College is Broken (and What We Can Do to Fix It!)

College admissions isn’t confusing by accident. It’s confusing on purpose, and the people who built it know it.

Teege Mettille spent twenty years in higher education, rising from admissions counselor to vice president of enrollment at small private colleges across the Midwest. His book, College Is Broken, draws on more than a hundred interviews with admissions counselors, deans, enrollment executives, students, and parents to lay out how the system actually works.

In this episode, we dig into the discount-rate arms race and why so few schools are willing to walk away from it, the psychology behind “merit scholarships” and what an honest version might look like, and why presidents so often believe their own hype even when the data says otherwise. We close on what admissions professionals can change right now, without waiting for anyone above them to sign off.

Host:

Dr. Alex Fronduto
Academic Lead, M.Ed in Education Administration & Associate Teaching Professor
Northeastern University

Guest:

Teege Mettille, Owner and College Planner at Class 101 in Brookfield, Wisconsin & Author of College is Broken

Start	Dur.	Speaker	Transcription
0:00:07.7	19.1s	Alex Fronduto	Hello and welcome everyone to the Admit It podcast by AACRAO. I’m your host, Doctor Alex Fronduto, and I’m super excited to welcome our guest for today’s episode, Teege Mettille, who is the owner and college planner at Class 101 in Brookfield, Wisconsin, and the author of College is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
0:00:31.10	2.3s	Alex Fronduto	Thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
0:00:33.95	8.9s	Teege Mettille	Oh, thank you so much for having me, Alex. I am thrilled to be here. Although as an ACA person, I do feel like I’m crossing enemy lines a little bit, but that’s OK.
0:00:43.20	25.4s	Alex Fronduto	I totally understand that. I do it all the time and some people are like, why are you part of this one and this one? I said, you can learn so much from both organizations, so I hope you become even more a part of us. But again, thanks so much for being here. Obviously our episode is going to focus on your newest book, as I mentioned. I would love first the audience to know a little bit more about you, and then we can kind of dive into the book.
0:01:09.23	70.4s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, so the quick background about me, the, the short version, and I think the most critical component is I was a first generation college student that was not college bound. In fact, my, the secretary in the counseling office when I showed up for a college visit once asked me like, teacher, you Really thinking about colleges or you’re just trying to get out of class, right? Um, and there was a college, a liberal arts college that I really want, like, I really wanted to go to. I got the view book. I saw the sticker price, and I was, I just immediately was like, Oh, that’s not for people like us. And I later when I got into admissions, where my professional background was as an admissions counselor, director, dean, vice president, etc. And I learned how the discounting game was working, and that uh that liberal arts college probably could have been for people like us. I was just tricked away from it. Uh, I was deceived away from it. Um, that’s kind of like a formative experience that stuck with me every time I was involved in the discounting conversations, but, you know, I spent 20 years, you know, in various roles in higher education. I built the discount or didn’t build them, I approved the discounting models, implemented them. Etc. um, and, and just have really kept asking more and more questions as, as time went on.
0:02:21.16	19.1s	Alex Fronduto	So first, I love that you said view book. It just really brings back the times of admissions. I know they still exist, but I feel like it’s still kind of an older time, you know, talking point. So first I have to comment on that. Um, and so again, you’ve written other books. Why? This one at this time.
0:02:40.75	135.0s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, there were two, the, the, the concept behind the book College is Broken is I’m suggesting college as a construct, at the cornerstone of the American dream that that is broken. I’m not suggesting the education doesn’t work. That that’s crazy to me, right? Or that it’s not worth it to go to college. I don’t know where that idea came from. Actually, that’s what I want to find out. Where did that idea come from? Because the data do not support those, those conclusions. There were two key moments for me that they realized we’re on a kind of an unhealthy trajectory that needs to shift. Um, one, while I was the, the dean of admissions at Northland College since closed, um, we had all but held the discount rate steady within 1% point for 4 years in a row, um, which, you know, is a difficult thing to do, and we had to make a lot of ethical compromises to do that, I will say that, um. And at the end of that, the message from, you know, the, the campus leadership was, it’s not enough. Keep, keep going, keep going, we need more. And I realized no matter what we do to like hit the goal, meet the class, uh, the charge from the campus the next year is going to be more, right? Like there’s no point where we have what we need. So it did, that was the moment where I started to realize, you know, kind of push back against the defense of some of the more questionable practices we do. Uh, enrollment managers will say some version of, we have to do what we need to do to meet the class. We have a goal, because the goal is never ending. If you are currently at 800 students and you get up to 900, the goal becomes 1000. If you get to 1000, it becomes, if you’re at 25,000, they need 26. And so that’s never going to end and we have to draw the line somewhere. But the real breaking. Point for me was when I read, um, Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management by Stephen Bird, um, uh, with New America. And it is just a, clearly they have lawyers that I did not when I was, I’ll say that. But it was just a brutal takedown in my mind of all the things we are doing in enrollment management. That I knew in my heart was not right, that was not serving students well enough, clearly not serving the institution, society writ large, all of that, um, but I hadn’t seen it kind of put together until I read, uh, Steven’s book, and that that’s what really pushed me to, to dig deeper and launch on this project with College is Broken.
