Using AI to Optimize the College Admissions Process

This episode of FYI delves into how institutions should manage change fatigue among staff, and how AI can and should be used to maximize efficiency and quality student engagement.

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Who is Elizabeth Kirby?

Elizabeth Kirby is the Senior Director of Student Recruitment at Colombia College in Missouri.

In this Episode

Elizabeth Kirby, the Senior Director of Student Recruitment at Columbia College, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about how AI can revolutionize the college admissions process. They explore how AI can enhance both student support and staff efficiency, turning challenges into opportunities and making the admissions process smoother and more personalized.

Elizabeth also delves into managing change fatigue among staff amidst new technological advancements and institutional shifts. Learn about the new tools that are reshaping the admissions landscape, like early student-school matching and AI-driven data analysis, and how they are enhancing access to education. Plus, get practical tips on improving the student experience and supporting admissions staff through transparent communication and practical AI integration. Join us to uncover the future of college admissions!

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Episode Transcript

How You Can Use AI to Optimize Admissions with Elizabeth Kirby

Publishing Date: July 9, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, I am joined by Elizabeth Kirby, Senior Director of Student Recruitment at Columbia College in Missouri. We’re going to talk about AI in admissions and how we can better support students, as well as the efficiency of our staff. Let’s listen in.

Hey, Elizabeth, how are you?

[00:00:30] Elizabeth: I’m doing good. Thanks for having me today.

[00:00:32] Gil: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining. I know this is an exceptionally busy time of year in higher ed. Hopefully, we’re getting into some quiet time. But before we hop in, I would love for you to share a little bit of your background, how you got to where you are, what you’re currently working on, what motivates you, all that fun stuff.

[00:00:49] Elizabeth: Absolutely. So, my name is Elizabeth Kirby, and I’m the Senior Director of Recruitment at Columbia College of Missouri. Fun fact, there are five Columbia Colleges or versions of that name in the United States. So, none of us are affiliated with each other, so it’s a good time. But I have been with Columbia College for about just over two years now. And I serve with our recruitment team, working with students of all different student types all over the country and really enjoy that work.

Started in higher education just over 10 years ago, with what I think is a lot of our stories. I was a campus tour guide and grew up through that, had some really great mentors in my life that led me to the places that I am at today, and worked towards growing enrollment at different institutions, using different technologies to do that. And really, increasing staff satisfaction has been my, kind of, niche that I’ve fallen into, I guess. Absolutely passionate about the student experience and finding accessible education for students, and that means something different for every student that we work with, but I also am really passionate about the admissions counselors, the recruiters, territory managers, whatever their job title is, helping them find success and happiness in this field, just the same way that I have.

[00:02:02] Gil: Awesome. Well, and it’s interesting because I… my story’s similar to yours. I don’t think anybody goes to college to become a college admissions counselor or to work in higher ed enrollment, but it’s one of those calling careers that just happens, right?

And so, I have to ask, there are so many Columbia Colleges across the country, but they’re not affiliated. It’s not like Loyola Colleges where there’s, you know, Loyola of Maryland, of New Orleans, they’re all part of, at least, a family of institutions. How often do you get students applying to the wrong Columbia College?

[00:02:33] Elizabeth: Like, once a day, probably. Most of them, I’m sure we don’t. Actually, they’ll figure it out before we do. But yeah, we do encounter that a lot. And it’s more disappointing once they get admitted, especially if they were intending to apply to Columbia University, because we are mostly an open enrollment institution, especially in our online market. And so, we’ve had some very excited phone calls with folks that weren’t quite sure which institution they had applied to. But yes, it does happen quite often. Typically, it’s a quick switch for the student, but it’s a pretty common thing in our world.

[00:03:05] Gil: That’s funny. When I worked at the University of New Haven, which is in West Haven, Connecticut, there’s a very selective institution that’s based in New Haven, Connecticut. And we didn’t have any cross apps. There was no confusion there. But whenever anybody asked about the area around the campus and those sorts of things, I would remind people that there’s a university in New Haven that nobody really questions the area around the campus and know those sorts of things, right? And so, “We’re the University of New Haven, not the university in New Haven,” was what I would always say to folks. So, it’s interesting. That’s got to be fun to manage through that process.

