SPEAKER_00
You're listening to the Higher Ed Marketer, the podcast for marketing professionals in higher education. Join us every week as we talk to the industry's greatest minds in student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where marketing in higher ed is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_01
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. I'm Troy Singer. And I'm Bart Kaler.

And Bart and I today talk to John McReil, who is the Dean of Enrollment Services at the Waukesha County Technical Institute. And our conversation with him is around enhancing college admissions through relationship building and efficiency. And you will soon realize that John is full of wisdom and full of energy.

SPEAKER_02
Oh, man, he really dropped a lot of really good things on this episode. I mean, it's one of those episodes that I often talk about, you know, you need to rewind it just to listen and take some notes. I think with his experience and his expertise and his passion that he's kind of instituted, they're doing some amazing things at WCTC.

And I think that it's really worth, you know, taking notes, seeing what you can implement and trying to kind of accomplish the same things.

SPEAKER_01
Yes. And we'll soon get to the episode. But before we jump over, we would love to ask our listeners, especially if you're on Apple, to please leave a review and give us a five star rating.

And to remind everyone that Bart and I do this to network. So please reach out to us and connect with us on LinkedIn. If you're listening to the show, we would love to communicate with you.

Now here's our conversation with John McReel. John, since we consider ourselves an education and marketing podcast, we always ask our guests to start our conversation all by sharing something that they have learned recently that might be deemed interesting or fun by our listeners.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks, Troy. I'll be honest, I'm going to share two things.

One that I think is just kind of funny. I've got a three year old and I got a copy of her letter to Santa the other day and it said, happy birthday, Santa. So apparently it's also Santa's birthday as well as Christmas.

So I guess we'll just kind of roll with that as it relates to education. One thing that I've known this for maybe a little while, but I think an important thing to know is actually something like 40 million adults in the nation have some college, no credential. Right. And when I think about the two year space and where community colleges and technical education like my institution can take us, that's a space we have to really operate into. Right. Not just thinking about the traditional age student, but also thinking about that adult who maybe started college, failed out, started college, had to stop out for whatever reason. How do we bring them back? What do we do to really ensure that they're having the ability to advance themselves? And realize the education that they want in the long term.

SPEAKER_01
So that's great. Thank you, John. And this is the reason why we're having you on the podcast to have a conversation about how to enhance college admissions, relationship building and building efficiencies.

And it's something that you and I talked about in our original conversation when we first met via LinkedIn and I love LinkedIn a couple of months ago. So to get into our conversation, would love to share. And yes, I know some of these answers to these questions and that's why I'm like, we need to have you on the podcast.

So John, if you could, please share with us some of the ways that you have seen admissions evolve over the last few years.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. One thing that I've really noticed and I kind of came into the, I came into the world of admissions and admission counseling really in the early 2010s, right? Where like the CRMs were on the rise, everything was about data. And so I would hear from colleagues of mine, oh man, we've gotten so much away from the relationship build, right? We've gotten so much away from connecting with that student and getting them the information they need to succeed.

And so what happened somewhere around when Salesforce started getting really big and so these other companies started developing CRMs and applications for admissions and enrollment offices. We got to the point that even admission counselors were in essence need to be quasi data scientists, right? Which is funny because we hire people who are super energetic, who have a lot of excitement about helping students on their journey. And then we put them in front of a screen and ask them to look at a spreadsheet and figure out exactly who to talk to, right? Instead of getting them to the talking.

And so one thing that I've been really passionate about with my team and kind of thinking about how do we streamline, how do we make things more effective and efficient is putting the counseling back into admission counseling and getting to the spot where we're really focused on the relationship. We have CRMs, they're great, they're wonderful, but they're a tool. They're never going to replace the ability for us to connect, right? And they're never going to be able to replace the ability for me to pick up a phone and call a prospective student and say to them, hey, I know you're in student engineering, let's talk about this program, right? That's the piece of the job that I always really enjoyed, especially when I was a road runner and I did that for 10 years and spent my time in the road doing college fairs.

It was the place that I got the energy from was talking with students and hearing about what they were interested in and having that ability to drive from there. We've kind of hit this, this nexus point where we've, we leaned almost too much into the technology and it's removed some of that. And I really feel like we have to, we have to bring it back and kind of go through, go through a process of reestablishing like what the core of the profession is.

SPEAKER_02
I love that, John. And I've often wondered too, because I mean, you brought up a really good point. Some schools will call them admissions counselors.

Other schools call them recruiters. I love the fact that you talked about the idea that really at the end of the day, we're really trusted advisors to help them along their education journey. And I think that's a unique way of looking at it as kind of that counseling, as you put it, putting counseling back in admissions counseling, because I do think that it's more about providing holistic guidance rather than just, hey, be an order taker.

So unpack that a little bit for me.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I'm an Irishman. I'm an Irishman story a lot.

So we're listeners buckle up. When I was probably back in 2015, 2016, I was working for an institution and we had a great BPD program, a doctorate of physical therapy program. And that was right around the time that industry shifted to requiring their professionals to have doctorates of physical therapy.

And I was talking to a student and their parents, we were talking about the cost of education, what scholarship they can receive from my institution and what it would take for them to ultimately enroll. Right. Because we know it's not just the desire or the great program or whatever it is. We know it's at the, when the rubber meets the road, a big piece of that decision process is cost.

Right. Interesting what the cost was. And what I was hearing from the family was my institution was going to be too expensive.

So I quickly like, I pushed the view book aside, maybe not so dramatically as I'd like to think, but I pushed the view book aside and said, okay, let's, let's not talk about this institution anymore. Right. And I, I can tell from the conversation we're having that this is not, this isn't going to work for you. Right. You're not going to be able to, to retain at this institution because of the cost, right? It's going to be prohibitive, probably phrased a little bit softer to them, right? To be honest, but like having that conversation with them and I said, okay, let's talk about some other options. I knew you want to do this.

I happen to know of this institution. I think I referenced them or for them to Carol specifically here in Wisconsin where they had a great direct entry D P T program. They met a little bit more need than we're going to.

They're a little bit less expensive than the institution is working for. But that moment where I was able to say to the student, Hey, I'm hearing everything you're saying. I'm hearing this fear you have about the cost of education.

I'm hearing this concern you have about going further away. Let's talk about this since you have some little bit closer to home as that conversation ended, right? The student ended up withdrawing their application. But what ended up happening the next year was that family ended up referring like six or seven different people to me to have that conversation, right? Because I had sat there and heard what they were saying, treated them the way I would want to be treated.

Right? And my parents always said, man, I wish we had a John to have helped John go to college, right? Because they didn't have that same level of guidance, right? And so getting those referrals meant a ton because that ended up helping in the long run my institution, even though I kind of kind of had that moment where I was like, well, this isn't going to really work. So it's being a relational and hearing what someone's saying, understanding is your institution the best institution to work for them or is maybe a different path going to be right for them and being willing to say, hey, this isn't the right fit. I don't know if this is the right fit for you.

Let's talk about some of their options as well and really hear what someone said.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I love that because it reminds me of the conversation that we had with Brad DeMarsow from Boston College last week and the idea of customer service. And I think that you're kind of taking the idea of being a trusted advisor, being a trusted counselor to this family. And you're really ultimately providing them customer service based on who they are and what they need.

And I think that goes so far. And I think that that not only kind of demonstrates I think an integrity that a lot of institutions could really lean into, but I think it also kind of, as you kind of indicated, that ability to hear somebody and to listen and to listen well and provide that personal attention and care in that process. I mean, unpack that a little bit because I think that it kind of goes hand in hand with what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, you know, I was introduced to the concept of radical hospitality a while ago by a colleague of mine who has since moved into a couple different roles, but he always, he would always talk about radical hospitality and the mindset of what you need to do is really understand and listen to what the person in front of you is saying and provide them that opportunity to get to where they need to be. And if ultimately that means your service or your product or in this case, your institution is going to work for them, fantastic. If not, that's okay, right? Because all that's going to allow you to do is to help the next person, right? If they say no, this is for me to help the next person.

