Contributed by: Heather O’Neill
Associate Director of Admissions, Vanderbilt University

“April is the cruelest month…”
- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

As the May 1 deadline for students to submit a matriculation deposit approaches, I find myself in complete agreement with T.S. Eliot. For those in admissions, April is the cruelest month, yet also one of the most joyful and gratifying. It is a month thick with contradictions, 30 days spent vacillating between counseling denied seniors and their parents through their grief and hyping the university to eager juniors visiting campus during Spring Break, between traveling to junior college nights around the country and being on campus for admitted seniors visiting one last time before making a commitment, between this year and the next.

The transition between the final exhausting days of admission committee meetings in March and the first days of April was particularly abrupt and jarring this spring. We mailed our decision letters early on a Saturday morning and assumed that Monday would be quiet, a buffer zone between the end of reading season and the start of the avalanche of phone calls. Apparently the U.S. Postal Service made Vanderbilt admission letters their highest priority that weekend, however; because the calls came flooding in from students around the country who received their news in Monday’s mail. The end of reading season is always draining, emotionally and physically. The reality of a 33% admit rate is that each of us lost a number of battles for students in whom we became invested and that pain can make it excruciatingly difficult to maintain a professional demeanor when faced with a parent irate over his or her child’s lack of a merit scholarship offer when you know how hard you fought just to have that student admitted. Each day in April, we span the continuum of emotions from elation when a student we have championed in the process decides to attend our college to heartbreak when another does not. We are frustrated with parents who cannot understand that there were students who presented stronger applications than their child and we are grateful to those who thank us for the time we spent answering their son or daughter’s questions even though he or she was not admitted. We host admitted students for final campus visits, answer their last-minute questions (Are there soundproof rooms in the freshman residence halls where you can practice the drums? Let me find out for you…), and keep our fingers crossed that enough of them will choose us that we achieve our target freshman enrollment.

In the midst of this emotional roller coaster, we begin recruiting the current high school juniors who will comprise next year’s applicant pool. My first spring college night was on April 10th, just two weeks after we mailed decision letters. I received my first question about the admissions process ten minutes into the fair. “What do you look for in an application?” asked a shaggy-haired boy in a polo shirt and flip-flops. My mind raced as I tried to form a simple answer and I eventually stammered out something about a challenging high school curriculum, contribution to the school or local community, strong writing, etc., all the while thinking of the multitude of students with those qualifications who did not make it this year. “Just be true to yourself and do the best job you can with your applications and then let the chips fall where they may,” I told him, “It’s hard to see now, but you will end up with a great college home next year.” He looked at me quizzically and asked for our average SAT score. Clearly the wounds from this year’s selection process were still too raw so early in the spring. Not enough time had passed for me to gain perspective and remember that juniors are not immersed in this process yet, that they just want to hear some general statistics so they can begin differentiating between the hundreds of colleges whose names they know.

These spring college nights are proliferating as the rise in Early Decision and Early Action applications means that the college search process now begins in earnest in the junior year of high school for many students. They do offer a wonderful opportunity for juniors to gather information on a wide variety of schools, but, for admissions officers, the month-long split personality disorder that they induce is difficult to handle. Our loyalties are divided between the seniors we have admitted and hope to enroll and the juniors just starting the search. Like the parents and teachers they are leaving behind, we need the summer to ease our emotional attachment to this year’s seniors and find closure as we hand them off to our faculty and student life staff. Only then are we prepared to go out to high schools and college fairs across the country to meet a new group of prospective students, finally ready to fall in love all over again. So April truly is the cruelest month, forcing us to flirt with next year’s class while our hearts still belong to this year’s seniors. We look forward to May 1, when the final matriculation deposits are in the mail, our phones stop ringing off the hook, and we can turn our full attention and affection to next year’s class.

Contributed by: Wade Marbaugh
Publications Coordinator, Georgia Perimeter College

It takes a team to raise a college’s image.