0:04:56.41	42.1s	Alex Fronduto	And so you brought up discounting a lot already, and so obviously a big point of the book and definitely something I think our audience would be intrigued about. And so, as you said, you know, you’ve been able to in some instances, right, have that in your book, say 56% while net tuition revenue barely moves, right? And so you give an example, and you talk about this, about discounting from 90% of the students down to 13% and replaced, you know, generic awards with, you know, named, identifying specific, you know, scholarships. So, why do you think so few institutions have tried something like this, given it costs nothing to replicate this type of model?
0:05:39.54	103.1s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, you know, there’s a, there’s a couple things. One, it does feel, I mean, it’s, it is risky, right, to do something different. And the discounting firms, writ large, right? You know, the, the, the lot of them, they have data to suggest what they’re doing works. And if it doesn’t work, they’re a convenient scapegoat to flip to someone else, right? Like you can throw your discounting firm overboard and and pick a new one. In fact, they all know that’s part of what they do. Sometimes they have to fall on the sword for the enrollment manager. Um, so there’s, there’s some level of comfort that comes from that, that. The particular case study that you’re referring to it, you know, it’s in the book, the gentleman is named Colin Seidler. Uh, that’s a pseudonym. They did not want to be identified. They did drastically change their discounting model from kind of the automatic what the discounting firm suggests to smaller amounts, more targeted and kind of specific to students’ interests and engagement. Um, and, and they, they report that they found kind of significant success there. But, you know, I bring up discounting so much, uh, there is no more. Corrosive thing that we do as far as the the perception the general public has, then the way we attempt to manipulate and mislead people about the cost of college. Uh, it’s, it’s dragging us down every which way. So, uh, I bring it up a lot, uh, because all my conversations, I did 100 interviews for the book. I, I shouldn’t say all, but the The cost of college and the, the perception of cost, more importantly, just kept coming up. Whether I was talking with presidents, enrollment managers, students, parents, faculty, marketing people, vendors, just over and over again, the perception of cost, um, is a, is a real problem. And, and so many colleges are just determined to, to double down on that problem and, and try and make it another year.
0:07:23.26	27.3s	Alex Fronduto	And I know just based off of, as you said, commenting on the idea of pricing models, I’m, I’m curious, you have this argument that is probably very valid that like the college price as it is, hasn’t really changed and shifted like the cost of doing business, and so I know this is a little bit of an aside, but I think just because you’re bringing it up, I, I would love for you to kind of explain why you continue to say that. I think people. Might agree with you and some others might not.
0:07:51.11	121.7s	Teege Mettille	Well, the, the, the data agrees with me, so I’ll say that, and that’s, the data, the data specifically, um, that I’m referring to is the College Board’s pricing index or, or whatever that report is. Um, and one of my favorite things to say in doing presentations and, you know, workshops in the community for families or, you know, on LinkedIn, anytime someone says like, look at the cost of college, it’s only college and healthcare that have gone so high. The cost of college has not meaningfully increased in the last 20 years, and the source for that is the College Board Price index. And the reason is because family incomes have not been meaningfully increasing in the last 20 years, and colleges have to come down to match it, right? And so colleges, to our credit, have done amazing work at finding efficiencies. Which sometimes include cutting into the educational mission by hiring more adjuncts than tenure faculty, but that’s a different conversation. But they’ve held the cost of college down for families in a way that is remarkable, but we are so determined to lie to them and say, no, actually this college cost a quarter of a million dollars. To get a bachelor’s degree from this random regional institution you’ve never heard of. We insist on saying that. And, and so families believe it. They believe it costs a quarter of a million dollars to get a bachelor’s degree from Podunk University in, in, you know, wherever, Wisconsin, and And so when they, when they see these crazy stories about the cost of college going up, or student loan debt being out of control, or college not being worth it, it makes logical sense. And I just think, imagine the goodwill that we would get from the public, from, uh, government agencies if we told the truth, which is, we are holding the line on costs because we understand how difficult things are right now. Just imagine how that would, would change things, but instead we Insist on this high price, high discount model under the false narrative that’s that this is a, this is a positional statement, not a factual statement. The false narrative that if we don’t raise our price every year, families won’t think we’re worth it. Families won’t perceive the value. I believe that is a lie that comes from the discounting firms, not something backed up by the data.
