AISAP52

A couple of years ago when I was blogging for Education Week I wrote a post that took independent schools to task for relying a more on lore than on data for making their cases and for planning their programs. I had fun with the Star Trek reference (just Google Data and Lore, the ethical and the amoral, respectively, android “twins” on The Next Generation series), but I was serious that as an industry we haven’t been very smart in using data to make our decisions, letting hand-me-down “truths” and opinions drive some of our most important work. 

NAIS and NBOA have been pushing us well with regard to collecting and aggregating data in the cause of financial sustainability, and instruments like the CTP 4 (“the ERBs”), the CWRA, and the HSSSE have been helpful in providing some school-specific and industry-wide information on how our academic programs are working.

As anyone who has had to give a board presentation knows, data can be a mixed blessing, but it does give you something concrete to talk about. When it’s your friend, it highlights what is working, and when it’s not so friendly, it forces you to rethink—and hopefully to regroup and improve. For admissions offices, with enrollment management sometimes seeming like a game of inches, data—knowing what’s happening at your school and also knowing how your performance stacks up against peers—can be a make or break. 

Data gathering has been an AISAP priority for a while, and this year the whole process of collecting and reporting has been given a serious upgrade. If you’re an AISAP member or just follow us on Twitter, you’ve already been prodded pretty emphatically about participating in The Scale, the AISAP– SchoolAdmin joint benchmarking survey for admission and enrollment management professionals.

Here’s an opportunity for you and your school not only to gather and examine your own data but also to see how your school measures up relative to peer schools. Is your “funnel” wide enough, narrow enough, or just broken—in a good way or maybe a bad? Are there tidbits of information that stand out as highlights or lowlights when compared with the same information from other schools? Are you spending too much, or too little, on each new enrollment?

Even when the news is good, we have conditioned ourselves to think so much in terms of “brand” and “message” that we’re nervous when faced with too much data. Often we’d rather have the comforting taglines and old maxims that have fueled our profession for years—the lore, rather than the data.

But times have changed, and so have our markets. Our taglines and brands and messages have to be finely crafted, yes, but as words they need to align with what is true and real about our schools for prospective families who are better informed and watching their wallets every more carefully. Data—the kind of benchmarking information that you will get from participating in The Scale this year—is part of “true and real,” and you owe it to yourself, to your school, to your bosses, and to your boards to dig as deeply into this information as you can. Data can help you see where you are going way more accurately than lore.

Baseball is one of the places where data and lore coexist peacefully and happily, making the world a better and more balanced place. But Yogi Berra once said something that keeps that balance clear, and it’s not bad advice for people in our profession: “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”

Where you should be going, right now, is over to The Scale to enter your data. Otherwise you might wind up living out another quote from Yogi, which I will paraphrase for our purposes here: “If people don’t want to come to your school, how are you going to stop them?”