice president for academic affairs is now overseeing admissions and enrollment.
Speaking generally about the profession, Mr. Schulz says he understands the bind in which many college leaders find themselves. “They’re under severe pressure to meet revenue needs that continue to go up. These institutions need long-term perspective,” he says, but, “unfortunately, market forces often lead to greater short-term demands.” He calls it “survival-mode mentality.”
Student recruitment is complicated, but it isn’t alchemy. An enrollment chief has only so many buttons to push, levers to pull. While a new hire inherits his predecessor’s challenges, he can’t conjure full-pay or straight-A students from thin air.
“Institutions think a new person’s going to come in and wave a magic wand,” says Karen Full. “The next person’s not going to make that much of a difference, but people are afraid to say that aloud because nobody wants to hear it.”
In the last 23 years, Ms. Full has worked for six institutions, most recently as director of undergraduate admissions at Kettering University, in Michigan. Arriving in the fall of 2010, she focused on improving yield, the percentage of accepted students who enroll. Two years later, incoming students had increased by 27 percent; tuition revenue was up, too.
But last fall, the numbers indicated that Kettering wouldn’t see a third straight year of growth. The university, which had hired a new president and vice president for enrollment management since Ms. Full’s arrival, informed her that she would no longer be the admissions director, she says. “Having had a couple of very good years,” she recalls, “I felt betrayed, unappreciated.”
Ms. Full, who’s now working as an enrollment consultant, hopes to return to admissions. She likes the minutiae of recruitment, the feeling that, in some small way, she helps students succeed. And she’s frank about the challenges. “There’s tremendous pressure to keep on increasing the numbers,” she says, “and it’s never fast enough.”
When Roger Kieffer started as senior vice president for enrollment at Trinity International University, back in 2000, he recalls campus leaders’ hanging on his every word. He had 16 years of enrollment experience at three other Christian colleges, and he had been successful at each stop.
At Trinity, Mr. Kieffer says, he oversaw some good years and some bad ones. Since the economy tanked, in 2008, however, enrollment at the Illinois institution has declined steadily. “It hasn’t been a pretty picture,” he says. After a few rough years, he perceived that key officials were tuning him out.
Sure, there were things he could have done better, says Mr. Kieffer, who recently left his post. But he saw other problems he couldn’t fix. At one point, he determined that the university hadn’t added a new program in 12 years. “We were so static academically,” he says.
He grew frustrated with a widely held notion on campuses: that enrollment offices can market their way out of any dilemma. “There’s this idea that if we just tell the story better, we will get more students,” he says. That thinking, he argues, misunderstands enrollment management and the plight of small colleges in the postrecession economy.
Creating a new branding campaign might seem easier than assessing whether academic programs are meeting students’ needs. But one isn’t a substitute for the other. “It’s not what we say on our website, or how many hands we shake, or how many applications we get,” Mr. Kieffer says. “No, it’s, What are we offering?”
He sees enrollment as a two-part puzzle: getting prospective students to want what a college offers, and offering what they want. “A lot of schools right now are desperate,” he says, “focusing solely on getting people to want what they offer.”
Echoing many enrollment officials, he describes the challenge of helping trustees understand the field. Some of those he worked with appreciated its complexity; others did not. He recalls a board member’s putting a hand on his arm and asking if the admissions staff had considered visiting high schools, as if that were some new strategy they had yet to try.
Before Mr. Kieffer left, the board formed an enrollment task force, led by a faculty member. “I got chewed up and spit out by that,” he says. “I didn’t think I would last much longer.” So in May he retired and moved to Tennessee, where he runs a success-coaching firm that works with businesses and nonprofit organizations, as well as colleges.
He loves Trinity, he says. But he worries about the direction the field is headed: “I said, You know what? I’m too old for this.”
Those who led the profession into the 21st century are signing off. And they aren’t necessarily waiting until retirement age to do so.
“Some are saying it’s time to step aside and let the next generation lead, and they’re leaving 10 years earlier than what was expected,” says Terry Lahti, a former dean of admissions at Kalamazoo College. “It’s the intensity, the overlapping pressures from year to year. It doesn’t get any easier.”
Back in 1997, Ms. Lahti founded Lahti Search Consultants, focusing exclusively on admissions and enrollment leaders. Her business has grown along with demand. In the last 12 months or so, one of the busiest stretches ever, her firm handled 28 searches. “Big places, small places, underendowed, overendowed,” she says.
Yet the pools of candidates are smaller than they have been, for several reasons. A wave of recent retirements. High salaries (“platinum handcuffs”) that keep some successful enrollment leaders from leaving. Presidents and trustees who refuse to consider anyone without decades of experience.
And some of those who leave admissions posts aren’t seeking another one. This past summer, Doug Badger left his job as director of admission at Grinnell College to become director of college counseling at a private high school in Colorado. For one thing, he wanted a better work-life balance, less travel. While studying his Marriott Rewards statement a while back, he found that he had spent the equivalent of two of the past 15 years in hotels. “That was kind of a wake-up call,” he says.
Mr. Badger, whose first job was in teaching, missed the close relationship with students. “I always came at this as an educator,” he says. As a senior admissions official, he interacted with prospective applicants only occasionally. His job was to promote the institution, improve its reputation, and protect its bottom line. “When I got back in the office,” he says, “I was much more like a businessman.”
The tension between marketing and mission has long defined the field. It’s likely to deepen as colleges turn to other sectors—branding, finance—for enrollment leaders. A recent survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling revealed concerns that pressure on those leaders will “heighten a ‘sales’ approach to recruitment.”
But is selling a college really a new idea? Michael Barron doesn’t think so. “Some of my colleagues will look at me and say, ‘Shame on you,’ but I do think in a very real, practical way, I’ve always been in sales,” he says. “It’s just that what I was selling had the value to change lives.”
Mr. Barron, assistant provost for enrollment management and executive director of admissions at the University of Iowa, began his career in Texas in 1969. As the first full-time admission officer for Angelo State University, he drove thousands of miles in his new Buick Skylark, visiting one high school after another.
In those days he lugged around a carousel slide projector loaded with campus photographs. Angelo State’s president, Mr. Barron recalls, wanted to expand its reach to other parts of the state. “Come here, associate with us,” Mr. Barron would tell prospective applicants, “and you will succeed.” The message hasn’t changed, he says: “Now we just have more-sophisticated tools.”
A mind for marketing, a nose for numbers, and thick skin. Perhaps none of those attributes is as important as communicating well with administrators, professors, and trustees. A football coach might face scrutiny, but on any campus, plenty of people couldn’t care less about gridiron glory. Everyone has a stake in enrollment outcomes, so the person in charge must field constant questions.
Over the years, Mr. Barron has felt those questions gobble up more and more time, making it harder, he says, to mentor his staff, to contemplate big-picture questions about how enrollment strategies serve the university’s mission. He has also seen a growing demand for “business intelligence": data to underpin every move.
“Having to explain our world to others, to justify decisions and calm nerves, that’s been mounting and growing over time, and it has added pressure to people,” Mr. Barron says. “Your ability to adapt and not feel personally challenged or beaten down has a lot to say about how long you stay.”
Recently, Mr. Barron, 67, announced his retirement. He was ready for a change, he says, eager to spend more time with his family. He also wanted to leave on a high note, as Iowa welcomes its largest, most diverse and decorated freshman class ever.
Mr. Barron’s last day is October 1. Though he doesn’t know exactly what he will do after that, he does know this: For the first time in 45 years, three months, two weeks, and one day, nobody will ask him how the numbers are looking.
