By Jeremy Tiers, Senior Director of Admissions Services
2 minute read
The Christmas holiday break is a popular time to plan out new goals or reflect on the past twelve months.
With 2022 upon us, here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about most when it comes to the Higher Education/Enrollment Management landscape.
As you begin another year, I encourage you to spend a few minutes and reflect on one, two, or all twelve of these:
- Self-care needs to be a non-negotiable. You are the most important person in your life, and it’s harder to be a good friend, colleague, or leader if you’re not consistently taking care of yourself – both physically and mentally. You decide what that looks like based on what you need. Make the time.
- It’s okay to give yourself permission to go for what you want, to change something that isn’t working or is working but maybe not as efficiently or effectively as it could be, to step outside of your comfort zone, to believe in yourself, and to fail.
- Before changing a process, a specific strategy, or adding new technology, ask yourself if better communication, better training, more accountability, more personalization, and/or more data could help you produce a better result.
- Intentionality matters. Be intentional with the questions you ask prospective students and/or their parents. Be intentional with your personal growth. And if you’re a leader, ask your team questions, then listen.
- You don’t need to tell prospective students everything about your school all at once – stop vomiting information. Focus on getting or keeping their attention, being helpful, and being memorable.
- Students take action during their college, transfer, or grad school search based on feelings and emotions. How are you making them feel when they communicate with you, or when they receive communications from you/your school? Don’t underestimate the power of empathizing, personalizing, and humanizing.
- Prospective students wish colleges and universities would stop making vanilla, generalized statements, and instead incorporate more storytelling that explains how your student experience is different, and why current students think it’s unique/better. Consider using short-form video to help you accomplish this.
- Every admitted student is not equal. Prioritizing your outreach is a big key to improving yield. If you don’t have access to predictive modeling or some kind of internal scoring, it’s essential that you talk with leadership and come up with a rating system that gives you a better sense of a student’s likelihood to enroll.
- If you aren’t getting the communication or support that you need from your boss, you need to be willing to start that conversation and ask for it. It’s not inappropriate to do that no matter what your job title is.
- As a leader, you influence your team by showing them how much you care, not by how much you know.
- Two ways you can improve your productivity: Audit every minute of your day. You’ll be amazed at how many 10-15 minute blocks you could free up. Next, narrow your daily to-do list to a realistic number (i.e. 3-4 things). If you finish those, add additional things one at a time.
- When you know why you do what you do, you’ll have more power to do it and be successful.
If one of these really hit home for you, I’d love to get a quick email letting me know.
And if you found this article helpful, forward it to someone else in your campus community who could also benefit from reading it.