The Georgia Perimeter College Office of Marketing and Public Relations carried that theme to its professional organization’s national conference in March. Director Jennifer Stephens hoped to share GPC’s experience with members of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations, which met in Austin, Texas.

GPC has seen its MPR office transform from lacking in teamwork and having a low marketing orientation to launching a highly effective branding campaign in 2005. The emerging teamwork necessary to launch the drive involved more than participation by Georgia Perimeter’s personnel. Vendors such as Stein Communications played a big part in the transition, which involved potential competitors working side by side for a common goal.

Promotion of GPC has not always been inadequate. Public Relations director Ann Knight did a great job from the 1970s through the 1990s. However, by the turn of the millennium, Georgia Perimeter was besieged with problems.

The college had grown from a quiet suburban community college — DeKalb College — to a diverse, bustling urban institution. Then suddenly the baby boom ended, dropping enrollment drastically and bringing the need for aggressive marketing strategies.

Knight’s premature death in 2000 left the MPR office in a state of transition and relative disorganization. Budget slashes came with the recession of 2001.

“The evolution of the office from a one-person PR shop to a large, fast-paced MPR office brought about some inherent problems,” Stephens says. “And there was too much internal competitiveness, aggressiveness, and lack of teamwork. Stress levels were high. We needed a marketing plan and a communications plan.”

When Stephens took the helm in 2002, she began building a stronger organizational structure and nurturing a culture of teamwork. The group attended leadership, team-building and creative workshops; internal and external communications improved; new employees strengthened the staff; the office held lunch meetings and had other fun activities at meetings; meetings became more productive.

GPC brought in a marketing consultant, Sandra Golden and Associates. Golden began to steer the office and the college toward a marketing orientation.

Subsequently, Stephens and Jeff Tarnowski, GPC’s vice president of Institutional Advancement, initiated talks with Latham and Associates, a firm specializing in branding issues. That led to extensive focus group studies by Latham at the college’s six locations.

What occurred next may be groundbreaking in business technique — at least it is unique for GPC. In May 2005, the MPR office invited all of its major vendors, even potential competitors, to an Institutional Advancement retreat at which Latham presented its findings and recommendations.

Gene Middleton, Jennifer Bagley, Bonnie McQuagge, and contract writer Scott Suhr represented Stein Communications among the vendors attending the retreat.

That Stein was invited is no surprise. Stein and GPC go way back (from Stein’s days as Phoenix Communications), as Knight contracted with them for many years to design and print college recruiting materials. Through the 2000s, Stein has continued to design and print exceptional promotional pieces for GPC.

Other vendors in attendance included EM2 Design, a Decatur firm that designed two annual reports for GPC that won first and second place in the 2005 NCMPR national competition, and J & R Kern, a Gainesville agency that has produced remarkable print and broadcast ad campaigns for GPC.

“We felt that we should get all the vendors on the same page with the branding campaign,” Stephens explains. “That way we would unify our look and feel in all our promotional efforts.”

At the meeting, Latham proposed a branding campaign that focused on everything from use of the school colors to primary messages. Having the various vendors present produced immediate results.

In fall 2005, Stein produced an award-winning recruiting package — including a colorful viewbook and search piece — that incorporates Latham’s branding recommendations.

“It couldn’t have worked out better,” says Stephens. “The recruiting pieces are in full conformity with the spirit of that branding retreat. Stein even came up with a tagline that we’ve adopted for all other materials — ‘Two years that will change your life.’”

Stephens is quick to point out that “we’re not there yet.” Much remains to be done to perfect the teamwork approach, but her office runs a much more systematic promotion and branding of the college than in previous years. Sharing the branding campaign with vendors at its conception contributed greatly to this success.

For more information on the teamwork approach and branding campaign, contact Jennifer Stephens at jstephen@gpc.edu or 678-891-2684.

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Wade Marbaugh serves as publications coordinator in the Office of Marketing and Public Relations at Georgia Perimeter College.

