How Career Services Can Partner with Enrollment to Drive Student Success

Jonathan Wehner:

As a career services leader, you got to pivot your mindset a little bit. You have to pivot that mindset of thinking like, okay, we are a student services function, and you got to move more into this mindset of like, wow, we are an institutional mission function.

And that can be a big leap. Particularly somebody that maybe is like first time in terms of leading a career services or career exploration development office. I think that can be a big leap even from, okay, I understand this context that’s going out here to like, okay, how do I position my office? How do I position our efforts in the context of what’s going on? How do I become a player in that aisle? I think that’s the first and most basic thing that in terms of partnership you need to understand is life. It’s about individual students, but it’s also about this macro conversation that we’re having from a higher education standpoint.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Jonathan Wehner, the AVP of Enrollment Strategy at Carnegie, a higher ed marketing and enrollment strategy firm.

Before joining Carnegie last year, Jonathan worked as a senior leader in higher ed enrollment management for 20 years, serving several Ohio institutions, including Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Cleveland State. I also had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan in person about a month ago when he spoke at uConnect’s Career Everywhere conference in Boston. He shared so much great information there that I knew I had to have him on the podcast so you all can learn from him too. Thank you for being here, Jonathan.

Jonathan Wehner:

Thanks for having me, Meredith. I’m really excited and glad we get to continue the conversation from Boston.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I am super glad to have you. It was great to meet you last month, and I am super excited to talk to you today about how career services can connect into institutional enrollment and student success strategy. This is obviously a very hot topic right now as national attention just continues to focus on the ROI of a college degree, declining enrollment, career outcomes and so on.

And I think we know that career services and enrollment teams should be collaborating closely, and we’ve had a few folks with career services backgrounds on the pod recently to talk about those kinds of things from their perspective, share what they’re doing. So I’m really looking forward to continuing that conversation with you today, Jonathan, and drawing from your many years of experience as a senior enrollment leader, I think our audience will appreciate getting to hear how you think through things and what advice you have for them. So before I get into my questions, Jonathan, is there anything else you’d like to add about yourself, your background or your role there at Carnegie?

Jonathan Wehner:

Thanks, Meredith. I’m excited to be here. I’m just about to celebrate my one-year anniversary at Carnegie. Again, Carnegie is a higher education marketing enrollment strategy firm. My role there is ABP of Enrollment Strategy. I work with clients across the country to develop integrated enrollment solutions, data-driven strategies to drive enrollment outcomes. And that can mean everything from advising on CRM implementation, developing search strategies, helping with staffing development training, thinking about financial aid. So I’m really lucky I get to work on behalf of a lot of great colleges and universities. I get to work with a great team and I get to work on a lot of interesting topics.

My background, I was not a good college student. I was incredibly indecisive about what I wanted to do in terms of a career, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I kind of fell into enrollment management and I say those things not to discount the career services team at the college of university. I think this was more about me and where I was, but I think that’s one of the reasons I’m really passionate about career exploration development.

When I was in college almost 30 years ago, enrollment management was not a career we learned about. We learned about being doctors and being engineers and being lawyers, and those were the things that the careers that we learned about. So falling into this career… First, I would’ve been a terrible doctor and I probably would’ve been a worse engineer. But in falling into it, I think it’s one of the reasons I’m passionate about this topic.

Across my career, I did my undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University. Believe it or not, I said I was a terrible college student, I meant it. I actually, we don’t say drop out anymore, now we say stop out. But I stopped out of school and went to work in industry for a while, found out that I really wanted to complete my college degree, and so I went back to school and I was working at Case Western full-time and finished my undergraduate degree part-time.

So I was one of those non-traditional students where I was working full-time, doing undergraduate, but had some success, went on to get my MBA there and advanced in their enrollment management division. Eventually left my alma mater at Case Western to move across the street to the Cleveland Institute of Art, which is a small little college of art and design. And I was Vice President for Enrollment Management and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid there for four years and then eventually moved on to Cleveland State University where I was Vice President and Dean of Admission, Enrollment Management and Student Success.

And in that division of enrollment management, student success had 120 plus staff members. That division included undergraduate admission and included financial aid, it included the registrar, but it also included some things that are not in your traditional enrollment management portfolio, institutional research. It included academic advising, it included academic and it also included career services, which during my time there we rebranded as career exploration and development. So you’ll hear me talk about career exploration and development a lot.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Wow, that’s quite the career and I bet in 20 years working in higher ed enrollment management, you probably have seen a lot of changes. A lot has happened in the last 20 years.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah. I mean, when I got into enrollment management, I don’t want to say the field is nascent, like I was there at the beginning, I wasn’t. But I mean, it was still in its early stages and I think it’s gotten significantly more advanced, whether that’s in the use of analytics, I think it’s gotten significantly more complicated, and I think it’s gotten significantly harder just with some of the external internal forces to higher education, but also external pressures that are coming. I think enrollment management has got a lot harder during that time as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, for sure. And I know we’ll dig into some of those challenges here in a minute, but before I get into the more specific questions about our topic, I do want to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests here on the podcast, and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, I’ve thought about this one, because you told me it was coming. I think a lot about, I’m really incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to do meaningful work in my career, and the meaningfulness of work, and I feel so fortunate to have that. I really hope that other folks have an opportunity to feel the same way about it. And we talk a lot about work-life balance. Is it even possible?

