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College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Admissions Counselor Malaise (on Amazon) Ten Moves To Rebuild Your Admissions Team The Circular Firing Squad Dr. Eliezer Vilanova Jr. started as a work-study tour guide who noticed every question was really a financial aid question. He went on to run financial aid and the bursar's office at Unity Environmental University, and now consults with institutions on student financial services. He sees the whole pipeline, which is rare. His argument on the interlude: trust, not affordability, is the actual problem, and trust is an outcome of operations rather than a strategy you can announce. We get into why students experience one institution while colleges design department by department, Grinnell sending net price estimates to Iowa students unprompted, the surprise fees that do more damage than the sticker price, and whose job it actually is to make sure a family understands their aid package. Three key takeaways: Trust as an operational outcome, not a marketing strategyDesigning around the student journey instead of the org chartWhat institutions could measure besides yield and discount rateLinks: Dr. Eliezer Vilanova Jr. on LinkedInNorthBridge Higher Ed Consulting

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Admissions Counselor Malaise (on Amazon) Ten Moves To Rebuild Your Admissions Team The pricing interlude from College Is Broken, read by the author. Three numbers, none of which match, and the argument that the discount rate is not an access strategy but a psychological one that has been quietly training the public not to believe us. Key takeaways What the sticker price is engineered to produceAccess to students versus access for studentsWho the model reliably works for

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Signal Solution (on Amazon) The Malaise Diagnostic Jeremy Thompson is vice president for marketing, communications and public affairs at the College of the Holy Cross, where he's been about four years after two decades in higher ed marketing and, before that, arts administration. He sits in the seat that has to translate all of this to the public, which makes him the right person to talk to about a chapter that argues higher ed lost the funding because it lost the trust. He agreed the sector can't fix this at the edges, then told me what the chapter leaves out. Rising cost isn't just a response to aid dollars. It's personnel in an institution that is 70 percent people, with health insurance costs up more than half over a decade. And it's decades of unfunded mandates producing the exact administrative footprint we get accused of. He also pushed back on my framing that everyone here is acting in good faith, which is fair. Not everyone is. Then he took the conversation somewhere I didn't expect, into the malaise interlude and the argument that we've been asking admissions counselors to be marketers instead of letting the marketers market. Key takeaways Whether ROI framing is a trap or a necessity for first-gen familiesUnfunded mandates and the administrative bloat we get blamed forWhy "your counselors are your sales team" falls apart on contact with a job posting Jeremy Thompson on LinkedIn

College Is Broken: Print Edition (Amazon) The Signal Driven Playbook The policymakers chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. I open by admitting I'm no fan of Reagan and then spend the rest of the chapter arguing that the private benefit reframe worked because higher ed handed it over, including the lobbying talking point I personally used on Capitol Hill. Key takeaways Where the private benefit reframe actually startedWhat the EFC was built to do, and what families thought it didPell as a voucher system higher ed won't call one

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) Stop Chasing Comfort Metrics Stop Waiting Betsy Klene spent ten years at IBM, did a stint as a radio announcer on a financial station in Los Angeles, lived in Singapore where spouses weren't permitted to work, and backed into college advising by helping her own three kids and then half of La Jolla. She came into the profession before U.S. News was the thing everyone organized around, which means she watched the whole arc rather than inheriting the end of it. She pushed back on me in two places. She thinks the book is too hard on parents, who in her experience take days off work, go to the night sessions, and show up already having done more homework than I gave them credit for. And she thinks I'm behind on prestige. Her last five years of students were picking Purdue and Georgia Tech over the sweatshirt schools, including one who got into Harvard and chose UT Austin because the program was better. We agreed on more than we disagreed, which is the risk with a rankings chapter. Everyone already thinks rankings are bad. Nobody stops submitting the data. Key takeaways Whether parents deserve more credit than the book gives themWhy prestige is losing ground to program fit and valueWhat a college's career center reveals about the institution Links Betsy Klene on LinkedInHECA (Higher Education Consultants Association) — The Admissions Directors Lunchcast

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Signal Driven Playbook The rankings chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. The argument is not that U.S. News built a bad formula. It's that colleges spent decades making themselves indistinguishable from each other, and the rankings showed up with a product to sell into the confusion we created. Key takeaways Why the sea of sameness came before the rankings, not afterWhat colleges actually bought when they spent on amenitiesWhether opting out is unilateral disarmament or an overdue question

