How to Save a Dying College: Strategies and Solutions

Gil Rogers sits down with Seth Odell to hammer out real options for institutions addressing challenging financial futures.

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Who is Seth Odell?

Seth is a respected leader in higher education marketing and the founder of Kanahoma Agency.

In this Episode

Seth Odell, founder of Kanahoma – an education marketing agency specializing in Higher Ed, joins FYI host Gil Rogers for an insightful conversation about Seth’s article ‘How to Save a Dying College’ following the news of his alma mater’s closure.

The podcast episode highlights the challenges facing higher education institutions looking at potential closure and offers practical solutions for managing these risks, including diagnosing of problems, market shifts, optimizing real estate, and spending into decline for growth.

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Episode Transcript

How to Save a Dying College: Strategies and Solutions with Seth Odell

Publishing Date: January 16, 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, we’re listening in on an insightful conversation I had recently with Seth Odell. Seth is the founder of Kanahoma, a boutique education marketing agency based in San Diego, California that Seth founded in 2020 after successful leadership roles at amazing places, like Southern New Hampshire University, Helix Education, and National University.

On the heels of the news of the upcoming closure of his alma mater, Seth wrote a piece titled How to Save a Dying College. We dive into his thoughts and insights and discuss how institutional leaders can and should make the hard choices in support of institutional health and, most importantly, student success. Let’s listen in.

Hey, Seth, how’s it going?

[00:00:54] Seth: Great, Gil. It’s really good to be here. It’s great to see you.

[00:00:56] Gil: Great to see you. Thanks so much for joining today. It’s always great because I know we go back and forth on LinkedIn on a bunch of stuff, either on the feed or in messages or whatnot. But I feel like, every six months or so, I need a Seth fix for a conversation. So, I appreciate the live conversation time.

[00:01:13] Seth: I’m looking forward to the conversation, and I feel the same.

[00:01:17] Gil: Yeah, absolutely. So, we’re going to dive into our topic du jour here in a little bit. For our podcast listeners, we’ll put a link to your article in the episode notes in the article aptly titled, How to Save a Dying College. This came up a few weeks ago. And on my LinkedIn feed, I thought it was really helpful and insightful for institutions who are struggling a little bit in a post-COVID world, call it that, call it with declining enrollment, et cetera.

But before we even dive into any of that, I feel like you’ve obviously been in the higher ed and marketing world for an extended period of time, where we’re both getting into that age where it’s like, “Oh, stop counting the numbers.”

[00:01:55] Seth: Yeah, agree.

[00:01:56] Gil: But I’d love for you to, kind of, for those who may not have met you before and just tell us your origin story, your superhero origin story, if it were. How did you get to where you are? I know you’re running your own agency. And I’d love to learn about what you do, for the folks that might not have had the opportunity to meet you yet.

[00:02:10] Seth: Sure, yeah, happy to. So, for those who haven’t met me, my name is Seth Odell. I’m the founder and CEO of Kanahoma. We’re a digital marketing agency that focuses on higher education. But I’ve been in the higher education space for, as you said, Gil, not quite 20 years. I mean a long time I’ve been in the higher ed space.

I started at UCLA. I did four years there, where I did, like, a digital marketing, social media, and video. So, that was really fun chapter, like, bringing them online. I signed them up for a lot of their original channels that still exist today.

While I was at UCLA, I founded a company called HigherEdLive, which was a live weekly web show network, which you will know well, and some folks may remember. And I did that 2010, 2012, until I sold that 2012. And it’s lived on, had a great life well after me.

And during that last chapter, I went to Southern New Hampshire University, which is now the largest nonprofit university in the country. But I was there four years, from a chapter where we grew from 7,000 students to 70,000 students. And I got to do, like, their brand marketing and all their campaigns. And I produced 30-plus TV commercials. It just was an awesome chapter. Learned, really cut my teeth in online education and marketing there, as opposed to UCLA, much more traditional campus-based. Was a general manager of an OPM after that for a couple years, called Helix Education. That was acquired by Ruffalo Noel Levitz. And then, I was vice chancellor of marketing at National University System, which is a San Diego-based, primarily adult-serving institution, owned about 45,000 students in several colleges and universities that they own and operate. So, I was basically the CMO there, essentially.