But I think all the time, if you’re working a 40 hour a week job, that’s aside from sleeping probably the thing you do the most every week. And so, having a meaningful job, meaningful career… So Career Everywhere, to me it’s like I think about again, how I would’ve been a terrible or doctor or a terrible engineer. How can we embed career exploration development more deeply into learning and really at every phase?

And so to me, I think that’s what Career Everywhere means, is thinking about learning and thinking about how we can talk about the applicability for it towards meaningful work. And actually in my hometown, the Cleveland public schools have really done a great job about this. They’ve started embedding career exploration into the high school and even middle school curriculum. I think that’s awesome. It’s a way to activate learning when we’re learning those subjects that sometimes we’re like, when am I ever going to use this? I think embedding career exploration and development is a way to activate it and a way to communicate to students. Like, hey, there are going to be times when these subjects that you’re going to learn, it might not seem applicable right now, but there’s so many careers out there that you don’t know about and this could be really applicable there. So I think it’s just this idea of having that career exploration development in every aspect of learning.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. And you talking about how Cleveland is approaching it made me think of a new story I just saw here in Colorado. The state has implemented a new law that all high school students have to complete a financial literacy class. That also includes things like how to apply for a job, how to look for a job. So I think that will be interesting, and I’m guessing that will be a trend we’ll continue to see.

Jonathan Wehner:

I am guessing that as well, and absolutely. And I think some more of that practical information. I’m a liberal arts graduate myself, and I am a big defender of the liberal arts and a big booster of the liberal arts. But I think combining the liberal arts with some of that practical application is going to be where the future of education and likely the future of work lies. So yeah, we have something similar here in the Cleveland Public schools requiring financial literacy.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, cool. Interesting times we live in, for sure. Well, now I would love to dig into our topic today, which is again, how career leaders can start connecting their work into institutional enrollment and student success strategy. So to start us off with some context for this conversation, can you just give us a quick lay of the land when it comes to higher ed enrollment?

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, absolutely. Where I always start when I’m talking about the context and the lay of the land is thinking about the social, the political, economic, and the technological trends that are going on. And so really to start with, I always think of the Gallup Poll that talks about confidence in US higher education as an institution.

And Gallup does all sorts of wonderful polling, including they’ve asked questions for many, many years about American’s confidence in these various institutions. And for a long time confidence in higher ed in the US, it was at the to, it was one of the highest ranked in terms of the most folks had a high degree of confidence, upwards of 55, 60% of folks said they had confidence in higher education in 2015.

And over the past 10 years, that has really plummeted. And in ’24, we reached the low point where there was a least number of people responding that they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education of all time. It’s ticked back up, but still only 42% of respondents are saying that they have a great deal of higher confidence in higher education.

So again, we used to be this pillar and there were all these other institutions. Congress, very lowly rated, but we were up at the top with the supreme Court. And now I think this may be, as you said, interesting times is reflective of the times confidence in all of our institutions has fallen, but it’s fallen in higher education as well. So there’s a lot of skepticism out there. Almost a quarter of Americans say they have little or no confidence in higher education. And when they say that the driving reasons are costs, this perception that higher education has political agendas. And then I think one that is really important to what we’re talking about, this idea that higher education doesn’t prepare you for the workforce. So there’s less confidence in higher education than there’s been really at all time.

At the same time, there’s a declining population in the United States right now in terms of high school graduates. So we know there are a number of things. I mean, worldwide, developed nations, there’s generally declining birth rates. But as we look at the United States, whether we’re looking at the Northeast, the Midwest, or even the west, we’re predicting a significant decline between now and 2035, 2040. In my home state of Ohio, we’re projecting a 6% decline in high school graduates over that same period. But there are other states right next door to me in Pennsylvania where they’re anticipating a 17% decline in high school graduates between now and 2040.

Colorado, your state, they’re anticipating a 12% decline. And so as higher education enrollment leaders, as we’re thinking about, okay, how are we going to fill the seats in our class? Well, among the population, there’s greater skepticism. And so that may mean there is a smaller percentage of the population that’s choosing post-secondary education. Then on top of that, there’s just fewer people in most of the states and the union. The south is one region where a few states will see population growth projected.