I do remember, and I don’t know if you ever go to any college fairs where there are other Columbia Colleges there, but when I was at the University of New Haven, you know, our abbreviation was UNH. In the New England area, there is a much more prominent and larger UNH in a completely different state, in University of New Hampshire. One time, I was at a college fair in New Hampshire and the front tablecloth to our table said “UNH” across it. And I would have kids come up and walk and talk to me and say, “Hey, so can you tell me about…” when they were super, whenever they were super, super, super excited, I had to pause for a moment and say, “Are you interested in University of New Haven in Connecticut or University of New Hampshire in Durham?” And they’re like, “Oh, sorry, University of New Hampshire.” And so, no big deal, right? Like, obviously, we want the students to go to the right place. But my favorite was when there were two regional campuses between us and the main campus. And so, probably 10 times during that fair, just for fun, we would send the kid to the next table, go to the next table to go to the next table because that was the one they were really looking for. So, a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

[00:04:45] Elizabeth: Yeah, those college fairs in alphabetical order, a lot of good times, so it’s very fun.

[00:04:49] Gil: Absolutely. Well, I think, at least, I feel like it’s better than, like, the large ones where they put you on based on the order that you signed up. And so, it’s just completely random and you, like, stop West Airlines boarding style, going to find the schools that you’re trying to look for. So, whatever.

So, we’re not here to talk about college years. We’re here to talk about AI in college admissions, right? And so, one of the things that I noticed is, on your LinkedIn, it specifically says, right in that intro, integrating AI theories with admissions realities. And I love that. I love that summary. And I’d love for you to, kind of, tell me more about your work in this area, because you did mention, you know, helping students, but you also mentioned helping staff. And I feel like many of the conversations that I’ve had in this space over the past few months have been around both sides, but independently. And I’d love for you to, kind of, share some of your thoughts on both.

[00:05:38] Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. So, I got bit by the AI bug, I guess, a few years ago, just as things were starting to launch out with ChatGPT and everything coming out into the market. I, through my entire career, have always been passionate about finding ways to make both the student side of the process and the staff side as easy and simple as possible.

I think college in itself can be complicated and scary for students, especially if they’re coming from a first-generation family or they’re going to a school that is different than maybe where their parents went, or going out of state like I did. And so, finding ways to make the college admissions process as smooth and easy and accessible as possible is something that I’ve always been passionate about.

The endless checklists and the do-this step and then do-that step and verify this and then log into this is not helping kids get to college. And so, finding ways around those things is something I’m passionate about.

And then that leads into the staff experience as well, because if we’re making the experience best for the students, sometimes it does make the staff experience a little bit harder, and that’s okay. But in order to retain staff in this field, we need to think about what that experience looks like. And are we having them do far too much manual work? Are we having them spend far too much time in spreadsheets when we inherently hire people that all they want to do is talk to students? They want to be outgoing and engaging, and then we’re asking them to sit in a spreadsheet and filter data for hours on end.

So, that’s where this all started. But I do think that there is the concept of vendors or companies that come from a place of growing up in higher education or working specifically with higher education, compared to others that might be stepping into the higher education field. And being able to take a really great tool and apply it to an industry that is very nuanced and has all sorts of differences even between institutions is something that I find very interesting. And navigating a really great tool, regardless of what it is, whether it’s a texting platform or it’s funnel management or whatever the tool is and applying that to what real life looks like in an admissions office.

I’ve worked at a number of institutions and admissions offices look a little bit different across the board. There are times when it’s very simple and there’s one CRM and one integration that goes somewhere; and then there’s times where there’s 50 different things. And all these things are timed and you have to, you know, playing a quartet versus an orchestra, and trying to figure out how to navigate those things, is something that I’m passionate about, of taking really cool tools and making them work in the differences of each admissions office. So, that’s where I started in all this.

[00:08:20] Gil: Got it. Yeah. And I like your point there about, I feel like, one of the challenges we’ve faced in higher ed, specifically, is that we sometimes let the software dictate our strategic conversations and decisions, and it really needs to be the other way around, right? And I think it’s got to be goals before tools, as many people like to say.

There are a dime a dozen chatbot providers in the universe right now. There are a dime a dozen financial aid leveraging programs, etc. You need to be more nimble than some of these larger out-of-the-box solutions. And I had Emily Coleman on the podcast multiple times during the FAFSA fiasco, right. And I think that’s the ongoing FAFSA fiasco, because we’re not through it yet. Kind of like COVID, it’s never going to really end. But the conversations we had were around the issue that, sometimes, when an institution is using a legacy financial aid modeling platform, as an example, these are big box store solutions that are meant to support everybody versus something that is a little more nuanced and personalized for an institution. The same can go for communication platforms, right? And the same can go for efficiency measuring.

But the challenge, like you outlined, and it’s revisiting the book, The Admissions Counselor Malaise, which is right behind me, by Teege Mettille, is we’re asking people who are people people to be data people. And sometimes, they can pretend to be one and play one on TV, but the reality is, is that we’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole when it comes to what we’re asking people to do.