So, mostly, in house. But in 2000… well, let’s see, 2020, I founded Kanahoma. It was, kind of, tail end of COVID. Decided it felt like the right time, which is weird to say in hindsight, but everybody was looking to make changes, how are we going to grow? Folks were pushed online. I have a lot of experience in the traditional campus model, trying to figure online out. Set up a shop on the shingle. I started with just myself in this room. And we’re, you know, over 30 full-time employees today, over a dozen partners. Feel super blessed. And it’s just grown really well. We primarily do agency of record digital marketing for colleges and universities. We do own our own production company. So, we do a lot of brand work as well. We have, you know, five full-time web developers. We work on that part.

But by and large, it’s schools are looking to grow enrollment or drive enrollment, partner with us to help them do that. It’s been really fun. And it’s gone way better than I thought it would go. And it’s been more of a, like, a hold on to the, hold on to the bike while it’s going down the hill, speed wobbles kind of a situation. But it’s been fun to figure out the last few years. So, that’s what I’ve been up to the last, a little over three years.

[00:04:36] Gil: Yeah. On 2020, a great year to, to start a new company, I guess, right?

[00:04:41] Seth: In hindsight. At the time, it felt like I don’t know what I’m doing. And I guess this feels right, but in hindsight it was actually an awesome time.

[00:04:47] Gil: Yeah, well, I mean… From defense to offense, there you go. And to be fair, I feel like, a lot of times, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. We just figure it out and innovate and create new things, right? And so, I feel like the work that you’ve put in over the years at all of those other stops really led to a great opportunity for you to start Kanahoma.

Now, in a higher ed landscape world, where there’s all these different companies with no vowels in their names and no… and, or whatever, however they want to present themselves as, I know there’s a really great story behind the naming of Kanahoma as the company. And for those who haven’t heard it before, I’d love for you to share.

[00:05:25] Seth: Yeah, absolutely. And so, Kanahoma technically stands for the combination of Kansas and Oklahoma, but more importantly that combination Kansas and Oklahoma becoming Kanahoma was the name of a cabin that my family owned in the Finger Lakes in Western New York for 99 years. So, my great great grandfather moved from Kansas to Naples, New York. He worked for the Oklahoma Mortgage Company. And he bought a family cabin that we had for 99 years. And unfortunately, the same year I found the business, my grandmother passed away and we couldn’t afford to keep it. And so, we had to sell it.

And so, name the business “Kanahoma” because I believe in effective primacy, the ability to impact your own mood. And so, I love Kanahoma. Makes me love the business by having the name leave on. It was also a one-word name that was available. In these days, that’s hard to find.

And then, the third is, if life goes perfectly and it’s fine, if it doesn’t, someday, somewhere down the line, maybe I’ll sell the agency and use the funds to go buy the cabin back and put it back in my family. That’s, kind of, my purpose.

[00:06:17] Gil: There you go. That sounds like a, a lofty goal and a good one at that. And so, I want to take a step back in your origin story to your time at Southern New Hampshire University. A few weeks back, we had Paul LeBlanc, who is the president of Southern New Hampshire on the podcast.

Lo and behold, a week after we recorded the podcast, he announced he was leaving to pursue other programs focusing on AI and focusing on… you see, you’re not, you don’t retire from a role like Paul LeBlanc. So, you just simply move into a new opportunity, right? And so, I’d love for you to… you mentioned all those advertising campaigns and you were there at Southern New Hampshire when it was at the start of it becoming the SNHU that everybody knows, right? Tell us a little bit more about that experience, from arriving on campus and meeting Paul and just what you learned during that stop.

[00:07:07] Seth: Yeah, happy to. So, yeah, I joined in 2011. I left UCLA. You know, I won’t say who, but I got laughed out of UCLA when I left. They were like, “Where are you going? To what school? Like, an internet college?” And it was a very interesting era. It was one of the few smart decisions I’ve probably ever made in my life. And I was, like, it just really feels, like, online education’s about to get big. And it’s… so, it, it was great timing on my part. When I showed up, though, like, Paul was literally waiting in the lobby and greeted me on my first morning and shook my hand and knew who I was. And so, just look how small-time and small town it was there. That’s also part of Paul’s personality.

And so, during the four years I had there, I had three different roles, went from doing video and social work to doing all their brand commercials and campaigns. I ended up getting to concept seven national campaigns, meaning, like, come up with the idea for them, the brand position, all the way to the script writing, to the art direction, to casting, and then produce these commercials, and then oversee the post-production, and help build out one of the largest in-house agency models in the industry. It was all, we ran almost everything internally.

And I got to learn in the process all about online education. So, the CEO of that division was a gentleman named Steve Hodownes. One of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made was he asked me at one point, like, what I wanted. And I said I wanted one hour of his time uninterrupted every week, and I got to set the agenda. And he agreed to it. And I would go in and I’d say, like, “Help me understand how you launch new programs or, like, show me the balance sheet.” And all these things that had nothing to do with traditional marketing, like, digital marketing I knew, the business and education I did. And that experience really taught me that. So, I think that taught me the branding, I learned on the front lines that they’re spending such a significant amount in advertising that we could put ads on the market and, like, immediately see the results. And so, soon, the talent was unbelievable, the talent that was there, even there before I arrived. And so, I just learned a tremendous amount. I feel like I still cite and think about my experience there all the time. To having gotten to be on that rocket for the four years, I feel super blessed that I was part of that, and got to learn from everybody that was there.

[00:09:05] Gil: Yeah. And you point to one of the few smart decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life. In a series of what I would say are arguably very smart decisions, but I think that great, that leans credibility to the next part of our conversation that we’ll hop into shortly, which is, I mean, your position, you have that experience now of the business of running a college and the marketing of a college. And so, when we talk about challenges that colleges are facing today, I think, having your lens will hopefully guide some people forward to make strategic and smart decisions.

So, we’re going to take a break. And when we come back, we’re going to dive into your recent article, How to Save a Dying College, Reflections on the Collapse of St. Rose. I know that that collapse, specifically, has a direct connection to you, but I think a lot of the insights that you put into this piece are things that, that we should talk about and people should be thinking about in today’s market. So, thanks so much. And we will be right back.

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[00:10:51] Gil: All right, we are back and we are here with Seth Odell. And we’re talking all things higher ed and marketing and the business of higher ed. And one of the things that we wanted to dive into is your recent article, How to Save a Dying College, Reflections on the Collapse of St. Rose. So, before we go down the bullet points of all the recommendations, I’d love for you to give us the background of why specifically this article at this time, because I know there’s personal connection here.

[00:11:18] Seth: Absolutely, yeah. So, I got my undergraduate degree from the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York. It was a part of the communication program. I graduated in 2006. And so, I have definitely a personal connection to the institution, very fond memories with the institution. Still connected with several faculty.

And so, I was particularly upset and bummed to hear about their closure. Obviously, they’re not the only institution that closes, but because I had that personal connection, I just took the time to self-reflect on, like, a little bit, how did we get here and how could we not solve this? Because I saw the value that was still there. There’s still one of the largest producers of teachers in the region. There’s still, you know, 2,500 students. There’s still a lot of revenue there. And so, I left a lot of questions. And so, yeah, with this article, I just took a chance to sit down and try to answer them from my perspective, just given how particularly drawn to that institution’s story I was, because they played a part in my life, and I played a, a small part in their story.

[00:12:07] Gil: Yeah, that’s got to be a challenge because you’re always going to have that diploma that says College of St. Rose, or yeah. And so, you’re going to have that reminder of what once was and now thinking about, how do we stop this from happening, to someone else. And so, I know that the point of this article is to give people some ideas and some thoughts for to not be in that same position again, which many institutions probably find themselves in today’s environment.

And so, I think one of the things I would love to talk about is the why with some of this. And I think there’s a lot of challenges that institutions are facing. And a big part of that has to do with, you know, I love your reason number one is denial of reality. And I think that’s something that higher ed has faced for a long time, is that we feel like, okay, it’s everyone else is having a problem, but it’s… but we’re fine. The demographic cliff is something that’s going to impact everybody else but us, right? And so, can you talk a little bit about these threats that institutions are facing and what keeps us, kind of, status quo?

[00:13:09] Seth: Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s a few things going on. I think, you know, the first thing in the article I read, I called it denial of reality. And I think that is very true, unfortunately. You know, higher ed is a mature consolidating market. And in a mature consolidating market, the only way to grow is to take market share from someone else. So, when you hear about the growth from a Southern New Hampshire or even from traditional campus institutions, anytime one institution puts out that press release and says they grew year over year, that means those students would have gone somewhere else and they didn’t.

And so, the reality is, like, our total addressable market is shrinking. And so, there are just less students, but there’s the same amount of colleges. And so, from the most one-on-one economic sense of just balancing supply and demand, the reality is there’s less demand for post-secondary education. Historically, that’s largely been driven by population dynamics, the demographic lift, as you mentioned. There also is a broader looming concern about consumer confidence in the degree, employers dropping the degree requirement, and the overall price pressure that we’re seeing with the price of college growing so disproportionately beyond that of inflation.

When you couple all those things with what happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which was that, like, many private institutions went on building sprees. Publics did, too. People joke about it with the lazy river mindset, but it’s like people went and bought buildings. And St. Rose went and it grew from 22 buildings to 80 buildings in the span of less than 10 years. And these are institutions that went out and bought. And they did that because they could get good enough interest rates to afford that. But the reality is those are debt payments that they’re carrying for a long time. And so, St. Rose is an institution that was carrying tens of millions of dollars in debt.

And so, there was this confluence of debt management, which has been its own thing, with the idea that, like, well, let’s just raise tuition to make it more economical. And it’s like, well, now, we can’t necessarily raise tuition. We can’t restructure our debt because the rates are so terrible in the market today. And now, there’s less students. And so, it’s, sort of, what’s creating this perfect storm, where it’s like there’s not as much runway as people thought there was. And suddenly, 10 years ago or 5 years ago, you could get away with that kind of a structure, but now it’s coming due.

And so, industries like St. Rose could have tens of millions in revenue and still not have enough to cover the tens of millions in debt that they took out to build these buildings. And so, just a lot of folks grew faster than they could. And they banked on future growth that’s not necessarily going to be there. And it’s unfortunate. And so, it’s demographic. It’s market condition. It’s a little bit of a perfect storm coming from a lot of these people.

[00:15:29] Gil: Well, also, I think there’s things like tuition discounting become a big part of this, too, right? Where this institutions tout headcount growth year over year, most selective class, etc., but they never publish what their discount rate is in those press releases, right? And it’s, they might bring in more students, but when their discount rate went up 10, 15%, then it’s a wash at that point from a revenue perspective. And so, and institutions might be nonprofit organizations, but they’re not charities. And they do have the need to invest revenue into the delivery of programs. And when you’re you don’t have your revenue streams in line with what your expenses are, it doesn’t matter what your headcount number is at that point. But headcount is a sexy stat to put on a press release. And so, it, it’s a challenge.

And that, that I think goes to the point about clarity and also just the, back to the denial of reality. It’s like we can look at the press releases and be happy with the numbers because we brought in a certain headcount, but the revenue number doesn’t tie in with that. And so, what are your thoughts on the, I want to call it denial, but that’s also, that’s almost what it is.

[00:16:32] Seth: It is. And I’ll say maybe I’m not ahead of my skis on this one, but, like, this has been my experience and observations, is that, like, part of this reflects a broken system that we have from a board perspective in, in higher education. And so, it’s important to say a lot of different types of businesses have boards that will govern. In higher education, by and large, the boards of trustees are nonprofit volunteers that disproportionately are made up of alumni or people with existing relationships to the institution. And so, these are folks who are, again, not getting paid, working full-time jobs, usually, or retired. So, they’re putting a little bit of time into this. And their job, if you’re on a board, your job is essentially, set the mission, hire and fire the president, and support mergers and acquisitions. And that’s, kind of, it. Boards aren’t allowed to manage the business.

And so, if a board’s primary job is to hire and fire the president, who are they going to hire? They’re going to hire the president that’s going to tell them they’re going to take their institution to new heights. They’re not going to hire the president who says, “Well, I’m a hatchet guy or girl. And I come in and I cut things up. And I’m going to really refinance. And I’m going to pare you down. And I’m going to make you…” like, so boards want to look at the world through rose-colored glasses and they want the Kool Aid. And then, they hire a president who will do it. Well, they get to keep their job so long as they keep serving the Kool Aid. But if you become the president who says, “Well, I think we’re going to miss next year,” then, all of a sudden, the pressure is on you, that, you know, “We’re not sure you’re the right person for this.”

And so, it’s not always the case. There’s definitely examples of healthy boards and healthy relationships. But I do think, by and large, it is presidents under pressure to provide optimistic budgets that aren’t really simply going to happen to buy themselves six more months or a year with a board that only wants to hear the best. Because they love the institution, and they won’t see their job as helping the institution flourish. And it’s very difficult for people to understand that, sometimes, the way to help an institution flourish is to cut things that have to be cut, reduce things that have to be reduced, and to change and evolve the institution to meet the needs. And so, I do think the denial of reality is a construct of a flawed board and executive level leadership model playing itself out in higher education.

[00:18:32] Gil: Yeah, and the program cutting component. And it’s a challenging part of the conversation, goes into your point about the fear of faculty, too, right? And I think that there’s a challenge there with, part of it is, when your programs aren’t growing, you have to take a look at what programs are in demand, aligning curriculum with workforce and skills, and what that needs to look like. And that comes with, you know, before we hopped on and started recording, we were talking about the world of, like, curriculum development and, like, these sorts of things. There’s always this challenge with faculty, kind of, being a part of the conversation. I’d love your take on that specific challenge and how institutions are, kind of, faced with it.

[00:19:08] Seth: Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting. I think the faculty role can change by institution, based on governance structure. But I think the broadest piece to first to start with is that, like, when you have a lot of students, you can have a lot of programs. And generally speaking, as long as the institution is growing, you’re always adding in new programs, right?

And I think higher ed isn’t so bad at adding in new programs. I think we make mistakes there as well, which is probably a separate conversation. But by and large, we look to try to meet employer demand and match the market. But when an institution is shrinking, you’re getting less students into certain programs. And ultimately, if you push the P&L down into the program level, like, the profit and loss, there are programs that are staffed too high, that have too many unnecessary faculty. Because if you staff for 10,000 students, and then you wake up one day and you’re 7,500 students, are you just going to carry those expenses on a lower ratio?

So, the institutions that I think are more effective have more of a student-to-staff and student-to-faculty ratio. So, they understand how they want to staff this. The problem is, when that shrinks, not every institution is in the position where they’re allowed to cut programs without the support of faculty governance. There’s complicated processes around that. Programs have to be taught out. Obviously, it depends on your accreditor and your relationships. And so, there are a lot of presidents, I think, that feel fresher from faculty, too, because the faculty, one, they want what’s best for the institution, just like the board.

Also, some of them want job preservation. And so, they’re pushing the president not to cut. And if the president does introduce a cut, there might be a vote of no confidence. They might go public. There might be bad PR. And so, now you have a president and a cabinet that’s basically giving pressure from the board, like, “Hey, give us an optimistic budget. Tell us this is all going to be fine.” And then, faculty are saying, “Whatever you do, don’t cut my program.” And so, you’re stuck in the middle, where it’s like, you know, you’re going to be the bad guy to everybody for a long period of time while you grow out of this challenge by reducing the expenses of the institution. Or, you’re going to just buy yourself another year and push it off. And so, that’s why we see with such a delay in program reductions. When truthfully, I think, program additions and reduction should be much more fluid than they are. Most institutions wait until it’s too late and then make a pretty dramatic cut, it seems to be the kind of path that they take.

[00:21:13] Gil: Yeah. So, we’ve spent a good amount of time outlining all of the challenges, but I think we’re both solutions-oriented people. And so, I think what I’d love to do is we’ll take another break. But when we come back, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go through some of your recommendations and things that institutions should be doing now so that they don’t necessarily fall into the same position that St. Rose did and many others before them. Again, we don’t want to, we don’t want to pick on St. Rose. We’re using this as our inflection point to have this important conversation. So, with that, we’ll take a break and we’ll be right back.

