Tebow

So what does Tebow have to do with independent school admissions? I’m not sure I know. But one can’t help but to be caught up in Tebow-fever. It’s the day of the big game: Tebow vs. Brady. (Actually, Denver vs. New England.) And there is not one but two Tebow articles in today’s Wall Street Journal. That’s right: I’m not talking about the Denver Post or the Boston Globe. I’m talking about the country’s leading newspaper on business and economics. Two articles on professional football and on one particular player. And there’s an article in today’s New York Times and probably numerous papers around the country I did not have the time peruse. And there’s a good one posted to ESPN.com I read earlier today.

Personally, I abhor the excess of professional sport. Individual players make more than the payroll of teachers of most schools and probably some small school districts. And they seem to attract fans who would die before they approved a school board budget that would have an annual impact of $100 in taxes but they pay ten times that amount for season tickets to their local pro team. These premier and famous and overpaid athletes are more often than not—much more often than not—poor role models, have questionable values, and fail to use their influence and fame for good. There are exceptions, of course. Cal Ripken comes to mind. Tebow is currently the most well-known of them at the moment.

Did you know he wasn’t even the starting quarterback for Denver this season? That he saw little play at all last year? And now look how far and fast he has come. Impressive everyone is now talking about him given that he spends so much of his time helping the poor, dying, underprivileged, and downtrodden. He flies the suffering and hurting to every Denver game, home or away. And it’s not just a token. He spends time with them before and after the games, and attempts to corral others to do the same. He speaks of his faith, virginity, Baptist parents, and personal values without shame or hesitation. More than without shame or hesitation, he speaks of them with conviction, humility, sincerity, and power.

He’s a one-man brand and he attracts fans and haters alike. (Yup, sadly one of today’s articles was on those who have grown to hate him and anxiously, sadly await some fall or stumble, personal or professional.) But he is very clear in who he is, what he stands for, and in what he believes. He has won countless fans with his clarity and drawn many followers.

If he were an independent school, he’d be full with waiting lists. Long waiting lists. So what can we learn? Yes, many seem to dislike him and can’t wait for him to fail tonight but many adore him. And isn’t that the compelling argument for a strong brand: to strengthen the loyalty of those you seek and help those who are not a good match to go find their own Tebow elsewhere? Good luck to them.

Know who you are. Own who you are. Share who you are. And do it like Tebow: proudly and genuinely. And the right matches will be lining up at your admissions office door.

The great thing about tonight’s game is that whether or not Denver marches forward, Tim Tebow isn’t going to change.

Thank goodness.

A Christmas gift

So I wrote in my last post about the need to make sure we carefully steward our profession and make sure it gets the recognition that it deserves, particularly when compared to our colleagues in the world of advancement and development.

And then the New York Times announces that Jane Fried, Dean of Admission at Andover, has been named the new head at the Brearley School, a most prestigious Manhattan girls’ school. It is a good thing for Jane and a good thing for all of us that a school of Brearley’s stature found an admissions dean worthy of a headship.

Don’t get me wrong: I have zero desire whatsoever to be a head. Except for one year, my office has always been in close quarters with the head’s office and I’ve always had good relationships with my heads. So between conversation with and observation of the head, I know it’s not a job for me. A wonderful friend and head once told me if it’s not burning in your belly, don’t pursue it. It’s not worth it. But if I wanted to be a head, I would want to know that I wouldn’t be immediately discounted because I was coming up through the ranks of admissions.

As admissions deans and directors, we work with all sorts of students and families, spanning ages, grades, races, backgrounds and circumstances. After all, any family a head must work with, we worked with first. Like a head, we understand the business side of a school. We manage sizeable admissions and financial aid budgets, navigate Board politics, work with outside vendors and contractors, and closely track institutional revenue and understand its role in the overall budget. We juggle demanding schedules, keeping evening and weekend hours, and are more intimate than we’d probably like with human resource law and policy.

And, like no other than the head, we know the entire school community, programme, curriculum, and campus. No other job than head or admissions dean is expected to know pretty much all there is to know about an institution. Can your third grade teacher speak to your AP offerings and results? Can your accounts receivable clerk detail fine motor skills appropriate for kindergarten? Does your English chairperson know how many varsity sports you offer—and in what league(s) you play? Thankfully, they don’t have to know the answers. But you do! And you, your staff, and the head are probably the only ones who do.

So, I give thanks to Jane and to other admissions directors before her who have made the transition to head for forging the path for those who wish to travel it. Admission dean is a great proving ground for a headship and it is gratifying to see a school like Brearley agrees.

Congratulations, Jane. Thanks for the Christmas gift.

Meet Erin

Interesting post this week in Jacques Steinberg’s blog at the New York Times, “The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid” about campus visits. (If you don’t follow Steinberg’s blog, you should. I’ve added it to the sidebar here. You should also read his gripping book, "The Gatekeepers.") As anyone who has done this work for a while knows, what happens in higher education eventually trickles down to independent schools. Following “The Choice” has proven to be a forewarning of things to come.

The most recent post was written by Lily Altavena about the somewhat unexpected consistency of campus visits this summer. Going to a campus and checking your gut for the right elusive “fit” is still a sacred part of the process, seemingly unhampered by the uptick in plane ticket fares or prices at the pump. I have certainly seen the same in my own experience this past year. As I prepared year-ending stats last week (yes, just a fortnight before we start with year-beginning stats!), Ridley College had a 27% increase in campus visits in 2010/2011. It certainly makes me wonder—if not actually assume—that the campus visit is even more important at these more tender ages. After all, at Ridley we start boarding at age ten. How can a parent enroll their ten year old in a school they have never seen? And when possible and affordable, I would imagine we get more visits featuring both parents instead of maybe the more typical one-parent/one-student combo on the college tour circuit.