And so, I always go to things like redundancy of effort, right? And the redundancy being we were talking about college fairs, beginning the conversation, when you’re asking someone to answer the same question over and over and over again, that’s something that burns out your staff, right? And if you can find ways to, when you think about the whole recruitment funnel, the reality that I think we’re starting to, kind of, understand is that, you know, as the funnel has gotten bigger at the top, because we’ve been buying more and more names, or we’re getting them from lead gen providers, we’re doing digital marketing, that redundant work has just become overwhelming.

And the reality is, is that it doesn’t really matter who’s answering those basic questions. What matters is those humans are deployed to the middle and the bottom of the funnel, where those interactions are more meaningful and make the most sense, right? And I think, on the human side of it, that helps the admissions counselors because it helps them to feel like the work that they’re doing matters versus answering the redundant questions over and over and over again.

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[00:11:41] Gil: I feel like this is one of those Venn diagram moments where the technology benefits the student because they’re getting accurate information quickly and it benefits the people that work at the institution because it reduces some of their manual and redundant work, right? Are there other examples that you’ve thought of or you’ve been working on that help to accomplish some of that, right, ease the burden of the redundant work or the data analysis on the counselor, so they can focus on the fun stuff and the important stuff?

[00:12:12] Elizabeth: Yeah. One of my favorite things that I’m sure my team is sick of hearing is what I call the 3:00 a.m. problem and there are times in the middle of the night when a high school student or, we work with adult nontraditional students, they want an answer right now. And so, taking them into, maybe it’s a chatbot or a really well-designed website that has good information for them, and being able to provide an answer to that question at 3:00 a.m. is perfect. But at some point in that process, as they’re going through the enrollment series or through the admissions process, they’re going to want to talk to a real person, whether that comes at the point of the talking about their individual financial aid situation or talking about what housing looks like or picking out their classes.

There are some things that people want immediately and right now. And then there’s some things that people want that human environment from. And so, figuring out the best place to deploy your human resources and make that successful and feel good for the student and know that we really truly care about where they’re going and how their process is and what their goals and dreams and aspirations are. And a lot of that can really be done best through a human conversation, but if we don’t have time to have that human conversation with every single student, because we, like you said, are redundant, we’re answering questions about when’s your application deadline, how much is the application fee, all of those things, we’re not utilizing our staff to the best of our abilities.

So, some of the things that we’ve done here at Columbia College of Missouri in order to really get started on some of that stuff is work with different vendors to pull out some of the, particularly, like, mass text message campaigns. So, we all know, and everybody’s been doing it since forever, we all have email campaigns. And we do them through various vendors. We do them in-house. Everybody has an email campaign. And most of us now are doing text message campaigns. And so, there’s some really great vendors out there that are helping with that.

And the AI in that, when a student responds and asks a question, it can answer. It can say, what are the housing options on campus or what are the meal plan choices or when do classes start? Like, they can answer those things. But then it’s also smart enough to know, “Hey, you’ve asked a really good question and I’m just an AI bot and I don’t know the answer to that. Let me connect you with somebody.” And then we can connect them to one of those human resources that can really walk them through some of those deeper, more nuanced conversations. So, it’s taking some of that work and moving it where it needs to be to best benefit the student.

[00:14:41] Gil: Yeah, and I think one of the things that people always fall on is things like personalization, right? And I feel like personalization is not just “Dear, first name,” right? Microsoft Word was doing that 20 years ago and we still, for many institutions, that’s still our benchmark is, “Oh, well, where can we merge in their name, and where can we merge in their term of entry, and where can we merge in the major they’re interested in?” That’s their level of personalization, right?

The issue is that that’s not really personalization. Personalization needs to be more about tailoring the cadence of the interaction, the timing of the interaction, the tone of the interaction, based on that student’s prior interactions.

And I feel like, again, it, kind of, goes back to the looking at the funnel and saying, “Okay, well, mail merge is really good for the top of the funnel,” right? Because that’s level that we have to focus on at that piece. But then when you get to the middle and the bottom, it’s really, personalization has to be about the content and the timing of those communications. But there’s that balance where you also don’t want to be, I like to call it big brother admissions, right, where, that student’s on at 3:00 in the morning, and then at 6:00 a. m. they get a text message, “Hey, I noticed that you were on our financial aid page last night. Is there anything I can do to help,” right? That’s personalization a little too far, right, where we… we all know we’re being tracked. We all click accept cookies on all these websites. We know that everything we’re doing online is monitored and tracked. But we don’t want to be reminded of it in the communication, right?

