Welcome, Heather!

So Heather Hoerle at NAIS is our new leader of SSATB. Congratulations to the search committee. None of these volunteers imagined the firestorm of this fall when they kindly agreed to serve on the board of our professional organization. They have all put in more hours than they ever planned or desired. No good deed goes unpunished, right?

I imagine this will be like taking the cork off the bottle that holds hostage the genie. Or I hope it is. Heather has been the lone voice crying in the admissions wilderness at NAIS, an organization that gives little regard to our industry or the work we do. (Do you know, for example, that in its training for new heads, NAIS provides no time for admissions but two days for development??)

It is a challenging time in our business. Some smaller schools are closing due to decreasing enrolments and medium-sized schools are scrambling, with immeasurable pressure on the admissions office but little additional resources or manpower to deliver. Meanwhile, we are top-heavy with a number of senior members of our fraternity recently retired, announcing retirement this year, or contemplating retirement. And/or wishing the balance in their TIAA-CREF accounts would have let them retired when they had planned.

Demands for financial aid are growing, technology makes us feel like the hamster running on the wheel to nowhere, and everyone at our school looks to us to save the financial day. In my two decades in admissions there has never been a greater need for national leadership and voice for our work and our people. Let us hope that unshackled from NAIS that Heather can be just that beacon.

Welcome, Heather. We have been waiting for you.