What happens if you get hit by a bus this afternoon? Or, more realistically, hit by a Volvo station wagon driven by the parent of a child to whom you denied admission? Is there a member of staff remotely ready to step into the office of the dean or director? If you were to leave tomorrow—via ambulance or of your own choosing after winning the lottery—would there be any internal candidates for your post?
When the Admissions Leadership Council, on which I proudly serve, met this fall in Arizona, we were tasked with thinking about what our industry needs. My thought at the time—and it’s been rattling around my head ever since—is that we are not doing much as an industry to nurture, encourage, and raise the next generation of admissions directors. We do well bringing new hires into the fold and there are some opportunities for directors on the other end, but what about the middle?
For rookies, TABS offers the summer Admission Academy and SSATB has the Admission Training Institute (ATI) just before their annual meeting in September. For those at the director/dean level, SSATB also offers Senior Symposium. There is also the Essex Institute for Enrollment Management and the Crow’s Nest Institute, which are summer programmes aimed at more senior and seasoned professionals.
But what about those in the middle, those at the Assistant/Associate Director level? For them to be successful and able to remain yet move up in our profession, they need their own professional development. If we are not careful to support and treasure those we have, they may get their professional development by changing employers and seeing how things are done outside the gates of your own school and under a different dean.
It is a common cry among admissions directors that our profession needs professionalizing and that we need to demand/earn the respect (and pay!) our colleagues in development and advancement enjoy. One place to start is to take our own middle managers in the office more seriously and do what we can to make sure that we are raising the profile of the profession one assistant director at a time, both within and without our schools. Rather than shrink away, I would imagine they would welcome more responsibility, trust, and opportunity to spread their wings.
It’s a win-win-win. Win #1: you can alleviate someone’s workload (maybe yours!) by entrusting some duties to this person. Win #2: they feel good about being trusted and the opportunities to grow within your operation and may stick around. Win #3: when it’s time for them to move along (into your job or to another school), you have contributed to the next generation of our profession.
Win-win-win!
Showing posts with label TABS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TABS. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
No (bad) surprises
My last two posts were rather related—the first time I’d done that. And I’m here to tell you that I think this one is now a third in the series. It is not intentional but it is how I’m thinking these days. I must be doing something right, however, as Admissions Quest picked up my blog and highlighted it during the TABS Conference last week in Boston. Thanks, Admissions Quest!
I have been writing about denying admission to candidates—either because they are a bad fit for our schools or because there is far more demand than spaces, and difficult choices have to be made. Saying no is rarely easy and never fun, even when it is the right thing. For my whole career, however, being denied admission is something I have tried not to have come as a total surprise.
Nobody likes bad surprises. Nobody.
Of course, there is a difference between my effort to convey information and feedback that should lead to no surprises and a family’s willingness or openness to hearing said information. Like when we were children, parents sometimes metaphorically cover their ears and wail nahnahnahnahnah (is that how you spell that??) in order to not hear what you are telling them.
There are a number of things we can do. First, while nobody likes to be held to cut-offs, we can certainly publish on our websites or in our materials the range that a typical admitted student might have for a GPA or test score. We can be upfront about the number of applications we expect or have historically received relative to the number of spaces available. We can disclose legacy or sibling policies, the role of athletics in decision-making and even where we place our institutional priorities for enrollment.
We can provide tactful feedback to parents, placement directors or consultants after we have received information or met an applicant that s/he “does not appear to fall within the norms of the typical student” to whom we offer admission. I have gone so far as to contact a family and shared that something I have in front of me indicates that the admissions committee would have a difficult time offering their child admission and give them the opportunity to withdraw from consideration. (And, no, I don’t give a damn about my deny rate that I’m forced to parade in front of those who revel in such petty things. Allowing a family to graciously withdraw and focus their efforts elsewhere is the humane thing to do.)
As I said before, parents can choose to hear none of this. My experience, however, is that they will have heard it, even if only subconsciously at first. I always put some time and space between an unhappy family who has just received a denial letter and when I will respond to their call or email. That time and space typically allows them to calm down, reflect on the admissions process and information they had, and usually (although not always!) admit to themselves that a denial of admission should not have come as a complete surprise to them.
Usually.
I have been writing about denying admission to candidates—either because they are a bad fit for our schools or because there is far more demand than spaces, and difficult choices have to be made. Saying no is rarely easy and never fun, even when it is the right thing. For my whole career, however, being denied admission is something I have tried not to have come as a total surprise.
Nobody likes bad surprises. Nobody.
Of course, there is a difference between my effort to convey information and feedback that should lead to no surprises and a family’s willingness or openness to hearing said information. Like when we were children, parents sometimes metaphorically cover their ears and wail nahnahnahnahnah (is that how you spell that??) in order to not hear what you are telling them.