And at the end of the day, we all are in this for a common goal, right? One of the reasons why I transitioned to two years, I was super excited about the mission of just helping students figure out where they were going on their next path, right? And that is very much at the core of anyone in this work, right? You line up 10 admission counselors. Hopefully all of us would say the same thing, right? We just want to help the student get to their educational goal wherever that might be, right? And the fact of the matter is there are 4,000 plus higher education institutions in this country, so many different types, and it's really hard to sift through. And one thing that higher ed does a great job of is not being transparent.

We do a great job of saying we are selective when we really are not. We do a great job of saying this process is difficult when it is not, right? And if we just pull back that curtain and pull back that veil a little bit more, we're going to find ourselves having a lot more success in the long run because we're taking the time to really hear the student build that relationship and help them overcome any fear or objection that they might have, right? Maybe they're nervous about something. We can help them overcome that by showing them what support they're going to have and by giving them that radical hospitality to really hear and listen to their needs.

SPEAKER_02
That's great. I love that. And before Troy is going to take the next question, have you read the book Unreasonable Hospitality? I have not.

No. Okay. So it's Wilk Adira. I read it a few months ago.

I think that Jefferson University, our guest from that podcast episode referenced it. And so I went out and grabbed it and read it. It goes right along those same things.

It's basically he was a restaurateur who took a restaurant in New York City from one or two-star Michelin to four-star year over year over year. And it was based on the hospitality, the way that they would go out of their way to just pay attention to what was the customer needed. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about.

And I applaud you for that. And I think that's such an exciting and refreshing conversation. 100%.

SPEAKER_03
At the end of the day, so much of what we do is we have to respond to what the student is telling us, right? And at the end of the day, that's what matters and we'll make our goals, right? It's just a matter of how we get there. And I think we got to do that with integrity, right?

SPEAKER_01
Moving toward the practical aspects of admission. So John, how important is streamlining the admissions process for efficiency or what strategies have you found that have been effective?

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's important, right? Students live and even us as adults, right? We all live in the age of Amazon Prime, right? If I want a new shirt, it's on my doorstep by the time I finish clicking the button, right? That's how fast things are moving and how fast we're getting information now. So one thing that I've talked a lot about with my team is about velocity. How fast are we moving a student through the process, right? Are we getting them from Aft, enroll, and at what speed and at what pace and what does that look like on the different populations that we're paying attention to? So as we, you guys can't quite see it, but I've got a whiteboard in my office.

And at some point, we're going to start having those intense conversations about how quick a student is moving because that's important. That's also an indicator of students moving through our enrollment steps. We got two problems to solve.

Or we got two things to keep in mind. Number one is that if they're moving really fast, it means they're hyperengaged right now and we've got to honor that. We've got to respond.

Maybe we're typically saying 20, 40, 48 hours. Maybe we got to increase that or like decrease that time difference in response to those students. But the other thing is we got to make sure we can keep them engaged, right? So at a two-year institution, there's a unique problem where we started admitting students for fall in September, the September before.

So as soon as it's going to start in August to 24 at my institution, could have been admitted on September 1st. And we can't get them registered for classes until April. So how do you keep a student engaged all that time, right? So if they're flying through and they have a high velocity through those enrollment steps, we have to find ways to continue to engage them, right? So we're designing events.

We're designing communications. We're doing outreach. We bring all these different things to respond to what we're hearing students.

But we also have to pay attention to how quick they're going through. The other day I was in another conversation with a buddy of mine and I said, yeah, app numbers are great. App numbers are sexy, but at the end of the day, yield is what's going to pay the bills.

So we have to think about how we're keeping that student engaged. That's the student who was admitted at, say, on September 10th, right, of 2023. If we're still thinking they're going to show up in August at 24 without doing anything to nurture them, to build that relationship, it's not going to happen, right? Like they're just not going to show up.

And so we have to make sure that we're keeping students invested and paying attention to how quick they're moving through. And the same respect, we have the inverse of the problem, about 40% of our applications. And I don't know this to be true of two-year schools overall, but I think it's a pretty healthy suspicion and guess that this is the case at a lot of institutions like mine.

We get about 40% of our applications in the two months before a term. So between June and July, we will process close to a thousand applications for students that we hadn't even talked to before. And we've got to get them through that entire process in a condensed period of time.