And so, what are some ways on the student side that you feel like there’s opportunities for institutions to improve as a byproduct of that automation to make the admissions counselor’s lives better? What are the interaction, the quality of interactions and the opportunities for interaction that students might see?

[00:16:24] Elizabeth: Yeah. So, one of the things that, one of my coworkers here, Amber Ellis, has really spearheaded is working with, kind of, a student mindset, data set, and working to create communication journeys around that. So, we know that students come to the college process, some more passionate about finding the lowest cost option, some more passionate about the academic piece, some more passionate about the student experience or career goals, or whatever their real true factor of decision is going to be.

And so, she was able to take some of that data and identify students in our system that fell into those subgroups, and then provide communications that highlight things that appeal to people with those particular mindsets, both on the student and the parent side. And so, then the student isn’t left scrambling for information or feeling like, “You’re talking about athletics and I don’t want to be an athlete. I don’t want to go to the athletic games. I don’t care. All I want to know is about the academic, the biology club, or I want to know about this or that or the other thing.”

And so, being able to provide that information as clearly as possible up front, and it’s not always just, are they going to be an on-campus student or an off-campus student? Sometimes, it gets a little bit deeper than that with, you know, is this particular type of student typically more interested in what their financial aid journey is going to be? We have students here that are, you know, financially prepared to pay out of pocket, and that’s just fine for them and their families. We have some students that are not. And so, the communication that we provide to those students needs to be tailored to what their circumstances are.

And then also training the staff to, when you get to that point lower in the funnel, how do we tailor even our email templates? We have templates, but they are not to be sent just copy paste, send them out. Like, edit them, talk about the different things and make sure that you’re using them. That’s a good starting point, but it’s not an end product, and really encouraging the staff to manipulate those templates to best fit the conversation that they had, and really utilize their human perspective into that conversation.

And then I think the other thing from a student perspective is, we know a lot of students want, kind of, that Amazon experience, where it just leads them from one step to the other and they’re going through that thing. So, we’ve taken a few steps in our institution to, like, review our application. You know, are we asking all the right questions? Are we asking questions that we don’t really need to be asking? What are we using that information for? And how can we shorten the application or make it more clear or make sure we get students to the right part of the workflow?

Columbia College works with students from high school dual enrollment all the way through graduate studies and everything in between. And we have all sorts of different things. So, making sure that students fill out the right application the first time is something that we’ve worked pretty hard on with, even, just the language that’s on our application language that’s on our website.

[00:19:11] Gil: Well, especially when you have five schools in the country with the same name, you got to put in that work. Are you sure you want Columbia College in Missouri, right? Making that a big… and it all goes back to quality of student experience. I feel like, if we focus on the student first and put their needs at the forefront, making their life easier will de facto make the admissions counselors’ lives easier, right? It might change the work that the admissions counselors are doing, but it’s, for sure, not going to make it harder because it’s going to take a lot of that load at the top of the funnel off. And like you mentioned earlier, it moves that human interaction to the phase in the funnel where it’s the most important, which is post application through enrollment. And I feel like that’s an area where that’s the sweet spot for admissions counselors.

And it always has been, right? I feel like the reality here is that technology is just enabling what we should have been thinking about and doing for decades now at this point which is, you know, we were doing mail merge at the top of the funnel anyway. We need to figure out the best ways to deploy our most expensive assets, which are our people, into these specific areas.

I spoke with Gordon Boyes, who’s the CEO of Concept3D, a few weeks ago here on the podcast. And he had gone through the college admissions process as a father of a kid who was applying to schools and dealing with the waitlist and denies and those sorts of things. Imagine a universe where, you know, the colleges got the exact right number of inquiries that were for admission and all those students applied and every single one of those students was admitted and every single one of those students enrolled. Totally throws U.S. News World Report off its rails, because now everybody has a 100% admit rate, and everyone has a 100% yield rate. That’s a pie-in-the-sky thing. It’s never going to happen that way. But if we can get, I think, the spirit of that thought process is we create a scenario where students are able to be better matched with institutions at the beginning of the process, which then leads to more positive interactions so that admissions counselors are talking to the right students at the right time with the right message on the right communication channel. And that’s a lot of rights to get right. But we get it, right? I think that’s the, I think that’s where we need to really be looking to and looking ahead, right?

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[00:22:17] Gil: So, speaking on that, I would love to hear you talk about the future a little bit. And I think one of the challenges that we have with addressing the future is that AI and technology seems to be changing at this breakneck rapid pace, right? But higher ed seems to sometimes be a little more, we’ll call it methodical. I won’t say glacially slow, except I just said glacially slow. But it’s a little more methodical in our approach with the use of technology and with just adoption of new approaches and tools. Even when the strategy says we should do it this way, there’s always that, kind of, hankering for sticking with what’s familiar. There’s a little bit of comfort in redundancy, right? Even if it is a pain in the butt with some of these processes, it’s the process we know, right?

