November 20, 2009 « Solving the Enrollment Compensation Problem (Part I) »
This two-part Executive Briefing was prepared exclusively for senior decision-makers. The focus assumes longstanding progressive organizational experience leading to a senior position in a college or university setting.
Part I of this Executive Briefing assesses the current situation with respect to the compensation of enrollment representatives. Part II continues this assessment and concludes with potential action items.
Once again, the for-profits are in the news for allegedly illegal, to say nothing of unethical and uninspiring, enrollment practices.
The public has an interest in this issue at several levels ranging from consumer protection to the use of federal funds in the form of grants and loans. University leaders have a special interest in this topic because their own shops may be performing to much different standards than they have been led to believe.
Those who use the term "for-profit" as a soubriquet for "inferior" will not be interested in what follows. For them, there is warmth derived from the heat falling on the University of Phoenix for allegedly allowing enrollment representatives to cross the line from well-managed enrollment practices to shoddy misrepresentations of the truth in an attempt to secure sales.
For the rest of us, it helps to note that the problem is both larger and more complex than the for-profit haters would have it. Let’s examine a few of the issues beyond the headlines.
- First, let's dispatch common traditionalist claims to moral high ground for eschewing performance-based compensation. Such claims display profound ignorance of moral theory. Superior moral arguments -- on both utilitarian and deontological grounds -- fall to performance-based compensation. Simply put, it is unethical to pay the individual who turns in mediocre performance while spending a portion of every work day surfing the Internet as much as the person who is focused on his job and shows continuous improvement in his performance. It is possible to construct tedious counter-arguments presupposing equal efforts and highly dissimilar results (i.e., how do you pay two individuals who work equally hard but possess widely differing abilities for the specific role they occupy). Such arguments are pedantic in that they fail to mirror the real world in problem definition or solution.
- On many occasions, heightened Department of Education and/or Department of Justice attention to a for-profit’s enrollment practices is triggered by the complaints of a disgruntled and strident (read: fired) enrollment representative. Few of us would suggest that the complaints of a fired worker should be summarily dismissed. On the other hand, we have all experienced enough of the exaggerated and even blatantly false allegations of dismissed employees to know that a special assessment is required in such cases. If you fired a worker in your university’s human services department it was probably because he spent his time surfing the Internet rather than working, and was the object of complaints by his co-workers. You did not fire him because, as he alleged, he belonged to a protected class. If an enrollment counselor was fired by one of the for-profits, it was most likely because he was not performing well in his role, or was committing the very violations of rules he is now imputing to the institution. Does the disgruntled worker explanation fully account for the problem? No, but it is a component.
- We should always be wary of the potential to commit the “compared to what” fallacy. It is easy to inspect the enrollment practices of the for-profits because they gather and use detailed metrics in all of their business processes. They do so primarily because they understand that one cannot run an institution efficiently without precision real-time metrics for all functional areas. If they are publically traded, they are also metrics-rich to support reporting requirements. Performance metrics are especially rich in the enrollment pipeline but, in the better schools, they are comparably rich in the post-matriculation retention pipeline. In a sense then, the for-profits are easy targets because they are so scrutable. What can we say about the rest of higher education with respect to how they manage their enrollment pipeline? Do enrollment representatives tell the truth? Do they work hard to help prospective students deal with the messy inputs that the typical working adult student brings to the table? Do they follow up on their commitments or even return their phone calls? If we are honost in our self-reflection, we know the answer to these questions: We have no idea how most state and independent institutions manage enrollment processes because they operate under a condition of extremely impoverished metrics. On its face, this condition would appear to render hypocritical any criticism leveled at the for-profits.
- It turns out that we do know something about the enrollment management practices of the not-for-profit institutions. Our organization shops colleges and universities of all charters, generally at the request of the institution being shopped, sometimes at the request of a competitor. The generalization from 15 years of this research is clear and consistent: if the for-profits deserve a D for their enrollment work; the rest of the industry deserves an F, albeit for different reasons.
Following is a summary of the top six experiences you are likely to have when attempting to learn more about a state institution as a prospective student: (a) most calls will get you nowhere; 3-5 calls are required to speak with anyone who is willing, even if grudgingly, to help; (b) somehow, the person will let you know they have better things to do with their time; (c) you will be provided with inaccurate and contradictory information pertaining to the few questions they can answer (call three times, get three different answers); (d) you will hear, “Gee, I don’t know” as an answer to most intelligent questions that are material to the enrollment decision (how many students are enrolled in the program; how fast is it growing; what are the job placement rates; what is the 4-year graduation rate; what will become of my various prior credits; will I be able to get all of my classes each term; can I be given start and graduation times today); (e) you will not be helped with anything that involves work (the forms are on our website, good luck and don’t call back); (f) promises to follow up and help you in a specific way will be broken; calls and voicemail will not be returned.
Is it possible for someone to filter the facts sufficiently to claim that the treatment afforded prospective students at the hands of the NFPs is somehow superior to the how they will be treated at the for-profits, given that the NFPs have no comprehensive empirical evidence of how they actually treat prospective students? Doing so could not be called rational. Remember, in the case of the for-profits, we are looking at egregious exceptions to an otherwise reasonably sound process. In the case of the NFPs, we are looking at typical behavior where decent, responsible treatment is the exception.
Part II will conclude this assessment and conclude with potential action items.
Reader Comments (2)
It would be nice -- no, much more than nice -- to encounter a true "customer focus" when dealing with, not just schools, but all institutions and agencies. Empowered service desk folks would be ideal.
But my recent experiences with poorly trained financial aid / data entry staff at some of the "other" for-profits shows that the customer service ideal has yet to take root across the industry.
It turns out that filing a student loan is a lot more complicated than these companies seem willing to admit. If they did, I speculate that they would have trained their staff better. On the other hand, what I was witnessing may have also been due to the marked increase in students streaming into on-line courses, butting up against inadequate staffing levels.
This leads to another thought -- about why service desk personnel often seem so clueless. Part of this syndrome is the result of the bureaucratization process itself, since pyramidal hierarchies move decision making and responsibility upwards, and limit choices and responses for those at the lower levels of the organization -- primarily through standardization (Weber). The private in the army is, in many ways, literally miles away from a general.
This suggests that much of the disempowerment that is encountered is structural, and not easily addressed.
Perhaps the most important result of this kind of analysis is the realization that, just as responsibility and decision making vary depending upon location within an organization, so does cognition. In other words, all knowledge is truly local. The view from the top varies considerably from the view at the bottom.
Whether or not training can address these kinds of structurally-based cognitive deficiencies is an open question, I think. And I will leave to one side the question of what this means for faculty and student learning.
So, how do those of us at independent colleges who want to apply Mr. Tucker's observations balance the common sense of compensating for performance against the thread of the Department of Education making our lives miserable with audits? Even if we come out of an audit with a clean bill of health, what are the internal and external costs of going through the procedure. Many of us end up deciding it isn't worth the hassle, even if it is more ethical to compensate someone for hard work and success.