Enrollment management veteran, Laurie Koehler, joins Jarrett to talk about the challenges facing enrollment management and key ways the practice needs to evolve.
Laurie and Jarrett discuss:
- How the practice of enrollment management has evolved over the last two decades
- Why enrollment strategy can’t be separated from institutional strategy
- Five ways we need to improve how we attract, retain, and develop the next generation of enrollment leaders
- And why it’s time for everyone to stop talking about discount rate.
Learn more about Laurie and her enrollment consulting work: koehlerconsulting.net
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Transcript
Jarrett Smith:
You’re listening to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m your host, Jarrett Smith.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab brought to you by Echo Delta. I’m Jarrett Smith. Thanks for listening. As you know, each episode, it’s my job to engage with some of the brightest minds in higher education and the broader world of marketing to bring you actionable insights you can use to level up your school’s marketing and enrollment performance.
This week, we’re going to be talking about enrollment management. Outside the president’s office, there may not be a job that gets more scrutiny on campus than the VP of enrollment. Today’s guest says it’s time for the way we practice enrollment management to evolve, and she’s got plenty of thoughts on where it needs to go. Her name is Laurie Koehler, and she’s a powerhouse of enrollment expertise with an accomplished career that includes some of the most recognizable names in higher education.
We discuss how the practice of enrollment management has evolved over the last two decades, why enrollment strategy cannot be separated from institutional strategy, five ways we need to improve how we attract, retain, and develop the next generation of enrollment leaders, and why It’s time for everyone to stop talking about discount rate. Laurie has an incredible mind for both leadership and enrollment management, and she doesn’t hold back on this episode. Whether you’re in the enrollment manager’s office or work with folks who are, you won’t want to miss this episode. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Laurie Koehler.
Laurie, welcome to the show.
Laurie Koehler:
Thanks, Jarrett. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, I’m excited too. I think this is going to be a super fun conversation and I think we’ve got a lot of territory to cover, but I’m excited to talk about all of it. One of the reasons I think I’m super excited to talk to you is just the extensive career you’ve had in admissions and enrollment and just the impressive range of institutions that you’ve been at, from small great privates to Ivies to larger publics. I think it’s just a really interesting swath of higher ed that you’ve encountered over the course of your career.
As a first question, I would love to get your perspective on how you have seen the enrollment function evolve in colleges and universities from when you started to more recent days.
Laurie Koehler:
Yes, yes. I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not suggesting that you’re suggesting that I’m old or something, but I do-
Jarrett Smith:
You are experienced and wise.
Laurie Koehler:
I am seasoned, I am seasoned.
Jarrett Smith:
Seasoned.
Laurie Koehler:
That’s a nice word. But I do remember the days at Cornell, which would’ve been my second … I had a whole life before entering higher ed. I had about eight years in nonprofits and then moved into higher ed. But in my early years at Cornell, back in the early 2000s, I remember, one day, we set our record for receiving 130 bins of mail on a single day, those were those big post office bins of mail, which became all hands on deck and everybody, plus all of the temp crew that we hired just to open mail and create paper folders for reading was … it’s just weird to think about now, and the drama of moving to an online review process and how we had to gradually acculturate seasoned admission folks to how you read online.
Anyway, but more seriously, I think there’ve been some pretty big changes, a lot of them center around technology and data and the intersection of those two things, the use of analytics in all things from aid awarding to territory management, developing your prospect pool, marketing and communications as the way that we’re using data analytics to drive that and even do that, and student retention. Those pieces are pretty amazing and it means skill sets have had to change for folks in the field, and ways of thinking have had to change. There is a multi-billion dollar industry around college admissions and enrollment. Going to a NACAC conference today versus a NACAC conference 25 years ago, the vendor hall, it’s just a different world and it’s so much to try to make sense of if you work in that field. And there’s also been the rise of aid leveraging, and I’m going to say, quote, merit aid and how that’s used as it’s become more competitive.
I think a positive change has been the diversification of the populations that colleges and universities are seeking to enroll. For younger listeners, it was still a big thing to enroll significant populations of women when I first entered the field, but focus on, outside of SCOTUS, on students of color, on first-generation students, international students. The very targeted, focused internationalization of enrollment has really shifted. I think that’s positive, and now there’s this whole population, and the Common App has done, I think, a great job of helping us to think about access in new ways and the whole population of students who have some college but never finished and how we reach those adult learners.
I also think enrollment management is much more in the spotlight, both institutionally and at the national level. I still think the stories are heavily weighted toward a very tiny segment of a population of colleges and universities. And although I think we’re getting the extremes now, we’re getting the usual suspects at the top of the food chain and we’re hearing about the schools that are closing, and then most schools are somewhere in the middle of all that. But I think another thing that’s affected the field is presidential tenures are shorter than they used to be, and the impact of that on institutional identities, on stability, on marketing, on what institutional priorities are, strategies are, that they shift much more quickly than they used to. And I think that’s made the field of enrollment management even more challenging.
And then the last thing I’ll say that’s changed, I think, is the enrollment cycle. I was listening to a webinar with our colleagues at Niche who were talking about their recent junior survey and really the lengthening of that process for students, starting much earlier, many of them, not all of them, but many of them starting much earlier than they used to in even thinking about it and having conversations about college admission. And now, and I don’t know if it’s pandemic-related, and then since, this stretching out of the process. They were talking about there’s a population of students still in May and June who are not just deciding, but considering applying to places, and what that does, also, to our staff’s jobs, which I can touch on later.
Jarrett Smith:
I wanted to circle back to something you mentioned earlier in your comments was just how enrollment managers have become front and center on campus. My sense of the role and the folks that I talk to is this is, maybe outside of the president’s office, the single most challenging role on campus. I’m wondering if you could just outline for us briefly the core areas where you think it’s time for some fresh thinking and a new approach, and then we can dive into those. But if you could, at a high level, where would you draw our attention?
Laurie Koehler:
Yeah. I think one big one is really the connection between enrollment strategy and institutional strategy and how we need to think about that, and I think a second is around what you referenced, is talent, is finding, developing, and keeping talent in the field, because you’re right, there’s a trickle down. It used to be just the chief enrollment officer who was getting the pressure, and I think that has trickled its way down to even the most entry-level person in an enrollment shop, from their campus colleagues, the pressure people are feeling, and people are leaving. I think that’s another one.
I’m seeing more and more schools, to their credit, really thinking about student retention through an enrollment management lens and being much more intentional about it, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity there that more schools need to take advantage of. I think those are three really big ones that I’d probably focus on. The fourth might be this whole notion of, this isn’t a new argument, but could we stop talking about discount rate? Could we please just stop talking about discount rate?
Jarrett Smith:
[inaudible 00:09:35].
Laurie Koehler:
You can go there if you want. Yeah, yeah.
Jarrett Smith:
I would love to because I hear about discount rate all the time, so I want to unpack that one. But maybe we could circle back first to enrollment strategy and institutional strategy. I wonder if you could just unpack that for us a little bit about why those two things can’t be separated and make the case for that.
Laurie Koehler:
There are lots of things I’m really not great at, but one thing that comes naturally to me is seeing connections between people, between ideas, between strategies. And I know, early in my leadership roles, I was seeing all these things and frustrated, because I didn’t have a framework, how to put this together, what I cared about in my mission shop or in my enrollment shop. I needed other people to think about what they were doing. I worked for a lot of years, and still do, with one of the most brilliant analytic minds I have ever encountered in my enrollment career, but even beyond that. It’s a guy named Brian Zucker, and Brian is the CEO of a boutique firm called Human Capital Research Corporation, HCRC. And they work with really 100, 120, colleges and universities on data analytics and modeling for admission, for financial aid, retention, pricing strategies, anything that involves econometrics and as it relates to higher ed.
And Brian talks about how your enrollment performance is driven by four buckets. You’ve got the college’s pricing; two, its cost structure and management of that cost structure; three, its market development, not just the admission market development, but, institutionally, its market development; and fourth, and biggest probably, its product. And when you think about product, you think about your campus buildings and grounds, your academic offerings, the pedagogies being used in the classroom, your residential life curriculum, your campus culture, really the student experience as a whole, what happens inside the box when a student gets there. And so you take those four buckets, and your enrollment performance is driven by those buckets in combination with specific tactics you might use. That affects your market position, which then affects your enrollment performance, and it’s the cycle. And so if you’re not tackling these other things, you’re not really moving the needle long term, if you’re not connecting the dots.
And so you have to think about how can you develop an effective enrollment strategy to drive applications and yield and retention if you aren’t looking at your pricing? Is your pricing aligned with your market position? How does it compare with other schools like you, not just your competitors in the admissions realm, because your competitor might be big state U because they’re located in the same city you are, but you’re a tiny liberal arts college. Who are your students? How are you aiding them, not just in their first year, but over their four years? What’s the state of your product? All of those things you have to be thinking. And so you can’t build an enrollment strategy that’s solely focused on recruitment and yield tactics.
I worked with great leaders at a lot of institutions and I’ve been exposed to a lot of institutions, not only through my consulting work now, but through my colleagues. Too often, I see university leaders want an admission or an enrollment fix for an institutional problem. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always room to innovate and improve. And as an enrollment leader, you have to be on top of things, you have to ensure that your tactics are being measured, they have strong ROIs, but enrollment management leaders must be collaborating with the entire senior team to consider how enrollment strategy is connected with an institutional strategic plan, or I think often people are now referring to them as roadmaps because the landscape is changing so quickly. A five-year plan is really not helpful. That’s what I’m thinking about.
Jarrett Smith:
It’s so interesting to hear you say that because, as someone who works in a marketing agency that works with lots of schools all over, we have very similar conversations on the marketing side of the house about how, so many times, schools are looking to promotional aspects of marketing to solve deeper product issues, and, “Oh, we need to drive inquiries. We need to drive apps. We have these priority programs.” Well, are those priority programs in demand?
I think about how many MBA programs we get asked to promote. Talk about a knife fight in terms of competition. And it is so hard to market a program when it’s like, “Well, what are you bringing to the table that is different or interesting or unique or arguably, at least arguably, a little bit better than what the school down the road has?” And so it’s the same thing. And what you are saying, marketing circles, they talk about the four P’s. One of them is promotion, but also product and pricing. And I don’t mean to suggest that marketing should be at the helm of, say, pricing conversations, but there is a lot of research that they can contribute and market intelligence that a marketing department can help contribute to better inform pricing decisions, which is what you were getting at.
Laurie Koehler:
Absolutely, absolutely. And it’s funny, I feel like you just teed me up for something which was not planned, but at my last institution, we did a significant examination of our pricing, of our tuition, our room, our board, our financial aid awarding, and also how we talked about it. There was a narrative on campus that I observed when I first got there, “We’re so expensive, we’re just so expensive, and that’s why students don’t come and that’s why students leave.” After we did the research, it became clear, sure, we were more expensive than the public institutions in our state, but when you compared us with other privates, we weren’t. We were actually quite reasonable and our aid was quite generous.
And this was really a collaborative project of our marketing team, which at the time reported to me also. That was really a wonderful synergy, to have enrollment and marketing co-located, but also our finance team, the provost, our student affairs and campus life team, our trustee committee, external partners. We worked with a marketing firm to help test. We had a lot of routes we could take to look at how we priced ourselves and then how we represented that. We wanted research on how students would respond, how parents would respond, and we didn’t want gimmicks. We wanted also something that was in the best interest of both the institution long-term and of students, using a student journey map. What do we want the student experience to be from prospect to graduate related to pricing and aid at our institution? And we couldn’t do everything we wanted, but we developed a really integrated holistic approach that was everything from dramatically reduced pricing for seniors who didn’t have to live on campus and we had beds we needed to fill to communicating upfront the maximum cost they would incur over all four years. And those are just a few examples, but it was done in collaboration with the board, and we saw our yield jump three points in the year that we rolled out this-
Jarrett Smith:
Huge.
Laurie Koehler:
Yeah, huge. It was about bringing transparency and how we communicated our aid packages, how we made ourselves accessible to families to talk about their aid packages. It was very student-centered, and it was institutionally wise. It was a great project to be a part of, but it wasn’t driven by marketing, but it was informed, and how we talked about it was informed and the ideas were tested, but the ideas had to be sound ideas. They couldn’t be gimmicky.
Jarrett Smith:
A way I would describe the enrollment manager’s job, the enrollment leader’s job, is that they are on the hook for filling classes, but most of what actually drives that is out of their control. If you find yourself in that position where you maybe recognize within your institution that lack of integration and collaboration across core functions, how do you get that started? I realize that’s a giant question. It has so much to do with the culture and the people involved and the other leaders at the institution, but let’s just say you are in an institution where you think people might be game for it, we just haven’t taken the step of really that intentional collaboration. Where do you start?
Laurie Koehler:
I think one thing that is important as an enrollment leader, if you’re vice president of enrollment, vice provost, whatever your title is, you’re the chief enrollment person, to remember is that you live and breathe this stuff. This is your world, and most other people haven’t ever had to. There are a few. There are a few presidents who’ve ascended through enrollment, but for the most part, it can be really lonely. And so there’s some self-interest here in helping to start by educating your colleagues around what it is that you do and how you think, which also requires you to be curious and interested in what they do and how they think so that you can understand what are the pain points that our CFO is dealing with right now, because that’s going to affect how that CFO is going to respond or react or be thinking about enrollment, and the same from our provost or from our vice president for campus life.
Relationship building with those folks is really important, educating folks. Don’t make it a black box. Invite people in when you’re doing your aid leveraging conversations. If you are an institution that practices strategic aid leveraging, and you do it in-house or you do it with an external partner, invite the provost, the CFO, the president, into some of those meetings. Let them understand what’s happening behind the curtain. Don’t make it Oz. The more people have an understanding of the complexities and the nuance and the trade-offs, which is part of the discount conversation, is all of these different trade-offs that you’re trying to balance, then you start to build a culture that thinks through an enrollment lens also. And at the same time, you’ve got to be able to put your own stuff to the side and say, “Yes, I understand we want to do this. Let me give you a sense of what I think the enrollment implications might be, but if this is what’s in the best interest of the institution, then I need to support that.”
I think there’s a lot of education. One of the first things that I’ve done in leadership roles is make sure I’m talking about enrollment, not just admission, talking about they’re not synonymous. And when you think of it as enrollment, people can see where they plug in more. When you think of enrollment as admission and financial aid and maybe the registrar and what students take and how they choose their courses and how we retain our students, all of those pieces together, then they can start to see how they plug into this.
Jarrett Smith:
I want to shift gears just a little bit. I want to talk about talent, finding, developing, managing, retaining talent. I know this is an area where you put in a lot of focus. What’s your point of view on the issues that we have right now?
Laurie Koehler:
I would say there are five things we need to think about differently. One, we need to let go of sometimes what has become, I think, a rigid mindset about what work looks like. I’m of the five-miles-through-the-snow-uphill-both-ways generation of admission officers. That may not be serving us very well in terms of staff retention as we work with millennials and Gen Z-ers who actually care about having a life and an identity that’s not tied up with their jobs. And so how can we build in more flexible work environments while also ensuring an equitable office culture? I think that’s one.
Two, professional development cannot be an afterthought. It just can’t. Budgets are the first to be slashed often in professional development, not just in enrollment areas, but across campuses, and that’s really a problem. Now, there are a lot of great opportunities that are free or very low cost, and you can do from your office, you can do as a team, and if that’s what you can offer, make sure you’re offering it, and as a leader, make sure you are committing the time for your team to do that and saying, “This is a priority. We’re all going to be in this workshop together.” Do you have somebody on your senior team that has staff development as a part of their job description or even as a part of their title? Send a message that this matters to you and then walk the walk. Professional development opportunities is the second area I think we need to shift on.
A third is related to that, Jarrett, and it’s providing staff with regular feedback. It’s shocking. It’s shocking to me how many staff members I’ve encountered who don’t have regular one-on-one meetings with a supervisor. And, in all honesty, lots of us were given supervisory responsibilities with absolutely no supervisory training. You’ve excelled as a counselor, as an assistant director, and you’re really good at the work, and so we’re going to promote you in this very hierarchical linear fashion. And now you’re going to have two people reporting to you, professional people reporting to you, but no one’s ever taught you what that means, what that looks like. I mentioned earlier the certification program I went through was an executive coach, and that training was so helpful in providing a new way of thinking about supervising. A friend of mine who’s had his own coaching business for a long time, we’ve created a workshop to bring to college campuses that’s about bringing a coaching mindset to being a supervisor, which can really benefit not just your employees, but you, by empowering them to do more.
We’ve got to provide staff with regular feedback. Number four, we’ve got to rethink how we structure offices so we can leverage people’s strengths and build structures that support strategies rather than starting with a structure. We are so bound by these traditional models of organizations. I mentioned this hierarchical approach, these very old-school titles. Partner with your HR folks to start. Start with your strategic goals and then figure out what do you need to accomplish those goals. And when you have talented people, ask them, “What do you want to be doing? Where do you want to grow?” You might even suggest, and I’ve had great success with this, suggest that people write their own position descriptions about what they want to be doing that would serve the office best. You’d be amazed at what smart, talented people come up with and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, yes, that’s exactly right. That’s what we’ve been missing.”