There are a number of things we can do. First, while nobody likes to be held to cut-offs, we can certainly publish on our websites or in our materials the range that a typical admitted student might have for a GPA or test score. We can be upfront about the number of applications we expect or have historically received relative to the number of spaces available. We can disclose legacy or sibling policies, the role of athletics in decision-making and even where we place our institutional priorities for enrollment.
We can provide tactful feedback to parents, placement directors or consultants after we have received information or met an applicant that s/he “does not appear to fall within the norms of the typical student” to whom we offer admission. I have gone so far as to contact a family and shared that something I have in front of me indicates that the admissions committee would have a difficult time offering their child admission and give them the opportunity to withdraw from consideration. (And, no, I don’t give a damn about my deny rate that I’m forced to parade in front of those who revel in such petty things. Allowing a family to graciously withdraw and focus their efforts elsewhere is the humane thing to do.)
As I said before, parents can choose to hear none of this. My experience, however, is that they will have heard it, even if only subconsciously at first. I always put some time and space between an unhappy family who has just received a denial letter and when I will respond to their call or email. That time and space typically allows them to calm down, reflect on the admissions process and information they had, and usually (although not always!) admit to themselves that a denial of admission should not have come as a complete surprise to them.
Usually.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
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!
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!
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Four Diamonds
You pull up to the TABS hotel and you’re not too impressed. Walk into the lobby and still not impressed. The wait to check-in? Not impressive. (Although the desk clerk who checked me in was most impressive! Give credit where credit is due.) But while you wait to check-in you see a AAA Four Diamond plaque on the wall. “Okay,” you think to yourself, “things must be much better up in my room if this place has four diamonds. This is, after all, just the lobby.” Well, your thinking would be wrong.
And this got me to wondering about what AAA was thinking and what little it must take to get four diamonds these days. But then that got me thinking about our schools. When we say we have great (aka "four diamond") teachers, what does that mean? What are our proof points? How do we define great? More importantly, when we say we have great teachers, how do our prospective families define great and what expectations have we established for them? We better be on or get on the same hymn sheet as our prospective families, maybe even after getting them to realign their definition of great with ours.
After all, if you get to define great for them in a way that is uniquely your school, then you have set a near impossible standard for other schools they are considering to meet. Game over.
So it seems to me that if you want to be successful, you need to differentiate yourself as well as establish some high, seemingly four diamond-esque, standards you think are uniquely yours and can be claimed by no other. And then get families to buy into that. Did you get all that?
And, oh yeah, unlike the TABS hotel, you have to be able to deliver on it.
Personal Indulgence (since it is my blog!): two pieces of exciting news this week. First, congratulations to Joe Hanrahan for being named the next head at Marianapolis. I had the incredible pleasure of working with his wife and to know them and their lovely family. They will rock that school and it will be much better for their arrival. Good luck!
And congratulations to Lynne Hay, retiring after 25 years in the Admissions Office at the Episcopal Academy (PA). She is returning to the classroom and by doing so has robbed our profession of one of its most senior, thoughtful, ethical members. Lynne is the kind of colleague I wrote about on Thanksgiving. It’s our tremendous loss not to see her again at the likes of SSATB, TABS, Essex, etc.
And this got me to wondering about what AAA was thinking and what little it must take to get four diamonds these days. But then that got me thinking about our schools. When we say we have great (aka "four diamond") teachers, what does that mean? What are our proof points? How do we define great? More importantly, when we say we have great teachers, how do our prospective families define great and what expectations have we established for them? We better be on or get on the same hymn sheet as our prospective families, maybe even after getting them to realign their definition of great with ours.
After all, if you get to define great for them in a way that is uniquely your school, then you have set a near impossible standard for other schools they are considering to meet. Game over.
So it seems to me that if you want to be successful, you need to differentiate yourself as well as establish some high, seemingly four diamond-esque, standards you think are uniquely yours and can be claimed by no other. And then get families to buy into that. Did you get all that?
And, oh yeah, unlike the TABS hotel, you have to be able to deliver on it.
Personal Indulgence (since it is my blog!): two pieces of exciting news this week. First, congratulations to Joe Hanrahan for being named the next head at Marianapolis. I had the incredible pleasure of working with his wife and to know them and their lovely family. They will rock that school and it will be much better for their arrival. Good luck!
And congratulations to Lynne Hay, retiring after 25 years in the Admissions Office at the Episcopal Academy (PA). She is returning to the classroom and by doing so has robbed our profession of one of its most senior, thoughtful, ethical members. Lynne is the kind of colleague I wrote about on Thanksgiving. It’s our tremendous loss not to see her again at the likes of SSATB, TABS, Essex, etc.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)