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Contributed by: Heather O’Neill
Associate Director of Admissions, Vanderbilt University

As the ball drops in Times Square and Dick Clark yells out “Happy New Year!” I smile and exchange kisses and high-fives with my friends, but inevitably I feel a tiny hint of dread invade my otherwise joyful heart. The turn of the new year brings me that much closer to January 3, Vanderbilt’s deadline for freshman application submission, and the awareness that reading season will soon be in full swing again. Though I have yet to experience childbirth, I imagine that it’s something like the application review process — the ultimate outcome (a new baby, a freshman class) is so captivating, so exciting that you immediately forget about all the pain involved in producing it and vow to do it again as soon as possible.

The pain associated with the application review process stems from the fact that all of us in admissions love working with high school students. We enjoy getting to know them during such a turning point in their lives, guiding them in making what is, for many of them, the first major adult decision of their lives, and reveling in all the possibilities for what their lives will become (a veterinarian who plays jazz trombone on the weekends, designs uniforms for the New York Knicks, and builds and flies her own plane — why not!). Unfortunately, the reality of our job is that we must deny admission to a large number of these wonderful human beings who have let us into their lives during the past year. At Vanderbilt this year, we will likely turn down two-thirds of the students who have applied for admission. Most of these students have compiled records that would make them successful students at Vanderbilt and certainly records that we would be immensely proud of, were they our sons and daughters. There simply is not room to admit them all, and therein lies the pain.

The review process begins in earnest each January and continues until we mail out all Regular Decision notifications at the end of March. Each fall Early Decision serves as our practice round, a time for new and experienced readers to warm up and calibrate together. Early Decision applications constitute roughly 10 percent of our total number of applications at Vanderbilt, so the Early Decision review is a mere sprint in advance of the marathon ahead at Regular Decision. From January through March, we will spend most evenings and weekends reading applications, a sacrifice that most of our family and friends cannot understand. Fortunately, we have our colleagues with whom we can share stories about obscene essays or odd teacher recommendations or students who insist on spelling Vanderbilt as Vanderbuilt, despite the fact that the name of the school is printed all over the application.

The occasional malapropism or humorous extracurricular activity (my all-time favorite is the student who founded the Big Eaters Club so that stressed out students could pig out together one night each week at an all-you-can-eat buffet) helps me to keep a sense of perspective on the application review process. It is tempting to imbue our process with too much authority, relying on it to separate the wheat from the chaff, when, at best, it is just one set of values and priorities imposed to create order out of the chaos. I like to think that our holistic review is superior to a process that admits students simply by their test scores, but who is to say which is more fair? We approach each file as a puzzle, attempting to fit all of the pieces together into a cohesive whole that will give us the complete picture of the applicant. We look at the student’s grades and curriculum to see if he or she is taking the most challenging courses available and what those grades mean relative to his or her peers’ performance. We compare the grades and curriculum to the student’s testing to see if he or she is under or over achieving in the classroom and we incorporate the letters of recommendation to bring life to the numbers, to understand how each student learns and participates in the classroom. The letters of recommendation frequently help us to understand what kind of community citizen the student has been at his or her school and what his or her involvement has meant to the school. We read the essays to hear the students’ voice and perspective and to gain insight into the person behind the grades and scores. Ideally the disparate pieces will come together to form a complete picture of the student’s time in high school, explaining any discrepancies in grades and testing or any blemishes on the transcript, so that we can make a case for admitting the student.

It is easy to read too much into the application and to get too attached to the person we have created in the file or not attached enough when the file comes across as flat or uninteresting. It is difficult to remember that we are making decisions based on the ten or fifteen pieces of paper in each applicant’s folder, that some students have access to experienced college counselors who can help them mold and shape the impression we receive from those ten pieces of paper and that others are left to their own devices. That is why it is essential for us as admissions officers to meet these students once they arrive on campus, to get to know them as three-dimensional people, and to be mindful that those few pieces of paper will never tell the full story. Three years ago we admitted a student whose application I read and thought was fairly average, though the grades and testing warranted admission. He is now one of the most prominent student leaders on campus, a voice of reason and maturity with more intellectual curiosity and a better sense of humor than I ever saw in his application. Another student that we were not able to admit stayed in touch with me during her first year of college, at first because she was interested in transferring to Vanderbilt and later to let me know she had decided to stay with her current school. Her life was none the worse for not attending Vanderbilt. We do the best we can to balance students’ welfare with institutional priorities and it is painful for us to fight for a student’s admission and lose, but by connecting with current students, we can put our review process in perspective and remember why the pain is worth it.

