The Enrollment Charts Dashboard: Part One
Why Build It?
Ted & I never considered ourselves Tech Bros. Not by a long shot. Just a couple of college pals deeply rooted in the Houston arts and music scene. If you’d have known us then - you’d have never seen this coming. Yet, jump forward 20 years or so, and here we are—introducing a dashboard we built that gives you instant access to visa issuance numbers and currently 3 ways to slice that data.
Let me back up a bit. Ted & I got into International Education largely right out of college. We both started off in ESL, teaching college kids the difference between comparatives and superlatives while gaining some of the best experiences one could imagine. Whether it was taking a group of 20 students deep sea fishing or collectively jumping up and down on couches in wild abandon during a world cup match, Ted and I were blessed to find this career, life, and in retrospect, each other. We both progressed and grew in our careers.
Then, COVID happened.
Good people and excellent professionals in our industry lost their jobs. Every university was paralyzed under the uncertainty and the complete absence of rationality. Meetings would get called. Questions thrown around the room like infants discovering spaghetti. And ultimately - some people were told there was no longer a place for them here.
But, why? Why did universities can these seasoned veterans?
My opinion was and remains that we didn’t have the data, tool kit or vocabulary to objectively explain ourselves.
International recruitment is like the wild west of higher education. Most of us, in some chapter of our professional development, would walk into strategy talks shooting from the hips with an obscene scoop of confidence saying we should go HERE. That finger slamming down onto an invisible map. Many still do. Or we’d walk around conferences, open eared, hoping to catch a whisper of the next hot market a respected counterpart is eyeing. Gut feelings, word of mouth & bias—hard claims to defend when pointed questions get hurled across the table.
But COVID offered some benefits within the tragedy. Many of us discovered new hobbies and interests, rekindled deeper relationships with our families and nearly all of us either ate too much or began to really appreciate walking. I was no different, albeit always a nerd at heart. I began studying data and trend analysis.
The unexpected benefit to that course of study was that when I was invited into those wildly uncertain meetings, I offered quantitative answers rooted in trend analysis. I will never forget my boss, during a phone call, completely rocked ]by my dismissing his concerns for the enrollment drop. He practically jumped through the phone to strangle me. But, I remained calm and explained: “This is a blip. Not a trend. And what most universities are doing right now will become a case study of how not to do this in the future.”
In 2022, we hit the road recruiting with an ambitious target: grow international enrollments by 18% annually, thereby doubling our numbers in 4 years.
Guess what? We did it. We surpassed it even. But along the way, over those last few years, I was wide-eyed at the number of new faces I saw on the tours and school visits. Where had all my friends gone? Where was all the expertise?
It was this stark realization that forced Ted & I to start Enrollment Charts. We felt driven to provide our counterparts with the data, tool kit and vocabulary many lacked during COVID. Forever moving forward, we want for each of you to confidently walk into meetings knowing wholeheartedly that “I am the most informed person in this room.” Simply put, we felt that allowing things to continue the way they were would be unacceptable.
So, next time, you get called into a meeting and the proverbial spaghetti starts flying—the hard questions get asked and the tempers rise with their absolute inability to be bedfellows with uncertainty—you’ll be there. Calm. Like a bay secluded from the wild ocean. You’ll open your desktop, log into Enrollment Charts’ dashboard and confidently explain:
This is what we are going to do. This is why.
To be continued….
Date is King,
Jay & Ted
Check out a demo of our new dashboard here:
