enroll ml

Excited to be on campus at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis next week! I’ll spend a day on enrollment and AI strategy before delivering the keynote at their 2025 Enrollment Summit, where I’ll dive into the unprecedented collision of forces pushing traditional enrollment strategies to their limits—and how transformative admissions leaders can guide their teams and institutions forward. I’ll also be discussing how to build a practical, powerful, and forward-looking AI strategy for enrollment management—one that aligns advancing technology with institutional processes and the needs of the next generation of applicants. This summit is a model that more admissions teams should consider—a dedicated forum where administration, faculty, and enrollment stakeholders can align on strategic objectives and the cross-campus collaboration needed to drive enrollment success. Looking forward to insightful discussions with partners from Niche, MARKETview Education Partners, and Encoura as we work together to shape the next-generation enrollment management data and technology playbook at UMSL. A special thanks to Vice Chancellor for Strategic Enrollment & Career Advancement Reggie Hill and Executive Director of Enrollment Management Megan Green Simonds for the opportunity to contribute to this important event.

Who are your admissions counselors focusing on this yield season? If your answer is “students who reply to our emails,” you might be missing the mark. The students who need your outreach the most are often the ones who haven’t replied yet—they’re the ones deciding between your institution and others. These are swing students—the ones who are engaged but unsure, committed but wavering. And reaching them requires more than a generic call to action. In my latest blog, I dive into what real proactive outreach looks like. It’s nuanced, personalized, and student-specific—not just checking boxes and hoping for replies. Curious to hear how your team identifies swing students. What is your system for prioritizing them, or is it all about who replies first? Let’s discuss below!

I was honored to be a guest of Cheryl Broom's Higher Ed Conversations podcast!

Excited to share that I’ll be speaking at the 2025 COTA Conference on March 7! ??? This year’s theme, “Student-Centered Transfer Revolution: Rethinking Policies, Practices, and Partnerships,” is more important than ever as institutions work to remove barriers and improve the transfer experience for students. As someone who has seen AI’s impact firsthand, both as an enrollment leader using AI to support students and now from the vendor side, helping institutions implement these tools, I’m especially excited about this conversation. I’ll be presenting Partnering with AI: Empowering Enrollment, Retention, and Student Success through Innovative Tools and Initiatives, where we’ll explore how institutions can leverage AI to create student-centered transfer practices while building strong vendor partnerships and upholding ethical standards. Grateful to the Missouri Department of Higher Education & Workforce Development (MDHEWD) and the Committee on Transfer and Articulation (COTA) for hosting these conversations. If you’re attending, let’s connect! Looking forward to insightful discussions.?

I hope you'll join us for the second edition of the enroll ml Video Podcast series. This week, we'll have our founder and CEO discussing how colleges and universities are moving beyond the predictive lead score and focusing on outcome optimization to drive enrollment success. (Registration link in the comments!)

The key to achieving incremental yield increase is the early identification of applicants who are displaying significant positive intent behaviors - but have not taken the final commitment steps. We're looking forward to talking with Tess Ferzoco about the strategies she's deployed at Edgewood College to deliver on enrollment objectives in this challenging environment.

Admissions teams are at a breaking point. AI won't solve it all - but it is most certainly a major part of the answer and the path forward. Personalized admissions at scale is an imperative for higher education as well as an expectation of the next generation of college students. As noted in this Forbes article by Vinay Bhaskara, the challenge of increasing volumes of applicants per counselor makes true individualization nearly impossible. And worse— we have now reached the point where the very act of deciding where and why to focus within the applicant pool now consumes a significant portion of an admissions counselor's and leadership's time - time that I think everyone involved would prefer was spent working directly with curious, motivated and enthusiastic students. This dynamic has created fundamental cracks in admissions today—and highlights why machine learning-driven admissions process optimization is no longer optional, but essential. The systematic de-frictioning of the college application process has improved accessibility—but at a cost. Admissions teams are drowning in data, spending 30-50% of their time just trying to make sense of it. That’s time lost engaging students, building relationships, and delivering on a more personalized, substantive enrollment experience that does a more effective job of identifying and connecting with the best-match students. I recently spoke with a newly graduated data scientist and asked how many colleges they applied to. The answer? 18. The overwhelming challenge of applicant volume and data analysis is not receding— and it must be addressed. At enroll ml we see a significant component of the solution first hand: effective deployment of the compute and deep data analysis power of machine learning to optimize and automate admissions teams work (reclaiming multiple hours of admissions counselor time per day) - so that they can spend more time directly with students. This creates a true win/win/win: a better experience for the institution, student and admissions team. To create an admissions process that serves all parties, Institutions must move beyond the contemporary data analyses, statistical frameworks and processes to AI-powered decision-making to make their teams more efficient, precise and personal - while also enabling the ability to execute at scale. The imperative is clear - and the question is not "if" transformation needs to happen, but how quickly admissions can adapt to this new environment.

Looking forward to kick off the 2025 enroll ml Video Podcast series with Tess Ferzoco, Vice President of Enrollment Management at Edgewood College. We'll be discussing how institutions can (or must!) uncover hidden yield by focusing on the middle of the funnel. Registration is open (and free!) now. https://lnkd.in/gqhzYUcR