So we also have to think about not only like if a student is moving through it fast at the beginning, but what about at the end, right? And how do we keep that person engaged? Well, the other person who comes to us in July, we have to get them all the content needed. A lot of things within that that we have to really do. And part of that is making sure that our solutions are very efficient and effective moving through that our communication is there.

We're segmenting communication properly, right? So many different populations that we're working with, we have to make sure that we're tailoring that message to them as much as possible.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. One of the words that I've been using a lot lately with different clients is the idea of agility. So we, I mean, you've got to have adaptability and agility.

So the idea that we've got our comm flows, yeah, we've got everything mapped out. We've got these processes in place. But sometimes you've got to say, look, we've got 10 months or 12 months before they're going to show up.

What are we going to do? How are we going to do that? And actually put that contingency in place as well as what you said earlier, we've got, you know, we got 40% of our class coming in in June. We're going to have to come up with an event or something that's going to get them engaged and continue that excitement into, you know, September, you know, when the classes start. And so you'd referenced earlier about this idea that you are looking at events.

And I think that in our pre-HIV, you talked about this mission accomplished event. Tell us about that. Cause I think that's very specific in what you're kind of framing here in this conversation.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we realized was, or there were a few things we realized, you know, you guys will find out anything with me. There's one thing, but then there's always three or four more things after that.

I love that. I'm the type of person who in college is like, Oh, I'll just hang out for one more drink. And then like three hours later, I'd go home.

But with, with that event and mission accomplished, I had a brand new director of recruitment coming on. And we were looking at the data and we're seeing a couple of different things. We're seeing one students were craving in person experiences.

We host an open house here on campus in the fall and the spring and without fail, 500 students show up. Yeah. It's just one of those things, right? People are craving it, especially post, you know, 2020, 2021, people are craving in person again, as well as I think we're really craving that connection again, right? We're craving that, that personalization. And so, so when we got talking, when he and I got talking about velocity right after he started, I said, okay, how fast do you think we can take a person from wherever they are in the funnel? Whether they have an app on file or they just need to register for classes, how fast we think we can get them from their funnel stage to enrolled.

And what we figured out was if we had all the right people there, we could probably do it in about two hours. All right. If we had a way to place students, if we had, if we had everything we need, all the documentation, we could probably push them through our process in about two hours.

And so we came up with the idea for this event. We initially went through a couple of different iterations as marketing people, you appreciate we went from the enrollment one stop, which just sounds fine to admission accomplished, which sounds a lot better, right? The marketing folks made their money there as they were helping us with that one. And I love our marketing team.

They do fantastic work here. Sarah and her team here do amazing work and they definitely are my partner in crime a lot are very often. But as we designed this admission accomplished event that a student could walk in the front door, no matter where they were at and leave registered for classes for the upcoming semester.

We did this twice over the summer. We actually just did it two more times recently. And what we have found is they have a 72% yield rate for students who enter and leaving enrolled 72%.

It has single-handedly become one of our major tentpole programs here on campus very quickly. And it's been successful because we've gone through, you mentioned iterative earlier, right? We've gone through that process of iterative change on that and design thinking. So the first time I tried to do this, it was, hey, just drop on in in these two weeks and we'll do what you're going to do.

We're going to do and then we realized that's a little too loosey-goosey for students, right? Students need a deadline, students need a timeframe, they need a directive. And then when they get here, they need a checklist, right? The student walks in the front door and we give them a personalized checklist that says where they're at in the funnel, what stages they have left. We tell them a few required steps at that event.

And then by the time they're done, assuming we have a way to place them in classes, they leave enrolled. Or they leave knowing exactly what they need to do to get enrolled and likely the two appointments that they need to complete that. So that event has been a huge success.

We've run it four times now. We've had about 211 people show up in that, or for those events. And like I said, about 72% of them have left enrolled.

So it's just an incredibly powerful event, very smooth. And like I said, we've gone through this process of inter-or change on it to make it more efficient as we're moving folks to the process.

SPEAKER_02
I love that. I love how you kind of identified something. You put something in its place and you're seeing tremendous results on that.

