Years ago, he wore a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe. He was friendly but aloof, a thoughtful fellow toiling in the shade of mystique.
Back then, he was more of a sage than a salesman. It’s said that he could judge applicants’ potential by reading their essays and absorbing their words in interviews. His college’s bottom line was someone else’s concern; he was paid to counsel students, not to crunch numbers.
You may remember him as the dean of admissions. You might have heard that he has faded into the past. In many ways, this is true—assuming, of course, that he was ever real.
Today, this long-romanticized profession is evolving rapidly. The continued proliferation of titles speaks to big changes: Many colleges now have a vice president for enrollment management, or a vice president for enrollment management and marketing, or a vice president for enrollment and strategic communications, and all of their purviews exceed that of the admissions dean. On campuses that have not created such positions, the dean of admissions typically juggles duties—like overseeing marketing campaigns and social-media strategies—not found in yesterday’s job descriptions.
Whatever their titles, the heads of admissions offices and enrollment divisions share similar concerns and carry more responsibilities than ever before. Their success or failure often determines a college’s financial health and prestige. A tough economy, the shifting demographics of high-school graduates, and the intergalactic competition for students have raised the stakes of the job, as well as its profile.
In this climate, many colleges are paying big salaries and offering multiyear contracts to lure top talent. More institutions are hiring search firms to find new admissions deans and enrollment managers, just as they do when seeking a new president, provost, or football coach. In this field, too, everyone wants to hire a proven winner.
But what makes a “good” enrollment leader? What skills and traits do colleges value? The answer starts with numbers. In the contemporary caricature, our admissions dean wouldn’t be smoking a pipe—he would be studying a spreadsheet.
‘Numerical and Verbal’
A profession that once relied on anecdotes and descriptive data now runs on complex statistical analyses and market research. Knowing how to decipher enrollment outcomes is a given; knowing how to forecast the future is a must. Which students are most likely to apply, submit deposits, and matriculate? At what cost to the college? How likely will they be to graduate? Such questions echo in the modern enrollment office, which is often supported by one or more institutional researchers, as well as consulting firms that sell recruitment strategies in various flavors.
Search the job listings for top-level admissions and enrollment openings, and you will find that many colleges seek a “data-driven” leader, someone who will develop “data-informed” strategies. This past winter, for instance, Pomona College, in California, began a national search to replace Bruce J. Poch, who had stepped down after 23 years as vice president and dean of admissions. Among the qualifications listed in the job advertisement: “an ability to analyze and use data to guide decision-making and measure results.”
David W. Oxtoby, Pomona’s president, led the college’s search committee. The modern admissions dean, he says, must have a “technical, quantitative facility,” the ability to delve into the relationship between a student’s SAT score and her subsequent performance in college, or why some kinds of students are more likely to enroll than others. Moreover, Pomona had decided to merge its admissions and financial-aid offices (a change many colleges have made already). So the new dean would need to speak the language of costs.
That’s not to say anyone wanted to hire an accountant. Numbers, Mr. Oxtoby says, have not diminished the importance of communication skills. Pomona’s search committee sought someone who could articulate the value of a liberal-arts education, and relate to faculty members. The “ideal” candidate, the job listing said, would also know how to talk to the news media; today’s admissions leaders are also public-relations specialists with loud microphones.
“The job is numerical and verbal,” Mr. Oxtoby says. “It’s still all about relationships. You still need a sense of that person on the other end of the admissions process. If you lose that, you just become another technocrat, and you’ve lost the reason why you’re doing this job.”
Pomona interviewed a dozen candidates before hiring Seth Allen, dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell College, in Iowa. Soon to occupy one of the premier jobs in admissions, Mr. Allen, 43, represents the next generation of enrollment chiefs. They’ve ascended during an era of high competition, learning how to market their colleges and massage the metrics that define success in admissions.
Although idealism may inform their work, they are clear-eyed realists. They are not introverts, for they must collaborate constantly with faculty members and other campus offices. They are diplomats who must manage competing desires: those of administrators who want to enroll more first-generation and low-income applicants, professors who want more students with high SAT scores, trustees who want to lower the tuition-discount rate. “Twenty years ago,” Mr. Allen says, “there were not as many wants.”
Drawn to statistics at an early age, Mr. Allen earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at the Johns Hopkins University in 1990. He first worked as an admissions counselor for his alma mater, a cutting-edge laboratory in the then-burgeoning science of enrollment management. Mr. Allen learned how predictive modeling could project net tuition revenue, how many biology majors would enroll, and a hundred other outcomes.
Later Mr. Allen became the university’s director of enrollment planning, research, and technology, a title that captured the profession’s increasing sophistication. While most colleges were still operating in a pen-and-paper world, he helped create the university’s first online admissions application.