Contributed by: Dr. Jean Norris
Managing Partner, Norton Norris, Inc.

A colleague and I were reminiscing the other day about college admission counseling and the changes throughout the years. It seems like you can’t get through a week without hearing about unethical admission practices or a school on probation or losing accreditation. Although many stories focus on the proprietary sector, it certainly isn’t exclusive. Both of us remembered the late ’80s when we worked as admission counselors in the not-for-profit sector. You remember… before the Department of Ed stepped in and banned incentive compensation and for-profit colleges weren’t really viewed as competition. The funny thing about those days is even though we were paid to enroll students, there wasn’t a soul we worked with that would put their personal gain over the needs of a student.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not promoting the idea of going back to paying commission based on enrolled headcount. I am advocating, however, the concept that someone in the role of helping people change their lives might actually derive benefit from helping someone. Instead, we’ve put admission personnel into a no-win situation and made their job something to be feared. They have to think about everything they say or didn’t say. Could the prospective student have misinterpreted something? We listen to their telephone calls; assign them lofty enrollment targets; send them to training; bring in compliance officers to audit recruitment materials; and are frugal with their pay. All the while, they are still accountable to the higher ups to bring in academic quality and a specific volume of new students.

No wonder it’s hard to find good admission representatives and keep them. I imagine a job posting that looks something like this:

WANTED: High-energy individual who desires to meet with prospective students and their families to explore their options on purchasing a five-figure, non-tangible item. Qualifications require the ability to balance faculty desires for high-ranking students with enrollment management mandate of volume. Requires long hours, including weekend and evening work in a position that has little control or respect but responsible for the fiscal stability of the institution and all employees. Benefits include sleepless nights, travel to exotic locations (including Dubuque, Iowa), and the opportunity to have a television producer pose as a prospective student and secretly film you (on a particularly bad day) to showcase your admission counseling skills on national television.

In the end, I don’t think the issue of ethical behavior has anything to do with whether an admission counselor is paid for enrollments or not. I also don’t support that this is simply an issue of the for-profit sector (the desire for student revenue has universal appeal). I believe it has everything to do with the individual integrity of the person in the job supported by the ethical values of their institution. Perhaps we need to reexamine our intense focus on compliance and expand the view to include real leadership. After all, following the letter of the law does little to promote true ethical behavior. Let’s get back to the days of solid values and integrity that are owned, supported, and promoted by employees at all levels. Perhaps then, the stories in the news will focus on the positive model higher education administration has set for others to follow.

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Dr. Jean Norris has worked in higher education for the past 17 years in a variety of senior-level positions for both proprietary and not-for-profit colleges. Currently, Jean is a managing partner leading the training and assessment division of Norton Norris, Inc., a Chicago-based marketing consulting firm specializing in Tactical Enrollment Management®. Jean is frequently called upon to present in national venues including the American Marketing Association, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the Career College Association, the National Small College Enrollment Conference, and the Community College Enrollment Management Symposium. Recently published works focus on admission training and ethics in college admission counseling.

Are you passionate about the admissions counseling profession? Do you have a great story about students you have impacted? Would you like to be included in the only book of its kind?

Dr. Jean Norris, well known for her work in advocacy of the admission counseling profession, seeks nominations and submissions of college admissions counselors for inclusion in a book promoting the profession. If you, or someone you know, has worked in the profession for a minimum of two years, has an interesting story and would like to be considered, please contact Jean Norris directly at jean@nortonnorris.com.