So congratulations on that.

SPEAKER_03
Thank you. One of the great things is it's shown other areas that we have room for efficiency. We historically have said, oh, it'll take two weeks to return a transfer credit evaluation to you.

Well, we now know we may be able to do it a little bit faster if we just put the right things in place. So that's kind of the next thing. So when you do something like this, you suddenly see, hey, we can do things that we weren't thinking we could before.

And where else can that spill over? So we're looking at our transfer processes to make that more efficient. We're looking at our CRM solution to make that more efficient. And actually, we're bringing on a new one to do that partially because I need to be able to dissect the data.

So much of what we do when we're prepping planning and thinking about how we're going to execute the next cycle is we've got to have that data to inform what we're talking about. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01
So. Well, let's continue down that path, John. How critical do you think the role of technology and strategic planning is in enhancing efficiency and effectiveness throughout the process?

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's critical. It's vital. I would say absolutely.

But here's the thing that I need that I say all the time to my staff, I say all the time to my boss is technology is merely a tool, right? If we're not using it the right way, if we're not thinking about it in the right fashion, it is merely a tool and it's not going to help us if we don't, if we don't optimize. And so we absolutely have to talk about how technology can improve things for us. We also have to make sure that it's working for us and we're not working for it.

So when I got to my institution, we have currently a CRM that is not going to name names. I've got the receipts, but I'm not going to use them. A CRM that's just isn't efficient.

It was implemented a little bit poorly in this, you know, and we were trying to figure out, hey, can we keep it going? Can we make it better? Can we fix what's going on? Or do we need to make a wholesale change? Right? And it was pretty quick. And my tenure that I was like, I'm pretty sure we're going to have to make a change, but I had a vacancy in the CRM role. So then what I decided to do was I decided to say, okay, what do I want out of this person beyond just CRM? Like what's the, what's the added value I want out of this role? And so I went about finding someone who not only had intimate CRM knowledge, but had intimate enrollment management knowledge, right? Yeah.

Who could go through and really, really dissect where the problems were, but also have that knowledge of like why things are important, right? You can hire a database person and that's great. But if you have, but if they're not understanding about CRM processes, we, it makes it a little bit more tricky, right? And I can teach that I'm more than happy to teach that, but I also knew we were at a critical juncture that I need my focus to not be on that. I need to be able to hand that off to a trusted person and say, figure out what to do, right? Do we sink, do we sink more time and effort into this? Or do we reject the sunk cost fallacy and we go, or do we go and find a new solution? Right? And ultimately we ended up finding a new solution, but because we have to have a technology solution that can work for us, right? And the technology exists, but I'll take us right now, like one thing that we weren't able to do that we will be able to do very soon.

So I couldn't look to see if Troy opened the email I sent him. Oh wow. Which is the point of a CRM, right? The point of it is to be able to see and see what the relationship is.

What you have to do with that technology solution is inject the things that are going to make that relationship personal for that prospective student. So even if this is only the second time I've talked to Troy, he doesn't feel like it's the second time because I know everything we discussed. I know everything that's on his application.

I can see everything. I can see that he opened that email on the beach in Hawaii on his vacation, which means he's super interested in it. And I'm not going to say that because that sounds super creepy, but I am going to say, hey, I saw you open this email.

How are things going? Where are you doing lately? And that might present that conversation, that opportunity for him to engage a little bit and tell me about his great beach vacation and having some of those things. So that role is, or that the role of technology is important. We have to use it to help advance the relationship, right? To help advance the connection of that prospective student.

SPEAKER_02
I love the fact that you used the word tools. That technology is a tool to accomplish something else. It's a means to an end.

The end is the relationship with the student. And I think that that's one of the things that I think that the more literate we can become with technology and technology tools, the better it's going to be. I mean, I've been doing a lot in AI and I get so many people who say, oh, I've tried chat GPT.

It's not that impressive. I mean, but they didn't know how to use the tool. Right. So I think part of it is you've got to understand, yes, I have these tools, but I actually take the time to learn the tool. Is that kind of what you find too?