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Signal Solution (on Amazon) The Circular Firing Squad Ken Cutts is a first-generation student from Milwaukee who spent eighteen years working out how the machine runs, roughly four of them on the vendor side with higher ed as the client. He is now Director of Marketing for Degree Programs at Columbia Business School. He points out early that he is a safe person to have this conversation with, since he is not an enrollment leader and nobody's discount rate is his to defend, which is exactly why he can say some of this out loud. He would not call it disagreement so much as what is missing, and the gap he named is money. The public sees a sticker price times a headcount and cannot understand why the college claims to be broke, and nobody inside is explaining where the money actually goes or does not go. From there we ended up on vendors as institutional memory, the fact that we built the entire funnel around what a vendor can track and monetize rather than what indicates a student is actually interested, and the new state surveillance pricing laws that may end up describing financial aid leveraging whether or not anyone in a state capitol has noticed yet. I also went further on for-profit colleges than I probably should have, and Ken let me. His own contribution is a piece of advice from a former boss about embracing your nemesis, which sounds like nonsense until he unpacks it. Key takeaways Where the money in higher ed actually sits, and why the public cannot see itSurveillance pricing law as an external forcing function on discountingWhy the metrics we optimize are the ones a vendor can bill for Links Ken Cutts on LinkedInThe Admissions Directors Lunchcast episode with Brian Troyer: [link needed]New Jersey Fair Price Protection Act, signed July 23, 2026House Judiciary Committee inquiry into tuition price fixing.

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) Ten Moves To Rebuild Your Admissions Team The enrollment chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. This is the one where the indictment includes me. Discounting from Robin Hood to house of cards, what the scholarship letter is actually engineered to do, why the enrollment manager who tells the president the truth gets replaced by someone who won't, and the bacon problem. Key takeaways The factory farm comparison, applied to enrollment ethicsWhat a scholarship letter is engineered to produce, and it is not affordabilityWho actually invented discounting, search campaigns, and application bloat

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon): Small College Consulting National Small College Conference Carole Chabries has three degrees in English literature, got the PhD fully intending to be a professor, and figured out in graduate school that she did not want the job. She spent 25 years in academic affairs instead, ending as vice provost at Carroll, which is where she and I were colleagues. She is also an HLC peer reviewer and team lead, which means she walks onto campuses she knows nothing about and watches every single one of them explain how it is unique. She now runs Third Rail Leadership. She did not disagree with much, which she is upfront about, so the useful part is where she pushes past me. My chapter frames the gap as enrollment selling job outcomes while faculty deliver formation. Her version is that both sides are talking to themselves and the actual gap is the student, whose real problem nobody has asked about. She got there by learning sales when she started her consultancy, discovering she had never once in academic affairs asked what pain the person in front of her was trying to relieve. We also got into why this is close to impossible for an adjunct teaching five hours a week, why faculty get drafted into recruiting with no preparation for it, and why nobody in a leadership meeting has ever asked whether the committee they are staffing is eating someone's teaching time. Her answer on that one was that calling it accidental was generous. Key takeaways Excavating what the student is actually trying to solve, underneath the jobWhy the adjunct model makes the case for the curriculum nearly impossible to makeThe generational shift in what being a faculty member even isLinks Carole Chabries on LinkedInThird Rail LeadershipThe Leadership LiveWire newsletter

College Is Broken: Print Edition ( on Amazon) The Signal Solution (on Amazon) The Signal Driven Playbook The faculty chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. The one where I side with the faculty and then explain why that is not the compliment it sounds like. Includes the original deal, the moment the pitch shifted to lifetime earnings while the product stayed the same, and the kitchen conversation about British literature that ends up doing more damage than any student loan statement. Key takeaways Why the pitch changed for first-generation families and the curriculum did notThe kitchen conversation as the place trust actually breaksWhat it costs when no president decides between the first job and the whole career