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[00:22:34] Gil: All right, we are back. We are with Seth Odell from Kanahoma. We are talking about his article, How to Save a Dying College: Reflections on the Collapse of St. Rose. We just spent a good amount of time outlining all of the… not all of, many of, the challenges that, that institutional leadership faces in today’s reality when it comes to challenging decisions for the fiscal responsibility and the health of an institution. And now, what I’d love to do is, kind of, just hear from you some of your recommendations for addressing those challenges. So, in our last segment, we talked about faculty and the challenges there, talked about denial of reality and rose-colored glasses for the board. We talked about demographic cliffs. We talked about risk of negative press and the desire to have positive press releases and all those sorts of things. What are organizations to do to be in a stronger position that they can work on now and moving forward?

[00:23:31] Seth: Absolutely. So, I think there’s a few things. You know, the first I would say is you got to diagnose the disease sooner, meaning, like, when there are factors of our offering that are not fitting the market correctly, how quickly can we align on that? Can we be an institution that can have difficult conversations? Can the folks in marketing enrollment elevate when they think there’s concerns? That’s the first. The second is to move with the market. So, it’s not just about cutting what you have, it’s about where you want to grow. To me, that’s understanding where the needs are, both of employers, but also for prospective students. So, like, matching employer demand with market demand. There’s a lot of ways to do that. You can use platforms like Lightcast to understand that data. By and large, the overly simplistic one, I would say, is that story of Southern New Hampshire moving from traditional campus, which is what they were, to now, almost entirely online, 190,000 students online, right, and a few thousand students still on campus. That was them moving with the market. So, like, don’t fight the market. Move with the market. What is the market looking for? And understand where your offerings match up.

One of the most obvious examples of that is how the disproportionate volume of closures you see are coming, come from areas in particular that are faith-based institutions and seminaries and areas where you’re seeing certain declines in the market already. And so, where is the market shifting? What can we offer that’s stronger for them?

When you are going to do cuts, I would say cut deeper. But you’re not just going to save revenue by reducing expense. The biggest thing I would say is, is liquidate your real estate. This is like what I’ve literally told several presidents. Like, why are you in the real estate business? Sell your locations. The fact that St. Rose had 80 buildings at the time that they decided to close, they put 10% of those on the market. But you can sell your buildings. And not only can you sell your buildings, but you can lease them back.

And so, I actually worked with one president on this, and I won’t say who, because I don’t, obviously, I don’t want to disclose it, but they sold a dormitory and then leased it back for 10 years. And so, they basically got the cash from the business, then, delaying the expense over 10 years. And yeah, in 10 years, where are the kids going to sleep? We don’t know. But guess what? We can worry about that problem in 10 years. And hopefully, we’ll grow and have room. So, we just bought ourselves this huge runway by selling out our own building and leasing it back.

And that key thing to me there is that, like, you need to free up capital. Because the one lesson of all of it, if I distilled everything, is that you have to spend into a decline. You can’t cut your way to growth. You can cut your way to stability, but the only solution is growth. So, I always have a saying that growth is the only moat. In a complicated, competitive, consolidated market like higher ed, the only protection you have is to be bigger. Because the larger you are, just the more you can absorb from unknown disruptions in the marketplace. But you cannot grow without spending more money. And so, the mistake a lot of institutions make is they wait till it’s too late. And so, then they cut some expenses, but the one of the expenses they cut is marketing. And then, they spend less money or they reduce the budgets for admission. So, they can’t travel to the places they used to travel to.

And it’s like you get into that game and it’s a death spiral, a literal actual death spiral. You spend less. You recruit less, you have less, you spend less, you recruit less, you have less. So, you have to have capital. Put together a growth plan and fund it. And the ways that you can fund it is dramatic reductions in expenses, and then selling your real estate portfolio as best you can. That’s one of the few things that a lot of higher ed has well is, you know, land and buildings. And, like, you can free some of that up. I mean, so I definitely encourage a lot of institutions. I encouraged one today, actually, to consider liquidation.

[00:26:47] Gil: Well, and I think the online programming piece is huge, too. I mean, where are the students going to live in 10 years? In 10 years, you’re going to be at home learning from you online, right? So, there’s a solution right there.