So what I always say to institutions is like, okay, you think about the universe of high school students that are out there in particular, and you want to slice of the pie, whatever size your slice is, but that pie is shrinking. So for you to even maintain stable enrollment, that means that you need to start getting a larger percentage of that pie. You and every other college and university out there wants to have stable enrollment. So everybody’s competing for the same students. There are fewer students out there, and public perception is against us in terms of students that outing into higher education.

You combine that with some of the economic factors that institutions are facing, whether that’s budget cuts that are coming from increasing discount rates across higher education, so you have fewer dollars coming in from tuition, obviously there have been some policy changes with regards to research dollars that are coming in. So institutions are trying to scramble right now, but there’s a ton of pressure and ultimately the good work and the mission-driven work that colleges and universities do in the United States, educating millions of students annually producing this research. There’s significant constraints on the work that we’re doing right now. So it’s really a squeeze. We’re getting squeezed from a budget standpoint. We’re getting squeezed from the number of students that are interested in post-secondary and really trying to navigate our way through that. But it’s an incredibly challenging time to be in the sector right now.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that good context. And I think that just really lays the groundwork for why this conversation is so important because I know career outcomes can be a major differentiating factor in terms of marketing at your institution.

Jonathan Wehner:

For sure. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. I say often that if you’re not differentiating on your career outcomes, you’re missing the boat right now. It’s what most families are looking for right now. And you see, even referencing back to that Gallup poll, this idea that college doesn’t pay off, I think is one of the perception challenges that as a sector we have to overcome, but also as an individual institution, you got to use it as a differentiator.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I totally agree. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I actually used to work in higher ed enrollment management marketing. So I worked on the central communications and marketing team at a university, and partnered with our enrollment team to come up with all of the content in the mailers and the websites and the emails and the videos and all of that good stuff to recruit new students. And I remember constantly asking, “Where’s the data? I want stats. I don’t want the ranking from five years ago. I want specific statistics and numbers that I can reference in these materials.” And it was really hard to come up with.

Jonathan Wehner:

Absolutely. But that’s what parents and students are asking for right now, and particularly parents, but students as well. I mean, they want to know the data, they want to know what’s going to be the payoff for my investment here. And I think some of that just reflects… I talked a little bit about the economic uncertainty that higher education institutions face, but a lot of students and families feel that same way now, where the cost of higher education has skyrocketed relative to inflation, and families are being squeezed now by inflation on things like gas and groceries.

So they’re saying, “Hey, my paycheck is not going as far as it used to just to feed my family or just for us to get around and now you’re talking about me making a significant investment,” even an associate’s degree, potentially $10,000. Or you look at some of these four-year colleges and universities now where their cost of attendance is above 50,000, 60,000, 70,000. They’re saying, “All right, what am I going to get back for that?” And they want the hard data.

I think we talked about at the conference even, it used to be back in the 90s and early 2000s when we asked students, why are you want to go to college? And many of them would respond, “Well, I want exposure to a broad set of ideas and I want to meet new people and I want to learn new things.” And then as the country went through multiple recessions and particularly after that 2008 recession, it was just like to get a better job and to make more money, suddenly those were what most students were answering in terms of why they were making a decision to go to college.

Meredith Metsker:

So I would love to pick your brain a little bit here as you worked in higher ed enrollment management for a long time, about 20 years. And for the sake of our listeners who are largely career services leaders, I would love to learn more about what your day-to-day looked like as an enrollment leader. What kinds of things were on your plate? What kept you up at night? I think the best partnerships come from this place of empathy and understanding. And so, I would love to give our audience a chance to get in the head of a long time enrollment leader.

Jonathan Wehner:

I think particularly as the field of enrollment management has grown, and for many enrollment chief enrollment officers, the portfolio has grown. Every day was different, which can be a great thing. I mean, it can keep it fresh, but it also can be a huge challenge. And a lot of times, particularly at both Cleveland suit of art and Cleveland State, I had a relatively large portfolio dealing with everything from housing, Title IX, student affairs, admission. So there were a lot of days where you felt a mile wide and inch deep in everything, which can be challenging.

And there’s often a desire to go deeper in certain areas, and you just don’t have the capacity or the bandwidth to. I think sometimes that can be in those situations, I certainly fell victim into this, but would lean into the areas where I was most comfortable, which ironically are the areas where I probably should have… I needed to pay the least attention. So yeah, a lot of times you’re a mile wide and an inch deep. The things that kept me up at night, a lot of things kept me up at night being a chief enrollment officer.

Some it’s just the work has gotten really hard. I think post pandemic, we’ve seen not just enrollment, but folks that work in student affairs in general, campus work has gotten really, really challenging. I think the demands of students and families rightly so, are really high. Their patience is lower maybe than it had been historically. The demands of boards of trustees and presidents and chancellors and provosts and deans is really high, and their patience is a little low.

