There aren’t many individuals who can claim legitimately to have brought about substantial, even revolutionary, change in the way that college admission is conducted. Recently we lost one of them.
Bill Royall passed away on June 25 at the age of 74, fourteen months after being diagnosed with ALS. He was an entrepreneur known in the college admissions world for having founded Royall & Company, the largest and most prominent direct marketing, student recruitment, and enrollment-management consulting firm serving college and universities. In 2015 Royall & Company was sold to The Advisory Board for $850 million, and today it works with more than 1700 colleges and universities as a subsidiary of EAB, which split off from The Advisory Board in 2018.
Bill Royall was also a philanthropist and patron of the arts in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. He was most recently the driving force behind the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ acquisition of Kehinde Wiley’s sculpture, “Rumors of War.” That sculpture, purchased for $2 million and unveiled last December, served as an important generational and racial counterbalance to the five Confederate monuments lining Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Four of those statues have been removed over the past several weeks in the wake of national and local protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the senseless murder of George Floyd.
Royall came to the higher education marketplace somewhat by accident. He started in politics, serving as Executive Director of the Virginia Republican Party and as press secretary to Governor John Dalton. In 1983 he started Royall & Company to provide direct marketing and fundraising support to political campaigns and nonprofit organizations. Five years later he took on his first higher-education client, Hampden-Sydney College. His college business grew from there and by 1995 Royall & Company was working exclusively with colleges and universities.
Royall’s method was using direct mail to expand the funnel, increasing inquiries and applications. That revolutionary approach found a niche as college admission morphed into enrollment management and adopted more sophisticated marketing practices. The company moved into other areas—design, financial aid modeling, yield prediction—as the enrollment management landscape evolved. Today, when data mining and analytics are increasingly important, EAB is at the forefront of research into student behavior. All of that has its origins in Bill Royall’s creative vision and support for his client colleges.
Perhaps the best example of that came after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. In the aftermath of Katrina, Tulane University relocated its admissions office 1000 miles away to Royall & Company’s headquarters in Richmond for several months to recruit its next class while the university recovered from the effects of the hurricane on the city. As a result of that experience, Tulane’s Dean of Admission, Dick Whiteside, became recognized within enrollment management and higher education as an expert on emergency planning and recovery, and he ultimately became one of numerous former admission deans to work for Royall & Company and EAB. Tragically, Whiteside died a year ago from injuries suffered in an automobile accident caused by a drunk driver.
The number of colleges and universities that have used Royall & Company’s services is a powerful testament to the impact that Bill Royall had on college admission. Given that this is a remembrance and not a eulogy, it is also worth noting that not everyone was enamored with the Royall & Company approach.
Some of the criticisms speak to larger questions and concerns about the direction of college admission.
Take, for instance, one of Royall & Company’s inventions, the “snap app,” an application sent to a student with most fields already populated. I have heard critics refer to it as the “crap app” (and in the interest of full disclosure, I may have used that term a time or two myself).
I know admission deans who question the efficacy of the snap app, arguing the approach ramps up application numbers but that those applications are “soft,” less likely to yield an enrolled student. There are colleges that have stopped using Royall for that reason.
For most of my career, the guiding assumption in admission has been that increasing applications is good, no matter where those applications come from, and the snap app generally achieves that goal. But does it make a difference how a student applies?
That is not a new discussion. I remember when admission officers debated whether an application submitted through the Common Application was as “serious” an application as one submitted through the institution’s own application. That debate ended long ago, and today colleges that use the Common or Coalition applications rarely have their own institutional app as well. Is the snap app less “serious” than other ways of applying? Today we have analytics that answer that question precisely.
There is a more philosophical question attached to the snap app. How easy should it be to apply to college? Both the Common and Coalition apps exist to make it easier for a student to apply to college, and the trend today is to make applying easier, with fewer requirements and barriers. The test-optional debate is the latest front for that debate. The argument for the use of snap apps is that it removes barriers to applying. Given that students applying by snap app often receive fee waivers, the snap app might be argued to be an engine for access.
The other side of that argument is that the snap app fails the “Goldilocks test,” which says that applying to college should be neither too easy nor too hard. Are students who apply by snap app actively engaged in the application process, and does that matter? What do we want the experience of applying to college to mean? We believe that going to college should be transformational for a student. Should applying to college be as well?
Other criticisms of the Royall approach are grounded in a deeper concern about the role of vendors in college admission. That rears its head each fall (but maybe not this fall) in complaints about the commercialism on display in the exhibit hall at the NACAC Conference. For years Royall & Company has been an anchor tenant for that exhibit hall.
I remember attending a conference venting session a few years back where Royall & Company was included in the pantheon of college admission villains, along with the College Board and the U.S. News college rankings. I did not then, and do not now, agree with that characterization. If there is anything to be learned from the current debate about monuments and heroes, it is that every one of us has a complex story that defies easy characterization. Bill Royall’s success was due to the fact that he served his college clients exceedingly well.
One of those clients was my close friend Anita Garland, who retired last year as Dean of Admissions at Hampden-Sydney College, Royall & Company’s first college client. I asked her for her thoughts on what Bill Royall had meant to her and H-SC.
“On my last day in the office before my retirement, in the last hour, the last call I made was to Bill Royall. Bill was a mentor and a friend to so many of us. He understood the pressure that deans of admissions were under, and he really cared about his college partners. Even as his college partners grew into the hundreds, Bill maintained the personal feel of a small business with R&C.
“Bill had such a vision and was always a step ahead of the curve. He always seemed to know what we needed before we needed it, and assured us that it would work, and we were smart enough to believe him. I learned so much about marketing from him.
“Bill never relinquished a chance to build a new relationship—a new partner, a new collaboration—which is what his business—and our business, for that matter—is all about. Bill always made his partners feel like Royall-ty, and he never closed a conversation without thanking us for our business. It says a great deal about Bill that he kept his first client throughout the years he ran his business.“
Bill Royall, R.I.P. You will be missed.