dr

Local businessman has organized local business people to elect more business friendly state representatives. Listen to the tone of questions from local PBS station where the “ guest,” is treated like a hostile witness in a courtroom cross examination.

The decision by the Virginia Supreme Court to overturn the will of more than three million voters will not stand.

I am in a Marriott in Orlando. The NACAC conference. The minibar has 2 remaining Maker's Marks and a Toblerone I will expense as "stakeholder entertainment." It is 1:47 AM and I have been staring at the spreadsheet for 3 hours because something happened today at the keynote that I cannot stop thinking about. I run enrollment at a university where 25% of our bachelor's programs cost more than they will ever return. I know which ones. I have a spreadsheet. 3 columns: program name, average debt at graduation, projected lifetime earnings. When column 3 is lower than column 2, the row turns red. I have been looking at this spreadsheet for 6 years. Tonight is the first time I counted the red rows. There are 43. I market the red rows the hardest. They have the highest margins. Here is what happened at the keynote. A man from Strada Education — khakis, lanyard, the energy of someone who jogs — presented a slide that said 42.5% of recent graduates are underemployed. Working jobs that don't require the degree they are still paying for. The room nodded. 400 enrollment professionals nodded. I nodded. Then the next slide was a recruitment marketing case study and nobody connected the two slides and I thought: we are all looking at the same spreadsheet. That's enrollment management. A girl came to our open house last March. She asked me — me, specifically, at the folding table with the Pantone 2768C tablecloth — whether the Communications degree "paid off." I said: "Our graduates report high satisfaction with their career trajectories." She nodded. She was 17. She did not know that "report high satisfaction" means we survey them 6 months out, when they're still grateful, before the loan payment hits month 7 like a rock through a windshield. I enrolled her. She is a red row now. I remember her because she brought her mother. The mother asked about parking. I told her about parking. That's enrollment management. A red-row student borrows $39,375. The degree will not, across a career, return that money. I know this when I sign the viewbook. The viewbook weighs 4 ounces. It has our Pantone — 2768C, a blue that tested well with parents in the 2021 focus group. The debt weighs 14 years. The viewbook is designed to feel expensive. It costs us $3.40 per unit. What it sells costs them $39,375. I am good at this. Here is the logic, and I need you to follow it because it is the only logic and nobody will explain it to you as plainly as a man with 2 bourbons in him at 1:47 AM in an Orlando Marriott: You need the degree to get the job. The job does not pay enough to cover the degree. Without the degree you cannot get the job that does not pay enough to cover the degree. We call this "the value proposition." We put it on the landing page in 24-point Freight Sans. 63% of our own faculty say this year's graduates are unprepared. I put that faculty on the brochure. The photo is from 2019. The department lost 2 adjuncts we didn't replace. We replaced them with a Coursera licensing agreement that costs $11,000 per year. The 2 adjuncts cost $94,000. That's academic innovation. I did not invent that phrase but I did put it on the landing page. AI automated the first rung. The entry-level jobs that made the red rows orange — account coordinator, junior analyst, editorial assistant — are disappearing at a rate I track quarterly because it affects yield projections. I sell ladders to the gap. The gap is getting wider. My ladders are getting more expensive. These are not opposite trends. They are the same trend. I voted to ban ChatGPT in the classroom. Every employer on our job board lists it as required. I banned what they need. I charge for what they don't. I did this in a committee meeting that lasted 11 minutes. I ate a Kind bar. Nobody objected. In 2023 I tried to flag the red rows. I mean formally. I went to the Provost's office with the spreadsheet. I said: "These 43 programs have negative ROI and we are increasing ad spend on them." She said: "What would you like me to do with this?" I said I didn't know. She said: "Then this is a conversation, not a report." There is no form for what I brought her. No inbox. No committee. No dropdown that says "Our product harms the buyer." I went back to my desk and increased the ad spend. The system has no mechanism for the information I carry. So the information just lives in me, metabolizing into bourbon at industry conferences. The second Maker's Mark is open now. Last month we won the NACAC Excellence in Enrollment Strategy Award. Yield rate. Yield measures how effectively we convert acceptance into payment. Not outcome. Not employment. Not whether the 43 red rows ever turn green. Whether they paid. That's all yield is. Whether. They. Paid. A red-row graduate emailed last week asking if we had job placement support. We do. It's a link to Indeed. The link has a UTM tag so I can see how many of them click it. 14 last month. I put that number nowhere. There is nowhere to put it. I checked. Our yield is 34%. Our red rows yield 41%. The girl from March — Communications, red row — will graduate in 3 years with $39,375 in debt and a job market that no longer contains the job the degree was designed to train her for. She will be a data point on someone else's slide at a future conference in a future Marriott. Someone will nod. The thing about a spreadsheet is it never asks you how you feel about the red. It just goes red. And you keep marketing it. And it keeps working. And you win awards for it working. The man from Strada is probably asleep in this hotel right now. His slides are probably still open on his laptop. 42.5%. He presented that number like weather. I received it like weather. 400 people received it like weather. Tomorrow there is a panel called "Enrollment Innovation in the Age of AI." I am moderating it. I will ask good questions. I will not ask the one question. That's enrollment management.