[00:26:56] Seth: Yeah, exactly. And it’s exactly that idea of that market is already heading in that direction. And if they do want to still come and have dorms, well, hopefully we’re in a strong enough place that in 10 years, we’ll figure that out. You know, I’d rather solve today’s problem than tomorrow’s problem. And now, in 10 years, we’ve got to figure it out.

The market is evolving, in some ways, slowly and in other ways at a rapid pace. And so, I think that it’s going to look very different in a decade. Those are probably a few of the first things that I’d [crosstalk 00:27:22].

[00:27:22] Gil: And like you said, when you’re with the Kanahoma origin story, maybe in 10 years you buy that residence hall back because you performed so well-

[00:27:29] Seth: 100%.

[00:27:30] Gil: … that you can purchase back things that you had to sell and lease. And the person who bought it from you is more than happy to take those payments and then another lump sum now online. You’re kicking the can in some respects, but you’re kicking the can for 10 years, not for 10 months. And you can solve a lot more problems with a lot longer of a runway.

[00:27:46] Seth: It’s not that different than what we’re seeing in venture capital right now, which, for a 20 second tangent, it’s just that, you know, as interest rates have shifted and folks can earn more money on their capital with cash, venture capitalists aren’t as interested in investing in growth companies. And so, growth companies have had to focus on their burn rates, dramatically reduce staff to give themselves more time, so they don’t raise money until the market has improved.

It’s not that different of, what’s our burn rate? I mean, I was running through the books of one institution that’s running at a loss right now. And it’s, well, it’s not hard to figure out your burn. If you look at how much cash you have left in your endowment, how much you’re losing, but also look at the rate at which it’s declining, we can predict pretty clearly when you’re going to be out of business. And so, the question is, like, what do you want to do today to avoid that?

And I just think it’s the hardest thing to do. And that’s where I do think I’m coming from the marketing side. If marketers step outside of their lane a little bit, same thing with enrollment, you’ll find that, like, growth is the entire conversation. And marketing enrollment is the heart of the growth origin story, in my opinion. And so, you can play a huge part in this. But often, these decisions are being made outside of the narrative of a CMO or a VP of enrollment. And so, I think, if you’re in one of those roles, I’d encourage you to find a way to get a seat at that table and have those conversations, because there is still ways to grow, but it’s just it’s harder than ever.

[00:28:59] Gil: Yeah. And I think I remember back, this is an old school callback, but Edge Ventures, back in the day, when they would publish the maturity model for enrollment management, on one far end of the spectrum, there was the just recruit anybody you can to get to come to the school. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. It doesn’t matter what the end. It doesn’t matter the discount rate. It doesn’t matter anything, just fill the class, right? And then, on the far end of the maturity spectrum, there’s the VP of enrollment is in the president’s cabinet seat at the table, driving institutional decision-making and being a part of the overall strategy. And I think, to your point, when enrollment has a seat at the table, there is definitely more of a, I want to say, respect for those investments in travel and in programming and in content. But also, there’s just a little bit more of a business focus to how things are operated when the VP of enrollment has that background and has the ability to really articulate those things well.

Institutions I’ve worked with, that’s been that way for every school that has a strong VP of enrollment that understands market conditions and understands the need to invest in specifically targeted programming are the ones who see the best results and become more healthy, right?

[00:30:07] Seth: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:10] Gil: So, Seth, it’s been great to have you here. We could go on for days on these topics, but I know that there are always and, sadly, going to be more of these types of conversations to have over the next couple of years or so. So, we hope that our listeners are able to share this content with their colleagues and friends to help to give people a solid footing to think off of. Before we let you go, how’s the best way for people to get in touch with you and to continue this conversation?

[00:30:38] Seth: So, you can find me most places online as @SethOdell. LinkedIn is probably the best place, but I’m still on X, as well. And then kanahoma.com, K-A-N-A-H-O-M-A.com. You can find an email from me there. Any of those work. But I’ll always take a chance to connect with folks and chat about topics like this or others.[00:30:57] Gil: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Seth, for your time. And thank you to our listeners. We will put all of these channels to connect with Seth in our episode notes. We thank you so much again, and we will see you next time on FYI.

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