Last summer I read somewhere (I tried earnestly to find you my source to quote but I can’t) that 77% of college-bound students listed the campus visit as the most influential factor in their decision. I don’t suppose that surprises much of anyone. No matter how much we spend on marketing materials, websites or plane tickets around the world, nothing confirms a student and family’s choice more than the proverbial “gut feeling” they get from a visit. It’s actually maddening how little control we have in the end when the gut can override an expensive, expansive and sophisticated marketing and yield campaign.

So my office started thinking about this at the start of the summer. We know those 2012 families visiting early are going to be key and we wanted to cement their interest in Ridley before school started in the fall and they had to make decisions about where to file applications. But how could we take an essentially abandoned campus and make it memorable? How could we get them more than just interested but actually excited about coming to see us, sometimes with both temperature and humidity at 90%+!?

Each summer we hire a recent graduate to work in the office and give all our tours (and stuff envelopes and fetch Starbucks and take inventory of our brochures and do data entry and…). Since we have only one tour guide all summer, we decided to generate some excitement and anticipation among our visiting families. We created a video that was emailed out to families before their visit introducing Erin and hitting some of our key messages. We thought if they felt they knew her, it’d make the connection both more immediate and more authentic.

We won’t know until a year from now if we saw uncommon yield success among those families but certainly the feedback we received was most positive. Families—and, more importantly, prospective students—felt they had a connection to both Ridley and to Erin before they even stepped foot on campus. We were excited to welcome them and they were excited to be here. And by having information about Erin and about Ridley before their visit, it shaped their questions and heightened their enthusiasm.

Meet Erin here.

Long-Term Investment

We are to the point whereby the sound of airplane wheels touching down on terra firma is almost drown out by the deafening sound of Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids, etc. simultaneously clicking on and the rings, chirps and bells of missed texts, calls, and emails filling the cabin. How can we have gone so long (even on the ½ hour USAirways Shuttle flight from Reagan to LaGuardia!) without contact, without being in the know? We must catch up immediately—we must know what we have missed!

The 21st Century has ushered in an era of constant contact and immediate gratification, and the demand for convenience and speed has never been greater. Do any of the following sound familiar to you? Or about you?! You find it unreasonable that it takes the microwave 3-5 minutes to accomplish certain things. You can’t believe how endless is the wait in the Starbuck’s drive-thru lane. You think downloading a full-length feature movie from iTunes is simply exhausting. And let’s not even get started that FedEx can’t promise anything earlier than 8am the next morning to rural Africa!

That’s our life, right? The “new reality”. We adapt. What’s the big deal? Well, the potential big deal is an article from last week’s New York Times sent to me by Kristin Dabney (whose daughters attend James River Day School), in which the chairman of the economics department at Brigham Young University proclaims the price tag of elite education a long-term investment. His study—and the related newspaper article—is focused on elite higher education but I don’t think it’s a stretch to extrapolate that to elite independent school education.

His study makes the case for paying for just such an elite education (future earnings, graduate school admissions, etc.) but he does specify that families must be willing to think this way and to see the future benefit and payoff from today’s investment in tuition. Are we in the same boat? Not entirely. I think that some benefits of an independent school education are more immediate, more obvious, and more measurable. TABS has done an excellent job of providing proof points for boarding schools and NAIS to a lesser degree for the larger industry.

But what about YOUR school? Once a family wraps their head around paying independent school tuition, what proof points can you offer from your own school that are evidence of long-term payoffs for the investment as well as feed the beast that is parental immediate gratification? What is your school’s evidence?

Don’t leave the beast hungry, as it won’t wait long before it goes down the road to another school for what it needs. It is, after all, in a hurry.

Merry Christmas!

Like Attracts Like

I’m in South Africa visiting one of my dearest friends. He is just one of the “good guys”. I’ve seen him leap from his airplane seat to take the arm of elderly passenger and help her navigate herself to the lavatory and I’ve seen him bound across the street to open a door for someone whose arms were full of packages, bags, and dry cleaning. He’s that person who maintains a meticulous list of everyone’s birthday and phones them with best wishes. His gmail and Skype contact lists are bigger than my inquiry pool! He befriends everyone he meets.

So it should come as no surprise that when I met some of his friends at a dinner tonight, they seemed likewise. Like attracts like, right? And this got me to thinking about the power of branding and how its power should be equally strong at attracting the right students and dissuading the “wrong” ones. If our messages are authentic and clear, then the right students will be engaged while the wrong ones will further their search elsewhere. And that’s okay. In the end, we want appropriate applicants, not all applicants, right?

(Or do we? On a related, interesting note, check out this New York Times article on the explosion of college applications sent to me by Kristin Dabney, whose daughters attend James River Day School in Virginia.)

I was recently looking at the new website for Shimer College, the Great Books college in Chicago and noted I could enjoy their viewbook online (someday a whole other blog post on whether or not sharing your viewbook online is a good idea—I’m not convinced). Upon first inspection, one thinks this book is the antithesis of what the marketing people have been telling us what to do with our print materials. There’s way too much text, not enough or big enough pictures, and too much reading to trudge through. Who is going to bother??

Students who are excited about going to a Great Books institution. That’s who. If you’re not interested in reading the viewbook for Shimer, than you’re surely not interested in the curriculum for Shimer, or any other Great Books college. I’m not sure if this was done on purpose or not, but posting their viewbook online may be the first step in Shimer’s inquiry qualification process.

If so, bravo Shimer!