In the 1990s, selective institutions intensified their recruitment of prospective students, and Dickinson College was no exception. As dean of admissions at the Pennsylvania college, Mr. Allen oversaw a surge in applications that enabled it to become increasingly selective. Average SAT scores rose, as did enrollments of minority students.
A nationwide application boom was under way. By the time Mr. Allen came to Grinnell, in 2007, many colleges had adopted a kitchen-sink recruitment strategy: Visit more high schools, buy more names of prospective applicants, and throw as many e-mails and letters at them as possible. “We were hounding students to get them to pay attention to Grinnell,” Mr. Allen says.
More applicants doesn’t necessarily mean better applicants, however. Four years ago, Mr. Allen decided to refine his recruitment strategy to emphasize quality over quantity. How? By shrinking the college’s prospect pool. Since then, his office has done more to identify and engage students who are genuinely interested in the college.
That move, coupled with the recession, has shrunk the college’s application total. In the 2007-8 cycle, Grinnell received 3,900 applications; for this fall’s freshman class, it received 3,000. During that time, however, Grinnell increased its enrollment of minority, low-income, and first-generation students, as well as those from other countries.
“This wouldn’t have happened if apps had been skyrocketing, and we didn’t know who all these applicants were,” Mr. Allen says. “My experience helped me get off the treadmill of thinking that more applications are better. They’re still important, but as a crude measure, they’re not the most important thing.”
In other words, Mr. Allen had to re-evaluate his relationship with one of the most powerful numbers in his profession. He predicts that in a marketplace saturated with messaging, colleges will need to rethink recruitment in the coming years. “The new enrollment manager,” he says, “is going to have to take a more-sophisticated approach to pierce through all that stuff, to make an impression on students.”
A Professionalized Field
As the importance of enrollment jobs has grown, the field has become more professionalized. Typically, top-level enrollment officers expect to move from job to job instead of staying put on one campus for a decade or more. Salaries have grown steadily, especially at private colleges that depend highly on tuition. A recent survey by Witt/Kieffer, a search firm that serves colleges, found that 45 percent of enrollment leaders make at least $100,000, and nearly a third earn $150,000 or more.
Helping colleges find those leaders has also become a bigger business. Companies that have long specialized in searches for presidents and academic administrators have added divisions that focus on admissions and enrollment officers. A few firms, including Lahti Search Consultants, focus exclusively on the latter.
When Terry Lahti founded the business, in 1997, hers was a one-woman operation. Now six people work for the firm, which conducts 15 to 30 enrollment searches a year. Hiring someone away isn’t always easy: One year Ms. Lahti saw three candidates for open jobs withdraw their names after receiving counteroffers from their own colleges.
The list of qualities Ms. Lahti’s clients seek isn’t changing so much as growing. “Colleges don’t want analog in a digital world,” she says. “Trustees are pressing enrollment people for robust conversations and analysis, so they need to speak the language, to have financial and quantitative skills. Yet all institutions ultimately want an educator who understands what’s happening in the classroom, who can mentor younger staff members.”
That’s become more difficult to do in a realm with so many demands, so much built-in suspense. Today’s enrollment leader needs a stomach for stress. W. Kent Barnds, vice president for enrollment, communication, and planning at Augustana College, in Illinois, says the pressures of the job are constant. “Last year,” he recalls, “it was our best year ever, and I said, ‘OK, let’s take five minutes to celebrate this, then let’s get back to work on next year’s class.’”
Mr. Barnds thrives on the adrenaline surge that each recruitment cycle brings. He offers a telling simile. “I view admissions as a campaign,” he says. “My campaign is to get 725 students to elect this place every year. It gives me a rush every time—I love the pressure to perform.”
Thick skin helps, too. Parents of rejected applicants complain; sometimes, they yell. Administrators and professors grumble. No matter how strong this year’s freshman class might be, by any measure, enrollment officials often grapple with the feeling that it could always be better. One former admissions dean recalls trustees complaining after applications had increased by 10 percent in one year: “They said, ‘Well, everybody else’s are up, too. ... ‘“
Mr. Barnds suggests that people who need a lot of affirmation from their jobs may find the enrollment field unrewarding. At the colleges where Mr. Barnds has worked, roughly three out of four accepted students turn around and reject the college. Meanwhile, admissions officers at increasingly selective colleges sometimes struggle with a paradox: Their job is to develop relationships with students, only to turn around and reject vast numbers of them.
Such dilemmas demand thoughtful leadership, a commitment to training a staff. Like many of his counterparts, however, Mr. Barnds worries about a leadership vacuum in his profession. As top-level enrollment officers move from job to job, they take institutional memory with them. As they preside over increasingly larger staffs, there’s less time for one-on-one training. “You cannot be an effective admissions leader unless you are cultivating the next generation of leaders,” he says.