And so, from your purview, what are some of the things that higher ed needs to think about to take advantage of this opportunity while also still being strategic in the approach?

[00:23:12] Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think one of the big things that we need to think about as we’re being strategic, and I’ll get to that part in a second, but the first thing that my team and I are really working through is change fatigue, surrounding all of the new technologies and all of the new things that are coming out and changes that we’re making as an institution. And every institution, at some level, is making change in some way, whether it’s externally is forcing change or something internally is.

But change fatigue is a huge thing for me and our team right now. And then finding ways to support the staff through those changes and make sure that they are really in a place of understanding of, “We’re going to introduce this new technology. Here’s why I think, and I know that it’s going to be the best move for us and for our students.” And really transparent communication surrounding that, even at the highest levels has really paid off tenfold for our team, because we have gone through a lot of changes this year. And I think that transparent communication at all levels is the thing that keeps the team moving forward through all of it. I think that’s something important for leaders who are considering really integrating AI into their work or even just changing a process or changing something that we’re asking the staff to do, understanding what that looks like and what that feels like for the staff, especially for younger admissions counselors who are coming in.

They learned one thing, and now we’re changing it. Or even older admissions counselors who have been through this for 10 years, 20 years, and now we’re asking them to change everything that they do. So, I think that change fatigue is, kind of, a caveat to a lot of this stuff.

But moving forward, I think some of the future things that I would love to see if I could pie in the sky, is colleges being able to do better at matching early in the process and knowing that we’re going to be a good school for a student. There’s a lot of really cool things that are happening at, even at the high school level, to aid students in that matching process. There’s a couple cool vendors that are working on some things. We have one more local vendor right now in the Midwest that’s working with high schools to flip the scholarship process.

So, what we do is we provide the vendor with our scholarship matrix and they get connected with all the high schools in the area and provide information to students, saying, “You would be admitted to this school and this is how much scholarship they’re going to offer you.” And then the student makes that decision to apply, so they can know that information a little bit more upfront.

It’s really robust where we’re able to also think about some of the additional affinity scholarships that we have, such as, like, our honors program and things like that. It’s been a really cool vendor to work with.

And then there’s some other things that are doing. One of my favorites is a company that I love to explain as like the Tinder of college match. And it literally is the same concept of, like, swiping left or swiping right, whether it’s on a college itself or just something about the college experience that student is passionate about. If they’re passionate about the dining center that serves biscuits and gravy or they’re passionate about somebody that has a really good environmental studies program.

And so, some of those vendors are doing really cool things to help the institutions find better matches and students. And instead of casting a huge wide net at the top of the funnel, like, really cast the right message to the right student at the right time. AI and analyzing all of that data is something that’s going to help us get there.

So, those are some of the things I’m excited about, you know, maybe flipping the script on, letting the student choose us, maybe before we choose them through the admissions process, and giving them that information up front. I’ve always worked for pretty open institutions, for the most part, or mildly selective institutions. Access to education is something I’m passionate about and really colors the way that I look at a lot of these pieces. So, excited to see where that leads us here in the next couple years, as the technology pieces change.

[00:26:57] Gil: Well, I think, based off of all the conversations I’ve had over the past few months, you’re completely on track with where I believe the same exact thing. Like, what can we do to make the process simpler for students? And it’s matching them with the right schools earlier in the process. So, they’re not under-matching where they should be and they’re also not loading up on institutions just because it’s the brand name that they know, but it isn’t actually a good fit, right? And I think that those are scenarios that are tailored all this time in higher ed. And I think we have the capacity and the opportunity to make that type of a change, right?

And so, I appreciate your time today, Elizabeth. I appreciate your thoughts and your insights. For the people who want to stay connected with you or continue this conversation, pick your brain further, what are some of the best ways to get in touch with you?

[00:27:50] Elizabeth: Yeah, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can find me as Elizabeth Kirby on LinkedIn. Send me a message on there. Happy to connect with anybody. Or you could email me directly. My email address is elizabeth.kay.kirby@gmail.com. So, happy to connect with anybody to grab virtual coffee or real coffee at a conference or talk more about this or any of the other things that we’re working through as an institution and as an industry.

[00:28:16] Gil: Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. And for our podcast listeners, we will put links to be able to connect with Elizabeth into our episode notes. And so, we appreciate your time today. And we will see everyone next time on FYI. Thanks!

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