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon): The Circular Firing Squad Jaime Hunt spent 22 years in higher ed marketing, nine of them as a cabinet-level CMO at Old Dominion, Miami, and Winston-Salem State, before launching Solve Higher Ed Marketing in 2024. She also teaches the graduate higher ed marketing course at West Virginia University, which means she gets to watch the next round of people learn the water while they're still standing outside it. She is candid about her own position in the story, including the part where the administrative bloat everyone complains about includes jobs like the one she held. Her pushback was on persistence versus retention. She agrees the language flipped, but she does not want to hand the responsibility back to the student, and she thinks retention pressure can just as easily push a campus toward admitting the right students instead of lowering the bar. We got into whether the fix is bringing in outsiders who have never worked in higher ed, why the early career admissions counselor is treated as a consumable, and what happens if you measure a counselor on the graduation rate of the cohort they recruited four years ago. Also a brief detour into presidents who believe their campus is the best kept secret, which it never is. Key takeaways Whether retention pressure lowers the bar or sharpens fitThe case for hiring expertise from outside higher ed entirelyMeasuring admissions counselors on graduation rather than census Links Jaime Hunt on LinkedInSolve Higher Ed Heart Over Hype: Transforming Higher Ed Marketing with EmpathyConfessions of a Higher Ed CMO Podcast (Enrollify)

College Is Broken: Print Edition⁠ (on Amazon) Stop Chasing Comfort Metrics Interlude: The Water, from College Is Broken, read by the author. The one with no villain in it. Clark Kerr's public good premise quietly dissolving, Kenneth Mason at Quaker Oats warning that profit is to a business what eating is to life, Mark Salisbury on why the language flipped from persistence to retention and what that flip gave institutions permission to do. Key takeaways Why drift is harder to write about than corruptionWhat changed when the student stopped being the one who persistsWhy the people inside a system are the worst positioned to describe it

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon)The Signal Solution (on Amazon) The Circular Firing Squad Thom Chesney has done this three times: Brookhaven College in Dallas, Clarke University in Dubuque, and now Southwestern College in Santa Fe, a graduate school in counseling and art therapy. Three very different institutions, three very different boards, about thirteen years in the chair. He's also quoted in this chapter, which made him the obvious person to argue with about it. He doesn't say I got the presidents chapter wrong. He says I didn't push hard enough, and then offers his own upgrade: higher ed has a gambling addiction, the kind where the machine pays you back eighty cents often enough to keep you feeding it. We get into who sets the topics for institutional storytelling, why "we just need to tell our story better" survives every board meeting, the college that geofenced with postcards and won, what presidents actually say to each other about being the Harvard of their state, and his case that every campus needs a reliable source of truth serum. Also a board member who wanted to know why students stopped coming from Chicago on a train that stopped running in 1981. Three key takeaways: Higher ed as gambling addiction, not just delusionClaiming your actual geography instead of manufactured uniquenessHiring to transparency so there are no presidential surprises Links: Thom Chesney on LinkedInSouthwestern College

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Signal Solution (on Amazon) Stop Chasing Comfort Metrics Chapter One of College Is Broken, read by the author. Presidents and boards, the Harvard-of-wherever problem, what a 56.3 percent discount rate is actually telling you, and why the crack is easier to talk around than to treat. Three key takeaways: The machinery that protects presidents from what they need to hearThe discount rate as market feedback, not a leverWhy viewbook language establishes normalcy, not exceptionalism

College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon)The Admissions Counselor Malaise (on Amazon)The Malaise Diagnostic Dr. Jay Keehn was dean of students at a national university that closed underneath him. He now hosts College Closures, Mergers, and Acquisitions and runs THE CLUB, a monthly gathering of higher ed leaders that started as one guy posting a Zoom link on LinkedIn hoping to meet people. His read on the Introduction is that the stakeholder-by-stakeholder structure is the right call, because people are impacted differently and informed differently. What he thinks is missing is the emotional bridge: the student who researched five colleges, chose one, and lost it eighteen months later with seventy credits and nowhere to put them. We get into the red flags nobody outside the cabinet can see, a bakery in Gaffney, South Carolina that lost a quarter of its business when Limestone closed, why boards often don't know what questions to ask, and his unproven theory about a president running out the clock on a contract. Three key takeaways: Closure as a human event, not an administrative oneWhy presidents can see the crisis and still say "not us"Board composition as a structural problem, not a villainLinks: Dr. Jay Keehn on LinkedIn (message him to join THE CLUB)College Closures, Mergers, and Acquisitions podcast