Valued Input is Employee Retention
We hear from clients consistently that it can be hard to hire and retain good talent. While this is a challenge for higher ed as a whole (see below), it feels especially true of professionals in admissions and marketing, who not only make up the bulk of our readers but also have some of the highest rates of turnover in higher education.
In 2020, CUPA-HR reported that 7.9% of non-hourly higher ed employees turned over from the prior year. The rate in 2023? 14.3%, nearly double what it had been just three years prior. These rates are higher for admissions and marketing departments, and more than one in three enrollment management professionals is “likely” or “very likely” to look for other employment in the next year:
The reasons are both many and incredibly simple. When surveyed, people say they want a new job for (1) more money and (2) more flexible/remote work. The latter should be a simpler solution for higher education - if the pandemic showed the efficacy of online education, it also showed the viability of remote or hybrid work (a topic for another newsletter).
But more than money, more than the freedom to work via Zoom a couple days a week, the frustration I hear from enrollment and marketing professionals who are thinking of leaving is this: they are increasingly expected to deliver results that are directly impacted by forces beyond their control.
By “forces beyond their control,” I don’t mean just exogenous factors like the whims of 17- and 18-year-olds or demographic changes but rather institutional decisions that affect enrollment and marketing, and over which these departments exert little control. Issues such as pricing, academic programs, facilities, responses to political issues, strategic planning, etc. (the list goes on) directly impact the work of the teams tasked with marketing and selling the “product.” Failing to include marketing and admissions in these decisions not only misaligns the institution with its audience, but can also cause internal people to feel sidelined, pressured, and underappreciated.
Admissions and Marketing teams often over-index on accountability and under-index on input. Over time, this causes people, good people, to go to different institutions, join an agency, leave the profession, or find another role like a fractional CMO. To wit:
Source: Google Trends
There’s no “one size fits all” solution, but at a minimum admissions and marketing heads should be part of Executive Cabinet and should be instrumentally involved in strategic planning.
In place of a true solution, I offer one implication and one prediction:
IMPLICATION: Money and flexibility are important, but people will put up with under-market pay and trudging into the office five days a week if they feel valued. University leadership must not confuse ownership of a result (i.e., an enrollment goal) with ownership of the process that produces the result or else more people will leave.
PREDICTION: In the absence of earning a true seat at the table, I expect we will see a fully outsourced admissions and/or marketing team in the next few years. Frustrated with trying to hire and retain the right people or make the right process work, a college will go from “fractional CMO” to “fractional marketing team” (or something analogous in enrollment management). They’ll give up the fixed costs of a full team and try entrusting the process to someone else. Who knows, maybe someone will read this and tell me that’s already happened.
If I sound dour, it’s partly because I am. In the past six months, I’ve known three VPs for Enrollment Management or Marketing who left their roles because they grew tired of the finger-pointing when poor results were directly attributable to other institutional decisions. JFK said, “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Too often, Admissions and Marketing are the ones left holding the bag.
But I don’t believe this is fated or beyond control. If university leadership solicits input commensurate with accountability, colleges can hold onto more good people and, in the process, better align their own decision-making with the market. After all, who knows the market better than people in Admissions and Marketing? When they are given a seat at the table, everyone is better off.