Andy 0:03
Welcome to the HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the Chief Operating Officer, and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

Kelly 0:09
And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the Director of Editorial Strategy. Dr. [Perez is a nationally recognized leader in higher education and a leading voice on college admissions and student access. As CEO of NACAC, he represents more than 28,000 admission and counseling professionals and serves as a key voice in shaping national conversations around enrollment, policy and access. Before joining NACAC, he held senior leadership roles across higher ed, most recently as Vice President for Enrollment and Student Success at Trinity College. He's also the author of "The Hottest Seat on Campus," a road map for mastering leadership in college admission, which discusses the realities of admission leadership. Angel, thank you so much for joining us today.]

Angel 1:04
Thanks for having me.

Kelly 1:06
So, Angel, before we get into a question, I just wanted to have you discuss your background, the mission of NACAC, and also what fuels your passion to lead the association.

Angel 1:17
Yeah, sure. I guess I'll start with my background because it's very much related to why I do this work. It is my passion and connected to my story. I was a first-generation college student. I grew up low income, first in Puerto Rico and then in the projects of the South Bronx in New York City, and had this incredible opportunity to go to college on a full scholarship. Because a high school counselor who had 700 kids in her caseload stopped me in the hallway of my high school and said, "Young man, have you ever thought about going to college?" And the answer at that time was, no, I had not thought about going to college. I didn't have anyone in my family that went to college. It wasn't something that I saw on television, growing up at that time in the early '90s. Just the tap on the shoulder really moved me in an entirely different direction. You know, this counselor who supported me through the process, and then this wonderful admissions officer who came to my school and painted a picture of what life could be on a college campus. So I went to college, had a wonderful transformative experience and eventually became an admissions officer. And I thought I was going to do that for one year until I got a real job because, you know, I didn't think — like people on college campuses have real jobs when you're a student, you don't think that way. And then, 20 years later, here I am. I spent most of my career in higher education, as you noted in the beginning, and I am about to start my seventh year as NACAC CEO and just, you know, passionate to be leading this organization whose mission is to empower college admission counseling professionals through education, advocacy and community. So we are the largest professional association for college access professionals around the world. We do a lot of advocacy, especially here in Washington, D.C., where we are located, to try to make sure that there's as much access to higher education as possible, but also a lot of education, training, conferences, so on and so forth. So it's a phenomenal opportunity and a privilege for me to do this work, especially at this critical moment in our history.

Andy 3:32
Thank you for sharing, Angel. I believe it's important to kind of have that history and your lived experience in this conversation, because I really do think there's going to be a huge thread of a lot of topics we cover that your personal and your professional really kind of offer a unique view. But we're going to jump right in to two biggies along with admissions currently, which is affordability and access. You've been part of national conversations about college access and affordability, including advising at the federal level. When you look ahead, where do you see opportunities for furthering access and helping affordability?

Angel 4:16
I think we're at a really pivotal moment in our history. I don't think I have to tell our listeners and our viewers all of the challenges that we are currently facing and the challenges that higher education and college access professionals are facing, but I do think there is incredible opportunity here. I think if there's one thing we can probably all agree on, it's that there is an incredible hunger for change. I think we continue to move into a space where we are rethinking the way that higher education is funded in this country. We all know that education across all sectors — K-12 and higher education — is deeply underfunded, and so that's one area where I think we have an incredible amount of opportunity. You know, right now we have a lot of challenges with this current administration and getting more funding for higher education, but it doesn't mean that there's not a lot of opportunity at the state level and that there's a lot of opportunity moving into the years ahead. I also think there's big change coming. You know, the reality of the matter is higher education is at this inflection point. I think the public has spoken and, you know, there's a lot of mistrust and I think we have some trust-building that we have to do, and part of that trust-building has to be centered around affordability — affordability not just in what we offer in our classrooms, but also how do we make it affordable for students, how do we make sure that we can deliver quality education to our students and at the same time be able to make it affordable. And so I do think colleges and universities, our colleagues on campuses, they are having those conversations. They are wrestling with those issues. It's not easy. I say that as someone who worked on a college campus for over 20 years. I understand how challenging it is to make it affordable because higher education is not a cheap product. It's a very expensive product. However, I think we're at a turning point, and so I'm excited about the kinds of opportunities that do lie ahead.

Kelly 6:28
Thank you so much for that, Angel. So speaking of conversations on campus, I want to discuss some people who are outside of admissions — they may not realize everything that goes into the role involved in strategy, revenue and a lot of internal decision-making. So what should faculty, student affairs professionals and maybe others on campus better understand about how the work that they do connects to admissions, and also what enrollment leaders may be navigating every day?

Angel 6:58
Oh my gosh. If I were to answer that last part of the question — what enrollment leaders are navigating every day — we'd be here for like three hours. But I'm glad you brought this up because when I was on a campus, I was actually infamous for saying it takes a village to recruit a class and it takes a village to enroll a class. Everyone is an admissions officer. Yes, you have the admissions office who is leading the efforts across campus. But the reality of the matter is students want to go to college because they are interested in the work professors are doing. They are interested in the work that staff are doing. They want to know what current students are doing and the kind of things that they're engaged in. And so everyone has a role to play in making sure that when students come to visit, they feel welcome — that they have a clear understanding of what the culture and the academic offerings are going to be. And so whether you're a student affairs professional, whether you are a faculty member, or whether you work in the dining hall serving food to students, everyone has a role to play in making students feel welcome on this particular campus. And the reality is the role of enrolling students has become more complex than ever. The headwinds are extraordinary. We have a demographic cliff that has already taken place, which means that we have fewer students in the pipeline to higher education, because they just weren't born about 18 years ago. And so that is just — you know, demographics don't lie and it's a challenge that we have. You know, one of the things that enrollment officers were doing to mitigate some of this is that for years, admission teams have worked to recruit international students across the world. And given our current political climate, it's getting more and more challenging to enroll international students. And so that is yet another lever that admission officers do not have. We also have, as we sort of alluded to in the beginning of the podcast, extraordinary headwinds from the public and a distrust in higher education, and more and more people thinking, is it worth it? Should I be investing this kind of money? It's a significant investment in higher education. And the competition is extremely steep, right? We have thousands of colleges and universities across the country; students have many choices. And so to be an enrollment officer, an admissions officer today, whose job is to enroll the right number of students and to bring in the right amount of revenue that is needed for the institution to operate — with the right demographics that meet all of the different needs across the campus, right, we need enough people to be in the chemistry department, and we need enough people to fill the school of communications, and so on and so forth — it is an extraordinarily complex role. I remember a former vice president for academic affairs at one of my institutions where I used to work. She used to describe it as having to land a jumbo jet on a tiny runway every single year. That was my job, as she thought about all of the different things that I was responsible for. And I have a deep amount of empathy, not just because I did that work, but because it's getting harder every single year, and the job is so public. One of the things about this role — the piece of enrollment — and as one of my colleagues says in the book that I wrote: "There is nowhere to hide in this role." Everybody knows whether you've succeeded this year or you didn't. And that's very different from other roles on college campuses, you know. How do you measure the success of a vice president for student affairs? Potential. How do you measure the success of a dean? Potential. Very different than the concrete numbers. The enrollment dean either made the numbers or didn't make the numbers. It's a lot of pressure.

Andy 11:11
And the pilot landing that plane is making decisions based on 18-year-old brains.

Angel 11:17
Oh, I used to joke all the time, Andy, with my friends — I must be crazy to take on a job where my success is dependent on the whims of 18-year-olds. We all know 18-year-olds, and their decisions can be all over the place. And so in addition to all the external factors, you have the emotions of 18-year-olds, who really are the ones making the decisions ultimately to enroll.

Andy 11:44
As the conversation has also evolved over the past few decades, particularly for students who are going to be on campus and engaging in that campus community, the welcome side of it is going to be re-emphasized. From an advancement standpoint — I was a development officer at a college — that's exactly the same thing. Every chance of interaction, that welcoming is there. At the end of the day, what students are going to get is their education and their experience, but feeling part of that community and feeling like they belong — everybody has a role to play in it. And more importantly, unfortunately, sometimes we're judged when you don't feel part of the community, or you feel othered. And when you feel othered or not part of the community, it takes a lot to rebuild that trust as an institution. It's so imperative that everybody understand that we all have a role in each finger — respect the value of the other fingers and understand that we need the entire hand to be working together in that effort. Such an important point that I think people sometimes think can be siloed on a campus. This particular thing cannot be siloed; that will absolutely make campus life a lot more difficult.

Angel 13:07
Yeah, and the truth is, there's research now that shows that belonging is No. 1 in terms of why students enroll and why they stay — even more importantly, right? Students stay and persist on college campuses because they feel a deep sense of belonging, and it is all of our jobs on a college campus to make that happen. The other thing I would share, and I write about this in the book as well, is that I am a firm believer that colleges and universities need to move further into building cultures of hospitality on their campuses. This is a controversial thing I'm going to say, but I believe it to my core. Many colleges and universities are inching up toward charging $100,000 a year in tuition and fees. You are absolutely in the business of hospitality, because if you are going to think about what do we spend $400,000 on — let's say your child stays for four years — the only thing we spend that kind of money on is probably a house, right? And so when people are making that kind of investment, they are now expecting a very different kind of service, and I think many institutions have not moved toward a culture of hospitality. I used to say on my campus at Trinity when I was there — and I actually did some training in hospitality and tried to build that culture into my team and my campus — that I can't beat institutions with more endowment and revenue and scholarship dollars; I can't beat them on that, but I can beat them on how I make students feel when they arrive on my campus. So I'm a firm believer in Maya Angelou's quote: People will forget what you said, they'll forget what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. And one of the secret recipes of success in admissions is about how you make students feel when they come to your campus.

Andy 15:00
That's spot on. And I'd also ask some of those leaders who are pondering that — when we buy a house, we're judged whether or not we're creditworthy and whether or not we can afford the house. And you're asking an 18-year-old to make a decision that is basically the equivalent of taking on a giant mortgage before they know anything about what their earning potential is or who they want to be. If you box them in so that there are only certain positions they can take to service the debt that they create to go to your institution, you really, really need to think long and hard about what your responsibility is to that young adult, that emerging adult, in their life. If this is the trajectory you're putting them on — to me, I just want to make sure that does not get lost in the conversation. Because I do think that's part of just being a good human being.

Angel 15:55
And I think that's part of — I love that you brought that up because I think that if we can do that, that's one other way of rebuilding the trust, right? I think there's been so much trust lost between higher education and society, and it's not just because of what you hear on the news, but it's things like that, right, that I think we need to be more transparent. We need to give students clear pathways to help them understand: If you take this on, what does this mean for the future? As opposed to just thinking about our own revenue, which is real. And the pressure is real around making sure that you generate revenue on a college campus. But I don't think it's mutually exclusive — you can both serve students well and also make sure that you're economically viable on your campus.

Mike 16:42
We hope that you've enjoyed the beginning of our interview with Dr. Angel Perez. Join us next week as we dive in deeper and talk more about admissions and how much it affects everyone working on a campus. If you have any questions or comments for us, email them to podcast@HigherEdJobs.com, or message us on X @HigherEdCareers. Thanks for listening. We look forward to talking with you soon.