enroll ml

In honor of Colorado's 150th birthday, I'm excited to announce our newest partner in the state I recently started calling home. The evolution from CRM-powered data, analytics, and workflows to AI-driven insight and decision support for enrollment management may prove to be the most significant advancement our profession has seen since the widespread adoption of the CRM itself. We're honored to welcome another institution on this journey as we help shape the next generation of enrollment management.

The hardest part of leadership is rarely the decisions. It's making them alone. Tess Ferzoco wrote about the kind of isolation that sets in when you're the one staring at melt rates and territory gaps and everyone is waiting for you to make sense of it. Companionship in thinking. AI Automation makes the work faster. This changes what it feels like to do it. That's a different kind of build.

Tess Ferzoco put something on the page this week that names a tension a lot of enrollment leaders feel but rarely have the words say out loud. Obedient counselors chase checklists, call lists. Disciplined counselors read patterns. The first produces activity. The second produces outcomes. We see this every day. Teams aren't underperforming because they aren't working hard. They're working inside systems that reward compliance, and then we wonder why the conversations feel transactional. The platform and each student thesis exists to give counselors the room to do it.

#AI thinking is the major advancement in enrollment and it changes everything about how your team understands and moves every student. enroll ml is excited to welcome a new partner. #graduateenrollment #graduateadmissions

Are we serving students or serving our metrics? Picture this very familiar story: A counselor gets a list, students within a hundred miles who haven't visited or admits who haven't filed FAFSA, and walks into every conversation with the same institutional goal baked in. The conversations start to sound identical, because they are. The student's actual situation, momentum, what's really blocking them, what they actually need, all of that gets filtered through what the list was built to solve. The relationship dims and we know relationships recruit students. The thinking engine works differently. It tells your team what's actually guiding each student, their behavioral patterns, momentum, what's stalled them. No if-then predictions. No buckets. Every student gets their own thesis, their own context. That makes it structurally difficult to have the same conversation twice. Counselors have to actually see the person. The real question you should ask yourself is "Are we willing to rethink how we do this work?" Because once you start seeing students as individuals with their own behavioral narrative instead of members of a segment, you can't unsee it and your outcomes won't either.

The enrollment environment has already changed. Most teams are still catching up. Families are questioning the ROI of a degree out loud, and expecting someone on your team to answer them with something more than talking points. Students have more pathways than ever and are genuinely using them. AI is reshaping what families expect from every interaction before they ever talk to a counselor. The demographic cliff isn't coming, it's here for most markets. And the bar for what "personalized" means has moved so far that volume-based outreach strategies are starting to work against the institutions that rely on them. That's not one headwind. That's a fundamentally different market. And it will only become more demanding. Leading through that kind of transformation requires something most enrollment leaders don't have a clear picture of: how to move the whole team, not just the ones eager for change, not just the ones satisfied with how things have always worked, but every person on the roster, forward together. They know who works hard. They know who shows up. They have a feel for who "gets it." What they can't see is how each person actually moves through change, not attitude, not effort, but the specific ways someone processes a shift in strategy, resists it, or leads through it. That intelligence is what separates a leader who manages through disruption from one who builds a team that operates well inside it. That gap doesn't surface in July. It surfaces in October. We built the Team Transformation Assessment to close it. A concrete, individualized picture of where each person is in their capacity to adapt, and what kind of development will actually move them. Not a personality type. Not a readiness score. A development map built for how enrollment environments actually function. So when you walk into a retreat, you're not guessing at what the room needs. You know which counselors need structural support to shift. You know who is ready to take something on. You know where your agenda is going to hold and where it's going to break down. You know who is going to nod and smile today then go back to the same behaviors tomorrow. That's the difference between managing a team and leading one through transformation. #EnrollmentManagement #HigherEd #EnrollML #TeamDevelopment #SummerTraining

Most of us have sat in rooms where enrollment missed and no one saw it coming. Not because the team wasn't working hard. They were. But because the reporting said one thing and the behavior said another and when someone finally asked how the class was shaping up, the honest answer came down to two words no one wanted to say out loud. "I hope." Hope is a natural response to uncertainty. It's also the moment where strategy should be doing the talking instead. This is the first piece in a new series called Straight Talk with Tess. It's written for the people in those rooms right now, in the middle of yield season, trying to figure out the difference between signal and noise. It's called "Hope Is Not a Strategy." And if you've ever ended a yield conversation with a feeling instead of a plan, it's worth five minutes.

My favorite quote of the day from a seasoned enrollment VP: “We truly never had more data, but been more confused.” 🫳🎤 Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard some version of this from enrollment leaders across the country. More applications than ever, more data flowing in, more..more..more! Having more data hasn’t made enrollment teams' jobs easier (which is already pretty dang hard). In some ways, it’s made it harder. This is why I get so fired up about the work we’re doing at enroll ml. We're not adding another data source to the pile. We give teams a thinking engine, moving beyond the "what" to the "why" and the "what now." Not just for the 3-4% of students, the team has the bandwidth to work. For 100% of the funnel.

Enrollment transformation isn't magic. It's hard work, and we live it and get it. We will continue to identify and build the tools and processes that help innovative admissions teams to more forward. This is a powerful one.