And then last is I can’t stress enough the importance of transparency and authenticity as a leader in your office. Now, I talked about staff development, which is not just about sending team members to conferences or workshops, it’s also about bringing team members into conversations about the work, even if they don’t have something to do, even if they don’t have a task related to it, bringing people into conversations. Share knowledge, deepen understanding for them, learn from them. You’d be amazed at what some junior staff perspectives might be on things. And one of the fastest ways … I think we’ve seen survey after survey about what makes people happy in their jobs, and feeling like you are in the know is very high on that scale. Don’t hoard information and exclude people. Bring people in and practice transparency whenever you can. Those are my five big thoughts on how do we retain staff.
Jarrett Smith:
I want to dive into something small that you said earlier, and it was about discount rate. We’re just going to go from the big picture to something very specific. I have heard you say that discount rate gets maybe a little too much attention and maybe a little more attention than it deserves. If discount rate is perhaps a little overrated, tell us why, and then what are we supposed to look at instead?
Laurie Koehler:
Yeah. I do think it’s one of the biggest misunderstandings in our field, not by enrollment leaders, to be clear. I think my colleagues and I have had conversations about, “Have you been able to shift the conversation on your campus away from discount, and how have you done that and what examples are you using to really help people on our campuses understand what a discount rate is and what it isn’t?” Schools of different types have different priorities with regard to their goals, but for schools where paying their bills is primarily funded by revenue from tuition, room and board, the bottom-line goal is often just that, total net revenue and net revenue per student. And when I say total net revenue, it’s net revenue from a combination of tuition revenue, which can be paid for by … Pell Grants can be paid for by student loans, can be paid out of pocket by families, et cetera, the monies you generate through any housing and dining charges that exceed your costs.
There are a lot of different levers or tools you can use to try to get to that revenue goal and playing with tuition discounting is one of those tools. There are other tools you might use. You might use a tool of adjusting your pricing. You might tweak your head count because you might get more students with more revenue even if your discount is a little higher. You might rely more on early decision students, or you have tools and goals around academic quality, around athletics, your academic program mix and how you do that. And there are some programs that maybe generate more revenue than others. But there are always trade-offs, and so using different levers are going to have different ramifications. You can’t move one lever without everything else shifting around.
For example, if you generate meaningful revenue through a high percentage of your students living on campus, you might choose to discount your tuition a bit more to elevate your head count and boost your overall net revenue. Comparing discount rates from college to college isn’t really helpful without understanding the other relevant metrics and the context. Your discount may be higher, for example, but your academic quality may be stronger as well. We know that often you have to pay more to get in your sphere, your top-end students, and that might then positively affect your student retention, which then positively affects your market position, which then makes you more desirable and drives up applications in the future. You just have to think of all these pieces, or your discount [inaudible 00:30:58] be lower than school Y over there, but their charged tuition is higher, and so their net revenue ends up being higher. At the end of the day, paying your bills, you pay it with net revenue. You don’t pay your bills with your discount rate. Your discount rate is fake money.
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. That is so interesting. As you were talking, I feel like we just came full circle in the conversation and that you just made just what a compelling argument for why enrollment strategy and institutional strategy have to be connected. They have to be in lockstep, because all of those levers that you’re talking about pulling have implications across the entire campus.
Also, you have said the word trade-offs multiple times in our conversations, and that is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is there are rarely situations where you have perfect solutions, but when you’re talking about big strategic issues, there are trade-offs. We get this, but we’re going to sacrifice this. Are these trade-offs that make sense for us that we can live with? And then the notion of bringing other colleagues from around campus to help them engage in that conversation around trade-offs, I think, is such a more thoughtful, productive conversation than just, “Well, why can’t enrollment management do their job? Can we just get 3% more heads?” and it’s a completely different conversation.
Laurie Koehler:
Yes. That’s right. That’s right. And you put people in the position of weighing in, which are our priority, if we had to prioritize these things, academic quality, athletic success, net tuition revenue, discount rate, head count, how would you rank them? This is not a question to you. This is a let’s get in-
Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, no one’s going to ask me that.
Laurie Koehler:
Yeah. I don’t know though. You’re thinking a lot like an enrollment manager. I like it. But so people then are a part of that decision-making and understand what the implications are and understand what the risks are and what the challenges are.
