Trust But Verify

Christopher Burnley
Senior Consultant
The Dysart Group

Most people’s natural instinct is to trust that others are doing what they say they are doing. Most employees desire to work for an organization, and a leader, who trusts them to do their job in the best way possible. Employees will often become upset if they feel that their leaders don’t trust them to do their job. In higher education, the faculty may also express their concerns about administrative leaders who don’t seem to trust their employees.

Unfortunately, we have experienced many examples of Admissions and Financial Aid teams that simply were not doing what they claimed to be doing, and the impact of these failures often cost their institutions many millions of dollars. For colleges and universities that are tuition dependent and operating in a highly competitive environment, this can force the institution into the downward spiral of frozen salaries, reduced benefits, expense reductions, headcount reductions, and worse. If your institution hasn’t experienced any of these challenges, then this article might not be helpful for you. But if this situation feels close to home, I encourage you to strongly consider this message.

The first step to verifying is to determine what should be verified for each team and each employee. The key question to ask is what are the things that our teams need to do correctly to accomplish their desired goals.

For the Admissions team, we feel that some of the most important tasks are:

• Consistent telephone contact with prospective students
• Consistent attempted phone contact with prospective students
• Consistent personalized text messaging with prospective students
• Meaningful contacts—the quality of the interaction matters
• Applicant folder completion
• Encouraging applicant campus visits
• Completing the deposit process

Goals for each of these tasks should be established and progress toward the goal should be regularly communicated with each member of the Admissions team. There should be team-level goals that are a compilation of each counselor’s individual goals (and both should be measured and reported). Successful institutions also establish a practice of regularly reporting progress toward these goals to the executive team, including the president. Our most successful institutions have presidents and executive teams who support the admissions effort in every way, including helping to ensure accountability by regularly reviewing progress toward these goals and holding the Enrollment Management leadership team accountable for achieving them.

For the Financial Aid team, some of the most important tasks are:
• Developing a data-informed financial aid plan
• Processing accurate and complete financial aid awards in a timely manner
• Supporting prospective students through completion of the financial aid process

While the Financial Aid team is typically smaller than the Admissions team, their work is just as important, and it is often more complicated to measure their results. Verifying often includes double-checking the financial aid awards via spreadsheets or other methods. We have heard many Financial Aid teams retort that the system has been set up by system consultants to automatically calculate the awards, so there is no reason for this check. We sometimes find significant errors in the awards. In these cases, the verification process is used to improve the accuracy of the automated awarding program.

It is important to measure these goals in a data-informed manner. This often requires additional investments such as telephone and texting systems that enable the institution to confirm their efforts and results.

The process of verification can be complicated and emotionally challenging, especially for Enrollment Management personnel who have excelled along their career path because they are great relationship builders. For this reason, it is important for the Enrollment Management leadership team to partner with someone outside of the group to help them review and maintain accountability. This partner can be a consultant or a team of high-level employees from the institution who meets regularly to review the institution’s enrollment and financial aid accountability reports. By properly implementing this approach, we have seen institutions set new enrollment records and even double their incoming class sizes. As we officially head into the long-predicted enrollment cliff, it is more important than ever to ensure that the Enrollment Management team is being held accountable.