SPEAKER_03
A hundred percent. You know, we talk a ton about, I'm a fan of analogies. So I always like to think of, I was like to think of the enrollment cycles a little bit like running a marathon, right? You have all the planning prep work that goes into the execution and the pacing of the race.

Right. And I always, I literally just said this to someone at lunch. I'm like, I'm a runner.

I'm not the fastest guy, but I'm definitely not going to be the last one. Right. Like, and I know that part of that's because I'm too competitive for my own good. But the other piece of that is just knowing that I've put in the time and effort, right? And when we think about enrollment, we have to plan in that kind of mindset.

We have to set forth the groundwork, do the planning, take a look at the data, make those informed decisions. Right. Like thinking about admission accomplished. We talked about it a second ago.

The reason why we knew that would be successful is we knew students were craving that in-person experience. Right. We had seen other things happen on campus. We see this huge sort of response to our on-campus events.

We see people coming in for a second, third, and fourth appointment on campus physically. They're craving it. So looking into some of that data, not only the qualitative, but the quantitative data that we have in front of us to say, all right, here's what our plan is going to be this year.

Right. And we know that we're going to spend this time, this effort, and things might not work out the way we need to. So in the middle of that race, we're going to have to adjust.

Right. We're going to have to say, hey, my ankle's hurting. Right. We've got to do something to fix this. Right. Or it might be, we have this other event that we're doing kind of on the flip side of admission accomplished. We had something called, we had something called admission possible.

And they were meant to be similar sounding events. And what we have found is that that's the, that's the ankle that's hurting at mile 13. Right. It's a good event. It's working fine.

We're just essentially deploying it the right way. Right. So how, so we've been going through this process now of, hey, we tried it one way last year. We're trying a different way this year.

We're still having quite found the secret sauce for it. And now we've got kind of another idea to pivot to in the future for what we plan on trying next year. But that's the type of mid race adjustment you've got to make when you're saying, when you're saying, Hey, I'm noticing this issue.

Right. So I've got to hit the medical tender. I've got to take that couple of minutes to walk and figure out what's going on.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I like that because you mentioned earlier the word iterative. And I think that this idea of having a plan, working the plan, using the tools, doing all the things that we've been talking about, but also having enough flexibility that you're not married to the prep plan, because at the end of the day, we have a bigger goal that we need to be able to adjust and adapt and move toward.

And so I think this analogy of a marathon is just a perfect one. So thank you for that.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I mean, and you're never going to have something that you execute that goes a hundred percent the way you want. Right. So if I was out there, please, I had come on the show, let me talk to you. I want to, I want to hear how you manage that because nothing is ever, nothing ever goes a hundred percent according to plan.

So you have to be able to be flexible. You have to have good partnerships. That's one of the reasons why I always joke that I'm a fake marketer.

My colleague Sarah and I talk about this all the time. She's our director of marketing communications here. And I say to her, I'm a fake marketer.

I know enough to be dangerous, but I know this is your world. Right. So the partnership that we have with our marketing office is so critical because often they're the ones helping us execute that course adjustment. Right. It's, it's me calling her and saying, Hey, this isn't working or we're not seeing the right registration numbers. What can we do? Right.

Do we have the resources to shift our strategy a little bit with getting students in or even just getting some, getting some experience, you know, getting some insight as to why something's happening. So I'll tell you one other quick story. We had a spring open house in 2000 and 22.

And there was a very hot. Yeah. There's a very hotly contested governor and Senate race here in the state of Wisconsin. Actually, it was the fall.

Sorry. It was fall. It was our fall open house.

And our numbers were, our registration numbers were lagging and lagging and lagging. Well, what we found out was the money that we put towards digital, we are being guaranteed impressions, but you're not necessarily guaranteed when they're going to happen. Oh, yeah.

And so the candidates came in, bought up all this time, bought up all these impressions and it pushed our stuff later. So we actually kind of hit a hard pause for a quick second, adjusted, let some of the noise clear out and then blitzed a couple of days prior to the events. We got our registration numbers pretty in line with where they historically are.

They, they were a little bit lower, but we got them to where they should be at that point. And so that type of relationship of having that ability and that moment to say, ah, this isn't quite working. We've got to, we've got to hit the time.