Jarrett Smith:
And now, when you do that, you have entered the world of actual strategy. This is one of my little soap boxes. People throw around the word strategy so much and it makes me want to throw chairs. Of course, I work with a bunch of marketers. They’re always like, “What’s your social strategy? What’s your email strategy?” I’m like, “That’s not a strategy. That’s a tactic.” And people, I think, are a little gun shy about saying the word strategy, but to me, part of strategy, and the telltale sign of strategy, is hard choices, actual choices. And I know you’ve seen this, when you look at so many throwaway strategic plans that are just, “Here’s our five priorities,” that have a dozen different things under each of them, and basically it amounts to, “We’re going to get better everywhere, and we’re just going to improve everything. Just do better.” Well, where’s the strategy? Where’s the hard choice? Who on campus got pissed off because you chose this direction? Sorry, sorry.
That’s as mouthy as I get on this podcast. But what I hear you saying is, “Okay, no, we’re going to go head-to-head, and collectively, we’re going to grapple with these deep challenges and realize that not everything that comes out of this is going to necessarily be ideal or perfectly palatable to everybody or to every aspect of our institution. We’re going to make again trade-offs.” That’s my little soapbox. I’ll settle down now.
Laurie Koehler:
No, it was good, it was good, and totally on point. And it’s those trade-offs, they’re really hard. They’re really hard, and because they affect real people, or whether those trade-offs are eliminating a sport or a major or choosing to reduce the size of your institution or trying to grow it. They all affect real people in real ways and real people’s jobs and livelihoods. And so I think that’s where people bringing their whole selves to the conversation and not losing sight of that is really important.
Jarrett Smith:
Well said. Okay. I feel like we could go on for hours. Just what you just said there, there’s so many things that I would like to talk about, but we’ll end up with an eight-hour podcast. We’ll just plan on doing a round two sometime in the future, and I would love to do that if you’re open to it.
I know you have a workshop coming up, and so I’d love for you to tell folks about that, and also, if people like this conversation and want to connect with you out there in the interwebs, what is a good place to do that?
Laurie Koehler:
Sure, sure. Yeah, I’m excited. As we talked about staff retention and developing staff, one of the focuses of my coaching has been with new leaders who are trying to figure out, “How do I tackle this?” And we have to develop them now. In today’s climate, there is not a lot of time for a learning curve. When you step into a leadership role in enrollment, you’ve got to be able to hit the ground running, and so the more we can help our emerging leaders prepare for that now, the better.
And so this fall, at NACAC, I’m excited to be co-leading a pre-conference seminar titled Calling All Future VPs”: Developing Emerging Enrollment Leaders, pretty clear what it is, but I’m doing that with my really great friends, Liz Cheron and Jen Desjarlais, who I’ve known for many years through this work, our work together in enrollment. And we want to help attendees not only identify their competencies, their characteristics, their qualities, to help strengthen their ongoing leadership in the roles they’re in now, but also to prepare them for advancement opportunities. And so the workshop, it’s three hours, it’s on the Thursday that NACAC starts, and you can still sign up for it, and it will be interactive and people will leave with a plan.
We each have to own our own professional development. Some of us may have wonderful supervisors who push us and challenge us and encourage us and support us and give us the resources to do those things, and some folks don’t have that. And either way, we want to help people identify how do you put together that plan? Some of it is being curious about how colleges work and being able to think institutionally, and some of it is being curious about yourself and what strengths you bring to the table, and some of it’s being curious about your peers at other institutions and building a network of people who you can reach out to and learn from and support.
That’s what we’re doing, and I’m excited about it, and Jen and Liz are amazing, and I’m learning from them as we prepare this workshop together. If folks want to connect with me, I would love it. You can find me right now on LinkedIn and you can also email me directly. It’s my first name, Laurie, L-A-U-R-I-E, at KoehlerConsulting.net. And Koehler is not like the toilets. I’m not related to that family. It’s Kohler with an E in there. K-O-E-H-L-E-R, KoehlerConsulting, one word, dot net. My website’s going to go live shortly, which will be KoehlerConsulting.net. We haven’t pulled the trigger quite yet, so excited for that.
Jarrett Smith:
Awesome.
Laurie Koehler:
I so appreciate you having me, Jarrett. This has been really fun.
Jarrett Smith:
Oh, man, super fun conversation, and I feel like we covered so much territory and I learned so much along the way, so thank you. Thank you for this conversation. I enjoyed every bit of it.
Laurie Koehler:
Have a great one.
Jarrett Smith:
The Higher Ed Marketing Lab is produced by Echo Delta, a full-service enrollment marketing agency for colleges and universities of all sizes. To see some of the work we’ve done and how we’ve helped schools just like yours, visit EchoDelta.co. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And, as always, if you have a comment, question, suggestion, or episode idea, feel free to drop us a line at podcast@EchoDelta.co.