Mr. Barnds has developed a performance-assessment tool for admissions officers. It’s designed to measure their personal achievements and contributions to the staff. In his wallet he keeps a laminated card that contains a list of questions, and he gives one to each employee who reports to him. One question asks: “What is keeping you up at night?” Another says: “Are you actively working to define your work philosophy (i.e., what do you stand for professionally)?”
Holding Up Mirrors
Some longtime observers of the profession worry that the escalating pressures of the job will weed out thoughtful counselors who are most concerned with the best interests of students. After all, not everyone who’s drawn to education wants to become a marketer in chief.
Renee Wruck Bischoff, associate director of college counseling at the Hawken School, in Ohio, says that more and more admissions counselors who visit her school seem like salespeople touting a product. She often hears them deliver “pitches” in which they offer their college’s application totals and test-score averages as evidence of quality. “A number of the younger staff members are not educators,” she says. “They’re all about numbers because their bosses are all about numbers. What are we doing about the next generation of admissions leaders?”
Larry Momo has asked the same question. Mr. Momo, director of college counseling at the Trinity School, in New York City, worked as an admissions officer for years at Columbia University. When he left, colleges had yet to create Web pages to transmit their messages to the world. Some colleges, he says, now treat applicants not as students but as “target audiences.”
“When I first started in admissions, people in those jobs viewed themselves as humanists, as educators mediating the process for students,” he says. “Now the needs of the institution are much more at the center of the process. There’s less recognition of the way in which policies play out on the psyches of kids.”
The prevalence of this view continues to shape the public’s understanding of applying to college. Like it or not, today’s admissions and enrollment chiefs must operate in a realm where many constituents suspect that time and institutional vanity have robbed the profession of its innocence.
Moreover, there are growing demands for transparency. Counselors, parents, and legislators all have questions about who gets in and why. Among colleges that conduct holistic reviews of applicants, the answers are not easy. “We can give you as much information as possible about how we make decisions,” says Mildred R. Johnson, director of admissions at Virginia Tech. “Beyond that, so many things might play into why a student didn’t get admitted.”
Still, a good admissions leader, Ms. Johnson believes, serves as an ambassador, not just for a particular college but also for an entire profession. Even after becoming the senior admissions officer at Virginia Tech, she has continued to travel six weeks out of the year, visiting high schools in the Richmond area. Talking to counselors and parents, she says, helps her understand admissions trends in ways that longitudinal data do not.
“You have intuition about things, an instinct,” she says. “If you’re not out there at the pulse of what’s happening, you miss a lot.”
Among counselors in the region, Ms. Johnson’s known as someone who counsels students instead of just recruiting them. At one high school a while back, she struck up a conversation with a young man named Brian Equi, who ended up enrolling at Virginia Tech after several follow-up conversations.
Mr. Equi liked Ms. Johnson, so much so that he named his cat after her. She keeps a photograph of Mildred on her desk. It’s a reminder, she says, that in this profession, one never knows the impact she might have on a student.
Yesterday’s dean of admissions might have said the same thing. And surely he would have been baffled by Virginia Tech’s recent decision to create a new position—vice president for enrollment management, to whom Ms. Johnson will report. Then again, yesterday’s dean could not have imagined the complexity of today’s enrollment challenges. After all, he was too busy being an idealist, and peering into students’ eyes, wasn’t he?
Donald R. Hossler, a professor of education and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, cautions against romanticizing the past. “The search for more resources has always been part of American higher education,” Mr. Hossler wrote in The Chronicle in 2004. “The struggle for income and students is not something new.”
What’s changed are the tools of that struggle, known as “enrollment-management tactics,” such as tuition discounting and early decision. Twenty years ago, Mr. Hossler says, a college president would have said that a good admissions dean needed a “firm handshake and a warm smile.” Yet those attributes, he suggests, were not necessarily the most crucial to the dean’s success. They may have just reflected the qualities that people wanted—and still want—to associate with the gatekeepers of our idealized havens of learning.
Mr. Hossler, former vice chancellor for enrollment services at Indiana, says enrollment chiefs use data to “hold up mirrors so that administrators and deans can see reflections of what’s going on.” What students are dropping out? Why aren’t more Hispanic students enrolling? Who’s asking for more financial aid?
Still, even the best mirrors have limits. “What looks good on a spreadsheet or in an algorithm doesn’t always tell you everything,” Mr. Hossler says. And so the challenge for the ever-evolving enrollment leader is to stay knee-deep in numbers without drowning in them.
