Nearly
a quarter century ago I took a three-year hiatus from my college counseling
career to take a job as admissions director at an independent school. I left college counseling reluctantly,
because I loved the school and the kids I worked with, but I was commuting 160
miles round-trip daily and my wife told me I could consider any job I wanted as
long as it was in Richmond.
I
realized quickly that the school was struggling, far more than I had been
told. I attended a Board meeting before
I started the job, and while casually reading the minutes of the previous
meeting discovered that just a month before a motion had been made and defeated
to fire the Headmaster, the person who had just hired me. I began my first day on the job, a month
before the opening of school, counting up all the returning and prospective
students and discovered that the best possible scenario was 40 students shy of
the minimum budget number. The
Headmaster had no clue. Perhaps most
telling was that when I went to the business office to get paper clips, they
asked me how many I needed. The school
couldn’t afford to give me a whole box.
Less
than two weeks before school started, I attended an emergency evening meeting
with the Headmaster and the Executive Committee of the Board. They wanted me to
make cold calls to try to recruit last minute enrollments. I refused, telling them that if word got out
on the street that we were desperate, the school would never recover. The school might need that approach or that
kind of admissions director, but I wasn’t willing to do that. I stood there waiting to be fired, but one
trustee spoke up and backed me, and the rest of the group backed down.
But
what happens when you really are desperate? A recent New York Times article about falling college enrollments mentioned
two institutions, Loyola University in New Orleans and St. Mary’s College of
Maryland, that have fallen far short of their enrollment goals this spring,
forcing them to cut their budgets by millions of dollars.
One
paragraph in the article raised eyebrows among those of us in the
profession. Loyola was reported to have
called students who had been accepted but not enrolled, including sweetening
financial-aid offers. The Times article stated that recipients of
the calls included students who had already deposited elsewhere, a violation of
the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice.
Loyola
officials responded both to the NACAC Exchange and to InsideHigherEd (which did a follow-up piece) that they had been
misunderstood, that the school had made the calls and financial aid offers only
to accepted students who hadn’t informed Loyola that they were going
elsewhere. I appreciate the
clarification from Loyola, but am also glad to know that the NACAC Admission
Practices Committee will apparently investigate based on complaints made by
NACAC members after the Times article
appeared.
I
am more intrigued by the larger questions raised by the articles.
The
most obvious has to do with May 1. What
are the ethical imperatives implied by the May 1 National Candidates Reply
date? Is May 1 the “end” of the
admissions process, such that it is improper for institutions to recruit after
that date? Should institutions like St. Mary’s and Loyola get a “pass,” given
that financial stewardship, saving employees’ jobs, and staying in business are
all in some sense ethical objectives? Are we about to see new attempts to erode
the May 1 deadline?
Let
me answer the last question first. I
certainly hope the answer is no. I
consider May 1 the most important convention for preserving sanity and ethical
practice in the college admissions world.
The May 1 date clearly provides protection for students to ensure they receive
all decisions before making a final choice, but I would also argue that it
provides protection for colleges, both as a benchmark for judging where
enrollment stands and also as a guard against deterioration into a Wild West
mentality.
It
is also clear that the admissions cycle continues past May 1 for many
institutions, including rolling admissions schools, those utilizing Wait Lists,
and schools that have to deal with considerable summer melt. There is nothing wrong with recruiting
students after May 1, IF those students haven’t deposited at another
institution. It is appropriate to
contact accepted students who have not deposited or informed you that they are
going elsewhere, but conversations must stop once it is clear that a student
has committed to another school, and financial exigency does not change that.
Are
the shortfalls faced by Loyola and St. Mary’s anomalies, unique to those institutions,
or canaries in the enrollment management coalmine? In the past week I have
heard about two other institutions with freshman classes smaller than expected,
although nowhere near the same degree as the two institutions named above. At least one tried to cut back on its discount
rate, only to find a corresponding drop in deposits. This spring I found that
economic considerations seemed to drive college decisions for my students far
more than I have ever seen before, choosing public over private and in-state
over out-of-state. I’m not sure if the
decisions are driven by ability to pay or unwillingness to pay, but if it’s
happening with my families, it has to be a wider phenomenon. Will college admissions officers need to
rethink fundamental assumptions?
The
ultimate question is whether college admissions can walk the fine line between
being an industry and being a profession.
What distinguishes the two is the degree of commitment to the public
interest as well as self-interest. Can we continue to agree on a set of
principles that serve all of us well even when they might not always serve me
well? I hope so. As Benjamin Franklin said about signing the
Declaration of independence, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall
all hang separately.”