We've got to take this ankle, right? And, and move forward, right? And that was one of those moments where we were able to really do that kind of in the moment.

SPEAKER_01
Love that. And I also love your energy, John. And I love the way that you convey information through stories, but unfortunately we're going to have to wrap up our conversation with you.

But our last question that we would like to ask is if you have either a piece of advice or a tip that you could share that could be implemented soon after a listener hears it.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. You know, I'm going to share a piece of advice. People do not, I don't remember who said this, but people don't care about what you know or what you have to say until they know they care about, until they know that you care about them.

Exactly. Right. And I think that's an important thing for leadership. I think that's an important thing for prospective students, for any audience we're talking with.

Right. We lead with, lead with our heart, lead with saying, Hey, I want to know what's going on with you. Right. A really good friend of mine is Jeremy Tears. And he turned me on as concept talking about fear.

What's funny is I was super resistant, I was super fearful of bringing up fear, ironic. And the second that I started kind of making that adjustment and how I connected with students, so much more came to me. Right. And so, but that's because they knew I was trying to dig in and see what was going to matter to them. They knew I was trying to understand who they were, where they were coming from, what their anxieties were.

And I'm going to mark these words right here. The future arms race in higher education is not the lazy river it was 10 years ago. It is mental health counseling supported student support services.

That's where our industry is going. We're going to have to make sure that we're wrapping our arms all the way around the student holistically. And that starts at the jump, right? That starts in the recruitment process and the enrollment process to make sure that students are ending up where they're supposed to be and where they're going to be successful.

So love it.

SPEAKER_01
Love it. That was John McReel, Dean of Enrollment Services at Waukesha County Technical College. John, if you would, please share what preferred way that someone could reach out to you after this conversation if they chose to do so.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I'm happy to connect on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to find John McReel as well as my email address is pretty simple.

It's J-M-C-G-R-E-A-L at WCTC.edu. And also find me on Twitter or whatever it's been called now at J-F, my last name, McReel. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01
Again, thank you for everything you shared today. I've enjoyed getting to know you.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_01
Bart, do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share?

SPEAKER_02
I do. I just want to remind a few things that John has talked about. I mean, I love the whole concept of the putting counseling back in admissions counseling.

I think that goes along with that final piece of advice that he gave with kind of being holistic in our approach to how we relate to the prospective students, their influencers, just being a lot more caring. I just thought that was a great way to kind of finish the entire conversation. And I loved kind of the idea.

We talked a lot about velocity and agility and iterative processes in the admissions cycle. And I mean, his examples of admissions accomplished and admission possible, I think those are great events that kind of illustrate how you can really kind of look to figure out how can you do that velocity around yield. And I thought the point about yield is really where it's at.

And so don't miss that mark. And then finally, I just really loved his conversations and his reference to Sarah and the partnership that enrollment has with marketing. And you've heard me talk about it before.

It's so important that enrollment and marketing are a partnership and not just a vendor-client relationship. I love the fact that John's going to Sarah and talking about, hey, we've got a problem. We need to address this.

And they figure it out together as opposed to just putting in a ticket saying, okay, here's what I need. I need it prettier by Monday. Ding, there's the short order cook type of thing.

And so let's make sure that we kind of keep in mind with that. I just, John had so many great things to talk about it. Really appreciate your energy, John, and just your willingness to be vulnerable and sharing all this stuff.

And we're going to have Jeremy on the show soon. Jeremy and I had lunch last week, so he's going to be on the show and I'm supposed to talk with him on his show next week. So we're excited to kind of bring that full circle to in this conversation.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you both for a wonderful conversation. Also always want to express our gratitude to Rob Conlon and his team at Westport Studios. The High Red Marker podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency, and by Ring Digital, the ad targeting people, precisely and accurately, serving as directly to the handheld and household devices of the prospective students that you are currently sending mailers to.

On behalf of Bart Kailer, I'm Troy Singer. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_00
You've been listening to the High Red Marketer. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player. The High Red Marketer is a production of Kailer Solutions and Ring Digital in partnership with Westport Studios.

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