So it’s gotten hard on staff. That’s one of the things that kept me up at night. But truthfully, the thing that probably kept me up the most at night, it’s this idea that sometimes as a chief enrollment officer, you have to make compromises, and sometimes you’re compromising in one area of your enrollment plan, and you’re trying to reach a headcount goal, and you get to that point where you say, “Is this a student that we think can be successful at the institution or not?” And you’re put in a position where you have to make a decision about, well, if we’re going to meet this headcount goal, we have to admit this student and take a chance on them. And so sometimes you’re put in a position, it keeps you up at night where you’re like, is this what’s best for this individual student or is this what’s best for the institution and the institution’s mission? And trying to balance that is hard.

I think I said at the conference, the other thing that’s hard is get out of your car in the parking garage, or I used to take the train when I was at Cleveland Institute of Art. You’re walking onto campus, and every staff person that you see, every faculty person that you see is looking back at you and looking in your eyes, and with that understanding of if you don’t make the class, that could have an impact on their job, their livelihood, their ability to feed their family. That’s a lot of pressure. So that’ll keep you up at night, for sure.

So every day you’re making decisions, and you’re trying to make decisions that could impact lives and livelihoods of thousands of people, but you’re making it with imperfect information, and an institution’s looking to you to lead and make those decisions. So yeah, it’s definitely stressful. There have been a lot of articles, Chronicle and otherwise talking about how chief and home officer is the hottest seat on campus year after year, and I think it continues to.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s really great context, and you brought up two things that I hadn’t really thought that deeply about, and one was the breadth of your portfolio. As a chief enrollment officer, it’s not just admissions and recruitment and enrollment, it is often all these other student-related, student-facing fields. But also the last thing you mentioned where in many ways you’re indirectly tied to other people’s jobs and livelihoods. I hadn’t thought about that, but that makes a lot of sense. Without enrollment, that major revenue driver for the institution,

Jonathan Wehner:

I had a trustee at Cleveland State who referred to me as a chief revenue officer. And so you’re really between, for those institutions that are tuition-driven, you’re really responsible for the bulk of the income coming in above the line. And for many institutions where financial aid is under the chief enrollment officer, you’re also responsible for one of the largest expenditures, which is often financial aid in terms of scholarships and grants. So in addition to being a great partner with your career services team, you got to be a great partner with your chief financial officer and your provost, just thinking about how you’re going to make the budget work.

Meredith Metsker:

For sure. And I assume you are probably reporting directly to the president as well, so no pressure there at all.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of different reporting structures for chief enrollment officers. The two institutions that I was at as chief enrollment officer, I reported directly to the president at both of those institutions. But there are some, where chief enrollment officer reports directly to the provost, and I think that that’s a structure that can work for a lot of institutions as well. But absolutely, you’re part of the cabinet and that means that you’re involved in the conversations. For good or for bad, you’re involved in the conversations that are going to shape the institution and shape the institution’s direction moving forward. So it’s a great privilege, but it’s a great responsibility. My kids would be more, want me to say with great power, comes with great responsibility.

Meredith Metsker:

Is that Spider-Man?

Jonathan Wehner:

I think it’s Spider-Man. Yeah, my kids want me to say, but it’s a great privilege, but it comes with a lot of responsibility.

Meredith Metsker:

What should career services leaders keep in mind as they approach is leading enrollment at their institution, knowing that there’s all this background pressure and stressors going on, what should they know?

Jonathan Wehner:

I mean, this is where I’m really a believer that career is ultimately higher education’s core value proposition right now. And I think if you are leading the career efforts at your institution, or even if you’re just part of them partnering with enrollment, it can be a huge boost and it can hopefully alleviate… I mean, you talked about it, you know the demand from students and families is so high. So when we’re able to answer the question of what’s the ROI in the context of what they’re looking for, I think that that can be a huge boost.

I think about a survey I was just reviewing not too long ago that the anthology conducted, and we’re talking about 51% of students said they enrolled in higher education for higher earning potential, 45% said they’re seeking better job benefits, and almost 40% looking to explore potential career opportunities. This is what students and families want, and this is what your chief enrollment officer needs to equip the admissions team, basically…

Your admissions team, your admissions counselors, I said I was visiting a campus last week and I said, gone are the days of admissions offices being the gatekeepers. They’re not the gatekeepers anymore of who gets in and who gets out. The admissions offices like the sales team, they’re like the navigators and they’re the ones that are going to help students and families end up at the right institution. So they need this information, they need this partnership, and they need the outcomes to be good and they need them to be differentiated. So I really think career is higher education’s core value prop right now from an admissions standpoint, but I think career is actually the core value proposition even broader than that.

We talked about some of the policy changes going on and how they’re impacting higher education. Between public scrutiny and federal and state policy, there’s a huge increase of focus on return on investment, and there’s a huge increase in focus on workforce and how post-secondary is driving workforce. And if you want to be on the right side of federal or state policy, you need to be able to demonstrate these kinds of outcomes to lawmakers in your state or lawmakers nationally or even at the local level thinking about working with your city or local politicians or city chamber of commerce. I mean, I think I take that even to advancement. When you think about the way that donors have shifted in terms of grant making, and so many donors now are saying they want to be giving in a particular area and they want to understand what the ROI is going to be on their gift, and that increased attention on ROI. It’s not just with prospective students and families for associates and bachelor’s degrees, but it’s coming from donors, it’s coming from politicians, it’s coming from the public at large.

I think that’s really where to start, is as a career services leader, you got to pivot your mindset a little bit and you have to pivot that mindset of thinking like, okay, we are a student services function, and you got to move more into this mindset of like, wow, we are an institutional mission function. And that can be a big leap, particularly somebody that maybe is first time in terms of leading a career services or career exploration development office. I think that can be a big leap even from, okay, I understand this context that’s going out here to like, okay, how do I position my office? How do I position our efforts in the context of what’s going on and how do I become a player in that island? So I think that’s the first and most thing that in terms of partnership you need to understand is life. It’s about individual students, but it’s also about this macro conversation that we’re having from a higher education stand.

Meredith Metsker:

Hopefully career leaders listening to this, I mean, I’m sure they will see that maybe as a little bit, it’s a challenge. There’s a lot more to think about when you view yourself as this more mission-critical office, but hopefully they also see it as an opportunity, an opening. I feel like this is really the time for career services to shine. They hold a lot of the most compelling student stories, the outcomes data, all of that information that can really make or break an enrollment strategy. So hopefully they also know the power that they have as well.

Jonathan Wehner:

Well, I think partnering with your chief enrollment officer in that context can be really powerful as well. You have to understand, again, this is somebody that is thought of as a chief revenue officer. This is a person that likely has a lot of influence on your campus. And so, partnering with them closely and moving from below the line again, and being seeing exclusively as a cost center to moving above the line and saying like, “Hey, actually these career outcomes, this is what we’re using to market the institution.”

And so being viewed rather than being viewed as a cost center, being viewed as a driver of revenue, and your chief enrollment officer can really help you make that argument, and your chief enrollment officer can be the one to [inaudible 00:31:13] back your chief financial officer, “No, no, no, no, no. I understand what the budget situation is better than anybody else on campus probably. But career exploration development, that’s not an area that we’re going to cut costs in right now. In fact, that’s an area where we need to double down in terms of investment because the investment is what’s driving a return on investment for our families, and this is the division on campus that’s giving us the data and that’s giving us the stories that we need to be able to then go out and market the institution.”

So I think understanding, as you pointed out, the importance of being able to have that information and marketing. And so again, it’s this mindset shift of like, all right, our team’s job is to serve students really well and guiding them through. That is a huge portion of what the team’s job is. But a significant portion of the team’s job now also has to be, and how do we take that work that we’re doing with individual students and do this salary telling? How do we translate that work that we’re doing with individual students and have the data to back it up?

And as a leader, your work has to shift probably to be more of that storytelling. Your work has to be more of that strategic positioning and less of how we work with individual students. I talk all the time about when you start out as an admissions’ counselor, you’re working one-on-one with a student, and then maybe you’re lucky enough, you worked hard enough, you were a roadrunner for years, you get a promotion to assistant director or associate director. And then the kind of work that you’re doing, most of your day can’t be spent working with one individual student. You have to start pivoting and think like, okay, now the work I do every day should be influencing hundreds of students at a time. When you’re a leader of a division than a director or a VP or a dean, then you start to think about, man, my day-to-day work, I need to be influencing the decisions and the impact of thousands of students at a time. And so as a leader, how do you pivot and make more of your work impact a higher volume there I think is really important.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, agreed. And it reminds me of something our last two guests mentioned. So it was Julia Volrath and Marissa Altenberg from the University of Florida, and I think it was Julia who mentioned that… I don’t remember what the title is. Their executive director, the head of career services. Most of her meetings are not with the career services team, it’s with admissions and academic affairs and all of these other departments. She’s far more external facing than maybe leaders have been in the past. So it’s definitely a shift.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, an important pivot though. And I think that’s one of the things that, as you’re looking for opportunities for advancement. That can be hard. I love working with students, and a lot of folks that got into higher education, we got into it because we love working with students and we love meeting students. And there’s still opportunities for that. And these weeks in August, my favorite weeks, I’m not on a campus right now, but seeing the pictures of students doing move-in from the campuses where I’ve worked or the partners that I’ve worked with now, I love that and it keeps you fresh, but understanding that you have that mission-driven work sometimes in leadership in that mission-driven work, you’re pivoting and being a lot more external facing, whereas you might have been doing more one-on-one direct service with students historically.

Meredith Metsker:

I think that’s a good segue into how discussion. So we’ve talked a lot about why this is so important, what career leaders should know is on the chief enrollment officer’s mind. So now let’s talk about how career services can partner with enrollment. How can they position themselves as those revenue drivers, have that mindset shift that you’re talking about? I know you have a lot of specific tips, so I would love to walk through those.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, the one I say all the time is if you’re leading a career services or a career exploration and development team, and you’re not meeting with your chief enrollment officer, regularly start and you have to be the one to ask if you can get him a cup of coffee or ask for time on the calendar. Not everyone’s lucky enough to have those units embedded in the same overall division, and so you might have to reach out. And you have to go understanding that they’re going to have a lot of wants and you’re going to wait for the payback on the back end as part of that.

But that’s my number one, is meet regularly with your chief enrollment officer or your director of admission or your dean of admission, and try and understand and try and collaborate. Because I think when you start meeting regularly, you’re going to see there’s a lot of synergy and there’s a lot of opportunity for you to be involved in the recruitment process. And if you’re not right now, I promise you your chief enrollment officer would absolutely welcome that. So number one is ask for a meeting if you’re not doing it out of the gate.

Two things specifically with working on enrollment management. I mean, I think one is establishing joint metrics, if you can. And that may include your First Destination Survey, but I think many students and families are asking for more than what’s just on the First Destination Survey at this point. And so understanding how can you establish those joint metrics and your enrollment team needs and then continue to supply that information. And whether that’s through a third party, you need your own information as well, but arm your admissions and enrollment team with the data they need to get out there and make that argument to students and families and be a differentiator.

So yeah, start meeting, establish joint metrics, looking for opportunities to increase visibility of career outcomes and recruiting and recruitment materials, but also recruitment activities. I say if you’re in charge of career services and you’re not part of the campus tour, find out why not. And what can you do to be part of the campus tour? Every institution that I’ve been at, the career services was not highlighted on the campus tour, and I said, not only does this have to be not highlighted, this got to be a centerpiece.

So you got to be on the campus tour. Your team isn’t going to love this, because it might mean they got to come in on some Saturdays, but you got to be part of the open house and not just part of the open house, you got to be a centerpiece of the open house talking about how career exploration, development and career services. You are the holder of this information about student outcomes, and we got to communicate this. So being part of the recruitment materials, being part of the recruitment events.

And Meredith, one, I think again, your background, particularly thinking about marketing and thinking about how you as an office of career services can create marketing material that can easily be shifted over to the admission office. And so we know all the time, anytime you’re creating anything, any marketing material, we want it to be able to be used across multiple platforms. Here’s a case where if you’ve got your Instagram for the Office of Career Services, think about the content that you’re creating there, compelling content, but also how can we share that content with the admission office so that they’re not looking to create new content on their own all the time.

I say all the time, and particularly at Cleveland State, we were lucky enough in our career services and career exploration office, we had somebody that was dedicated to marketing and dedicated to events that worked full time. So they had a very small student caseload. Most of their time was creating marketing content for the office and helping develop and deploy for events for the office. And that was a huge boom to the enrollment team because all that content that they were creating all the time, they could pick up and lift and send that over to the admission office. So I think those are great tips, just how to partner with your chief enrollment officer.

Meredith Metsker:

I would love to dig more into a few of those. So the first one where you’re saying to reach out, try and set up a regular meeting. I guess knowing that a chief enrollment officer is probably extremely busy, mind is going a million different directions, thinking about a ton of different things, how should career leaders approach that invitation? Should they offer something? Should they be like, “Hey, I have this specific thing I would love to talk to you about, or I have these stories, these trends I’m seeing.” Would that be helpful do you think, for a chief enrollment officer?

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I like to think that most chief enrollment officers would make time for a colleague no matter what, but that’s where I said I do think you have to understand that you got to come to the table with something. And so try and think about a hook, try and think about getting their attention. And the back end of that, Meredith, is understand that it might not be their top priority. You might go in hot and heavy thinking like, all right, and we’re going to spend the next six months partnering. And well, we got to spend the next two months just making sure we get enough early action applications to make the class next year.

So understand that it’s going to take some time to develop that relationship, but that’s why I say meet regularly and be sharing that information regularly and be strategic about looking for that opportunity or looking for that data point that’s going to get him, get your chief enrollment officer who are super engaged.

So yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say two things. One, if they have somebody that helps them do scheduling work through their scheduling person, that’ll help get on their calendar. But two, absolutely try and go with something. And I think even if it’s like, “Hey, Meredith, we’re getting ready to release the First Destination Survey results and I wanted you to have a first peek to think about how you might be able to work these into your recruiting materials.” What a great offer that is, and bring your chief enrollment officer inside so they’re in the circle of trust and say to them like, “Hey, we’re getting ready and as soon as we release these, we want you to be able to go out day one to your recruitment team as soon as the embargo lifts with that,” something like that to get their attention.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. So next I wanted to ask a follow-up about the joint metrics. So of course you mentioned like FDS survey, but what are some other metrics that you have seen work in your work as a chief enrollment officer or that you think would work these days?

Jonathan Wehner:

So a couple things mean, obviously I think we’re seeing if there wasn’t already a ton of emphasis on internships and internships leading to career success afterwards, I think really diving deep and being able to slice and dice that internship information. I don’t know that it’s enough anymore. In higher education, we came up with this great term experiential learning, and we use it as a catchall for everything from a paid internship to campus work study to practicum student teaching study abroad with this idea of experiential learning as a catchall. But I think particularly around some of these work components, so whether that’s internship practicum, being able to provide data on the number of students that are participating in that broken down by field of study, and then being able to link that back to job. I know placement is also a terrible word, a terrible word among a lot of career folks, but being able to help trace that back to job placement or employment outcomes eventually I think is huge as well. So looking again at those internship opportunities, that’s a big one.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, we have definitely seen that a lot with some of our customers here at uConnect. I was just thinking of Illinois Institute of Technology is one that comes to mind. So they use our outcomes data visualization module to showcase their outcomes data on different program pages, and they also have it filtered by did they complete an internship or not?

So someone can say, “Hey, I am interested in electrical engineering. I want to know what past alumni in this major, did they complete an internship?” And then they can see the outcomes. So I think that’s definitely on people’s minds these days.

Jonathan Wehner:

The ability to drill down to that level is amazing as well, particularly with your own data. That’s the kind of information where when you can put that in front of students and families, and I’ve been doing this for a long time among chief enrollment officers, sometimes we’re cynical about the lack of differentiation among the ways that a lot of institutions portray themselves. Man, that kind of information at that level, you got to have a strategic partnership or you got to have somebody that’s great with data to be able to deliver that, but it’s going to set you apart from that institution where they just say, yep, 90% of our students are employed during graduate school within six months of graduation.

Being able to have that kind of data slates down to individual programs and even then looking at, did a student complete an internship or not? It’s super compelling compared to this just general statement of, yep, 100% of our students completed experiential learning. Yeah, no, we want to go deeper than that.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s hard for prospective student to create a narrative in their mind about what their path might look like if they don’t have specifics. Hard to get from point A to point B. Of point B is just everyone got a job. It’s like, great, how did they do that?

Jonathan Wehner:

Well, that’s the difference between these meaningless… I don’t want to call them meaningless, but you know what I’m saying, meaningless statistics of, yep, 90% of our students have a job or within graduate school in six months. And these really specific statistics. For me, I think tying those very specific statistics with the storytelling is incredibly important. And being able to talk about a narrative so that, okay, you have the hard evidence, and then you also have the example, whether that’s your student ambassadors or tour guides or your interns at work and your career service officer, just whoever your university marketing team is helping develop that narrative.

How do we talk about their experience? So if student, mom and dad, we can say, “Look, here’s the evidence, your investment’s going to pay off,” but for that student, we can say, “You might not know the answer right now. Meredith didn’t know the answer either, but this is how her internship then informed her course of study when she came back to campus after an internship, and this is how it informed her career and her success moving forward,” and make it really deeply personal on that level.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. When I worked in enrollment management marketing, that’s what I was always trying to do, is pair the data with the stories. So I’m like the data, it gives you part of the story, but sometimes, as we all know, sometimes in the absence of information, we start to make up our own stories in our heads of what’s going on. It’s also always helpful to include that student story perspective.

Jonathan Wehner:

Right. There are decision makers that are going to make an extremely numbers driven, clearly rational decision, but there are other decision makers where it’s going to be emotional. And so, it’s like how do we put together a compelling argument that speaks to both of those kinds of decision makers?

Meredith Metsker:

So Jonathan, I would love to again touch on your experience working in higher ed enrollment management, but when you were in that role, how did you partner with career services, and is there anything you would do differently if you could go back?

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, I was super lucky. The two institutions where I was a chief enrollment officer, I had career services or career exploration development as part of my portfolio. And for me, it was an area of interest, but not an area of expertise.

So I had a direct reporting relationship with the director of those departments, and it was great partnership in that they taught me a lot, I think about the way that career services operates, the way that career exploration operates, what is involved there. And I worked with four different directors, across two different institutions.

So we had a direct reporting relationship, which was really, really lucky. Hopefully I taught them about a little bit of what we talked about in terms of positioning the office in the context of the institution as a whole. So I was really lucky to have that relationship of a direct reporting relationship and co-developing strategy was where we really tried to focus. And so, it was not for me. I mean, I was always interested in, these are the number of employers we’ve had come through sessions this week. These are the number of resume critiques we’ve done this past month. But for me, I was always really interested in how do we think about those big wins, and how do we really think about setting a vision for the team there? So that’s where I think our partnership was really, really important.

What would I do different? I think when I started working with career services, career development, I was really focused on some of those top line things, some of those top line metrics. And I wish that I had given a little bit more space or a little bit more attention to the need to develop some of those personalized stories. Again, sometimes as a chief enrollment officer, you’re really focused on the bottom line. But those top line metrics, right? I do think that that’s one space where I wish I had been involved a little bit. Or I I had given more space to develop that.

The other thing is just as a chief enrollment officer, it was hard for me to get to know the teams that worked underneath my directors in those roles. I knew everyone’s name. I knew everyone’s face. I knew a little bit about everyone’s background. But I would have loved an opportunity to get to work with those teams a little bit more directly than I had the ability to. So I think that that would be some hindsight there as chief enrollment officer, you get really focused on those top line.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, there’s only so many hours in the day too, but I imagine that’s cool in your work now with Carnegie, you get to offer some of that advice and perspective to the teams that you are working with in higher ed.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah. As I’ve said, I’m really lucky that I get to work on a ton of different projects. Although now instead of just thinking about one campus’ enrollment numbers keeping me up at night, I’m thinking about ten different campuses’ enrollment numbers, and they’re keeping me up at night. But it’s great to be able to partner with chief enrollment officers and deans and directors and be able to provide them both with strategic direction but also some advice when they need it.

Meredith Metsker:

On that advice note, you’ve already offered a lot of great advice here in our conversation, but is there any additional advice that you would like to share with our listeners about how they can better partner with enrollment?

Jonathan Wehner:

I think the one thing I would say is I’d love to connect with listeners on LinkedIn. You’ll see me post about enrollment topics pretty regularly on LinkedIn, but I also post about higher education broadly and what some of those impacts are. So I guess I would invite listeners to say let’s connect, let’s have some dialogue. And for those listeners that are working in career exploration and development or career services, if you want some insight into the mind of how chief enrollment officer works, let’s connect online, and let’s have a dialogue there.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And for everyone watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include a link to Jonathan’s LinkedIn profile so you can easily go and find him.

Okay. So Jonathan, now I would like to close us out with this answer or question, leave a question thing that I do at the end of every interview. So I will ask a question that our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So as I mentioned earlier, our last guests were Julia Vollrath and Marissa Altenberg from the University of Florida, and they left this question for you, if you could choose any character from a book or TV show to lead your university or department, who would it be and why?

Jonathan Wehner:

Is it too obvious? First, I would say, I think Gary, our CEO at Carnegie, has some of these qualities. Jason, my boss, has some of these qualities. But I would say Ted Lasso from TV. I think leading with such empathy, leading with such optimism, that enthusiasm, like unbridled enthusiasm, and just kinda wearing your heart on your sleeve. I don’t know if that’s what they were fishing for.

And I did feel like when it first came out, I got worried that we were gonna start leadership by Ted Lasso and ignore strategy and everything. We’re just gonna be unbridled enthusiasm. But I guess I would say Ted Lasso because I also love all the allusions to everything Gen X and every bit of Gen X and millennial culture that has dropped into the writing of that show. So, yeah, I guess I would say Ted Lasso.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. I love Ted Lasso. That show was great. And he is a great leader.

Jonathan Wehner:

[inaudible 00:52:26]

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. I love Ted Lasso. That show was great, and he is a great leader. He is a good example of… Yeah, I think Julia and Marissa were their answers. I think Julia said Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter, and yeah, I think Marissa said Elle was from L’ilie Blonde, which I also loved.

Jonathan Wehner:

Be curious, not judgemental, right?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That’s great. Julia and Marissa, what were their answers. I think Julia said Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yes, my sons would agree with that.

Meredith Metsker:

I think Marissa said Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, which I also loved.

Jonathan Wehner:

I would love Elle Woods too. It’s similar to Ted Lasso. Right? Like, just don’t know the definition of the word no.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yeah, love it.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s great. Well, Jonathan, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Jonathan Wehner:

And I have to answer it too, huh?

Meredith Metsker:

Only if you want to.

Jonathan Wehner:

I’m gonna go a different direction for the next guest. Hopefully, I don’t make it too hard. I think what I would say is, what’s one thing that’s holding you back right now, and what’s one thing that you could do today, so that it’s not holding you back anymore?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh that’s a good one. It’s a deep one. So do you know what your answer would be?

Jonathan Wehner:

I don’t know what my answer would be, but I will discuss it in my next therapist appointment.

Meredith Metsker:

There you go. So maybe part of the answer is go see a therapist.

Jonathan Wehner:

Yep, everybody at least a little bit.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. Absolutely. All right, well, Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was a great conversation full of, I think a lot of good insider knowledge for our audience on what’s going through the minds of chief enrollment officers these days and how career leaders can use that information to bring value, start a relationship, and hopefully build an alliance with the enrollment department on their campus. So just thank you very much for sharing your time and your wisdom.

Jonathan Wehner:

Oh, Meredith, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.