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.

The D-Word

Friends were visiting from Washington, D.C. this weekend. Actually, it was my first admissions boss ever and her husband although she long ago stopped being my boss but thankfully has remained my good friend. But you can still feel free to blame her for my presence in our profession—she encouraged me!

This was their first visit and so I took them on the obligatory tour of campus—after, of course, the obligatory visit to Niagara Falls. While touring, she commented on the stately grandeur of our d*rms (see, I can’t even type it out!). It was at this point that I struck with the precision of a rattle snake and corrected the error of her ways. “They’re houses,” I exclaimed, and went on to explain Ridley’s residential commitment and philosophy as the largest boarding programme in the province. Being a true and traditional boarding school, you approach your residential program with the utmost seriousness.

Now my friend has since left the world of admissions (it IS possible apparently) and is in project management for a real estate development corporation. Part of her work involves overseeing apartment complexes throughout the mid-Atlantic. As we continued on our tour of Ridley she explained to me that her company is very clear on their expectation that those who live in the apartments are considered residents, not tenants (the T-word). In doing so, they send a message, if only a reinforcing one amongst themselves, about how they do business and how they treat and engage their customers.

These little rules might seem silly or trivial but, in my experience, they aid in creating a mindset and an approach to our work that helps dictate our actions and priorities. At a previous school where I was director, we implemented an internal office motto of “Families First” to remind ourselves that walk-ins, late arriving appointments, and telephone calls were all our top priority and not an interruption to our day or our duties. Our enrollment did not allow us to roll our eyes at any of these people and instead we needed to embrace them. And from my perspective as the objective outsider who had joined this office, it worked. I saw a decidedly different—and better—outlook from the staff and how they approached some of our more challenging prospective families. And, even more importantly, it was reflected in the numbers.

The famous organizational guru Stephen Covey and author of the The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People coined the phrase, “Start with the end in mind.” If we think houses not d*orms, and residents not tenants, then we just may shape the thinking of our staffs and our colleagues towards our enrollments ends.

And wouldn’t our schools (if not the world) be a better place if everyone thought as we did??

No Salesman Sundays

There is a car dealership in the GTA (that’s Greater Toronto Area for my American friends) that has blitzed the radio airwaves with a new campaign. And if the goal of such a blitz is to create chatter about your business or product, they win! Everybody is talking about this ad—and the concept behind it.

This car dealership has introduced No Salesman Sundays. The dealership will be open and there will be a skeleton staff on hand to distribute keys and the like but they promise not a salesman will be found. They won’t be lurking behind SUV’s, jumping out from between cars in the parking lot, offering a coffee and their friendship, or any of the other things one pictures when they fear the gauntlet of buying a new car.

But you will be able to roam the lot and sit in the cars, look at materials, and take test drives, all at your leisure and all without the hungry eyes of a salesman following you around the joint. Come and go as you like, stay as long or as little as you like. I’m almost tempted to go just to see if they garner a crowd or not. Even if they don’t, the pitch is certainly the hot topic of mid-August.

What would this look like at our schools? Do we throw out some pastries and coffee on a Sunday morning, unlock all the buildings and classrooms and labs, and then walk away? Maybe we staff some teachers around to answer questions but we promise prospective families nobody will be asking questions of them, not the least of which is their name and email address.

We have 115 CCT cameras on the 108 acres of Ridley. I foresee some sort of prep school version of “Sell This House”. We secretly record their reactions and commentary on the security cameras, play it back for all to see, and then run around trying to fix what we think were legitimate criticisms. And then invite them back.

Could be fun I suppose. But who has time for fun?

I was a vegan.

I’m fresh off a visit to see friends in San Francisco. If you haven’t been, that’s a city with an unmatched coffee culture, at least unmatched in North America. On Saturday, we went to the Saturday coffee place, which, for a non-coffee drinker like me, renders me clueless as to why it can’t also be the Monday to Friday coffee place. Or at least also the Sunday coffee place. (And yes we went somewhere else entirely different on Sunday.) See: aforementioned unmatched coffee culture.

Here’s the exchange between the barista and me:

Me: I’d like large non-fat latte and a small Pellegrino.
BD*: Would you like any pastry with that?
Me: No, thank you. Just the drinks.
BD: The pastries are amazing here. It’s what we’re known for.
Me: They look mighty good but I think we’re fine, thank you.
BD: Dude, I was a vegan before I worked here.

Stage direction: Cut to me walking away with a cinnamon roll dripping with caramel sauce and a blueberry muffin the size of a hubcap.

Now you might think I got snookered into some excellent salesmanship. And maybe I did but his hair that suggested the lack of shampoo and scissors, the tattoos running up and down his arms, the clothes fresh from the Salvation Army runways of Paris, and his quintessential vegan absence of any body fat or muscle (i.e. lanky) all seemed to validate his story. If it wasn’t true, he sure as heck looked the part. Welcome to San Francisco.

The brilliant guys at TargetX who advises colleges and universities on admissions always encourage tour guides to think, “Stories, not statistics. People, not programs.” BD could have told me how popular his pastries were or something about how supposedly healthy I’d find the blueberry muffin (program/statistics) but instead he made it personal, authentic, and he made the connection (people/stories). And I walked away with two seriously large pastries, both in size and price. Plus my drinks.

There’s got to be a lesson there somewhere.

*Barista Dude

I'm sorry.

22,000 people thought they’d won the American Dream. And they had. But erroneously. And then the U.S. State Department shook them on the shoulder and awoke them from their dream and took it all away. It broke my heart to read this article in the Wall Street Journal. There’s a bit of a pit in my stomach for these people.

And then I remembered when I was the U.S. State Department. In a previous school in a previous time (with previous technology), we used to send a congratulations note from the headmaster a week after each candidate’s offer of admission. But those letters were run on the same day as the offers of admission—just post-dated. I don’t recall the circumstances (no doubt having suppressed them) or the details, but one year we changed our mind about a student after we’d run the letters, and we pulled their offer and instead sent a denial.

But we failed to pull the follow up letter from the headmaster.

You can imagine my utter confusion when I returned to my office one afternoon to a very excited voicemail from this student’s mother. She was completely baffled but didn’t care because their family dreams were realized and for reasons unknown we’d changed our mind and offered her son admission. Seemingly from the headmaster no less!

What can you do? It took a bit of time to figure out what happened and then I had to call the mother immediately before they told every neighbor, grandparent, and classmate. In the end, it still was not a good match and despite our mistake we had to hold true to what we believed was best for this boy, which was not to offer admission. It was one of the lowest and most difficult points of my admissions career. Proud dream maker had just become humbled dream killer.

I owned the mistake. I apologized endlessly. I explained what happened. I wrote a follow up note to both parents and kid. When I read about the 22,000 immigrants and conceived this post, I was going to title it “Not Proud”. But that’s not fair. I remember how I felt and can only imagine what those in the State Department are feeling this week.

For the boy in Philadelphia back in the 1990’s and for these 22,000 immigrants today, I’m sorry.

Just be.

Maybe it’s the fact that our school years have all come to a close and we’re all just a wee bit exhausted, but I have talked to more colleagues in the last month who seem to be teetering on the edge. And apparently I’m seemingly one of them as the chaplain recently called me into his office out of concern and to inquire how I’m doing. I thought I was doing fine. Best I not reflect too much and discover otherwise!

We seem tired from the year but also tired from what we perceive to be battles with heads, boards, faculties and even our own staffs. We’re restless, looking longingly on the other side of the fence to see if the grass is actually greener over there. There certainly have been an uncommon number of late spring director changes to invite curiosity. Upon closer inspection, however, it doesn’t seem to be. Even schools, directors and offices that appear from the outside to have a perfect admissions life really don’t when you peel back the cover. The diversity is never right, athletics is never happy, and/or the financial aid budget was never sufficient.

And then there are our schools. They seem restless as well, looking at colleagues and competitors down the road and thinking it’s seemingly better there. They appear to raise more money, generate more ivy league-bound graduates, and have deeper waiting pools. They appear… It’s not that our schools shouldn’t always strive to be better but they sometimes do so absent of taking an accounting of all that is good and actually going well. Goals are admirable but goals don’t negate the success and accomplishments of today. Or they shouldn’t.

What is going on? Why can’t we just be? Why can’t our schools just be? Hopefully the hallways empty of students and faculty and the slower pace of summer that comes with warmer, longer days will result in a quieter pace, a reflection on all that is good and promising in our lives and in our schools, and newfound optimism and enthusiasm for 2011-2012.

Chocolate Fudge Brownie

Hello from the Essex Institute, a wonderful (and rockin’) professional development opportunity for anyone in prep school admissions. I highly recommend it but just don’t let your spouse or head see where we stay.

This evening they made us do one of those hideous “get to know the person to your right and introduce them to the group” exercises. Actually, it was about a decade ago when I met my dear friend Pam McKenna from Hopkins Schools at the Essex Institute. We immediately bonded over our mutual loathing of such exercises. “I’m not here to make friends!”

Well, Drew Lineberger from St. James School had to introduce Craig from The Linsly School. This school is apparently the only boarding school in West Virginia (shocking!) and one of only two independent schools in all of WV. When this was pointed out, someone shouted out (was it you Shelia, from Packard Colleagiate??), “What’s your point”??!! Through the cloud of martinis, merlots, and beers, the question was actually quite valid. What was the point that they were the only boarding school in West Virginia?

Actually, I was next to Drew and my job was to introduce him. In our chat beforehand, he mentioned he had two kids. I asked him “who cares”? I told him that it was all about differentiation and that having two kids was nothing special. He then went on to tell me that he had two cats (I’ve forgiven him). Their names were “Ben” & “Jerry”. Bingo! Who cares he has two kids. Shortly after my introduction of him, someone across the table had two kids—of the same age! I elbowed Drew, hard!

Nobody will remember his kids—or the kids of the person on the other side of the table—but I bet you they remember “Ben” & “Jerry”. And who cares if you’re the only boarding school in all of West Virginia? Big whoop. Tell me something I care about and then I’ll remember your school.

Who cares about being unique. It’s all about being memorable and valuable. If you’re the only boarding school in a state/province that doesn’t care about boarding schools, what good does it do you? Being different doesn't fill schools or beds. Having value does.

On the other hand, do you think those two cats at St. James could fetch me some Chocolate Fudge Brownie or maybe some Cookie Dough??