0:09:53.59	69.4s	Alex Fronduto	And it’s interesting that you talk about that. I mean, we have this idea of either competition, right? We know that there’s competitive if you’re thinking about, especially a small private, you know, we even talked about, you know, closures and mergers and acquisitions, and so thinking through all of that, there’s still this idea that we have to keep our price high. Again, when I say price, I of course mean sticker price, and so the idea behind that to then Oh, we’re going to either make it seem like now it’s more affordable because we’re going to grant you all of this scholarship money to make you feel better, right? To make you feel more prestigious, but we also have to keep our sticker price this way, cause if we changed that, right, there would be this different idea about who we are as an institution, and so. I’m curious cause you talk a little bit more about this in your book as well, about the idea of like institutional scholarships. You are essentially relating it. I loved it like Kohl’s cash, right? So, again, being chosen more than actually trying to actually close what you’re calling, right, the affordability gap. So talk to me a little bit why you included this. Where did it come up? Was it certain scenarios, certain conversations? Um, I would love to hear a little bit more about that.
0:11:03.60	182.0s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, well, first, the, the mythology, cause I know that’s a, you know, the claim that I just said was, you know, it’s a lie that we have to raise the tuition for the perception of value. I am aware that there is data that when you do a price reset, the perception of your value or your quality goes down. What I’m suggesting is not that that is not true. But the idea that we have, that the reason we’ve been increasing sticker price every year is to, to chase the perception of value, that is incorrect. That is what the discount firms have trained us all to say to each other. The reason we are increasing sticker price every year, even in years when we don’t increase net price for new freshmen. is because it’s the only way to squeeze more money out of the returning students, and the discounting firms know that your least price sensitive students are the ones that have been there the longest. But of course, we can’t say that. We can’t say to sophomores, we’re going to charge you more because we can. So we have to pretend that we’re, that the cost has gone up, even though we all see. The data from the College Board, the price has not gone up. But to answer your question about Kohl’s cash, um, so I’m from Wisconsin, right? Herb Cole was our senator for like 817 years. Um, and Kohl’s cash is, Kohl’s is just a, it’s just a fixture in Wisconsin. And I know it’s a broader chain than that. Um, but I, you know, people in my mother’s generation like will go post on Facebook like they’re expiring Kohl’s cash, like someone use this before it goes. Scott Walker, when he ran for president for I think 3 months he was running for president, his whole like stump speech was about how he gets a sweater for they pay him $1 when he buys a sweater from Kohl’s because of all the different gimmicks and and coupons and all of that. So what I wanted to demonstrate, so many families. Take college scholarships and pretend it’s a real scholarship, and I think that has been a real dishonest thing we did by calling them scholarships because we took an existing thing and said that people understand, which is a scholarship from Burger King, from your local bank or whatever, and we just attached our or attached our coupons to that construct. And it has misled people to the point, there’s several downstream effects in that. Students are much less likely to try and apply for a $500 scholarship because they just got $35,000 from this other one. And last night I was at the Elmbrook School District uh here in Wisconsin, doing a presentation for families, and I, this came up and I said to, I talked about the, the scholarships, right? Like, you might get a 30,000 to $35,000 scholarship from a college. And then I said, parents, let your students be excited about that. Don’t take that away from them. But parents, I need you to think rationally about this. It is just A coupon, it does not mean you were right and your sister-in-law was wrong about spanking 10 years ago, right? Like, that’s not, it is not a validation of your parents’ parenting. It is purely a financial manipulation of how much they think you need, you need off, you need reduced to get there. And I use the concept of Kohl’s cash because I think it more accurate. Really reflects what’s happening. You can’t take your Kohl’s cash somewhere else. It is absolutely useless if you try and cash it in. In fact, the college scholarships are less valuable than a like 50 cents off coupon from butter that you might get in an old school newspaper, because those at least have some stated cash value. Remember, they had to say like, worth 1/100 of a penny, and I don’t know why, but
0:14:05.91	2.3s	Alex Fronduto	I don’t know either, but I’ve always thought about that.
0:14:09.35	42.1s	Teege Mettille	Anyway, so I, I use the concept of Kohls cash because I think it does reflect some of the manipulation colleges are doing. We could be, we could continue this pricing model and just be honest with families that we’re doing, uh, segregated pricing or surveillance pricing, or that we’re, you know, doing the, the Karl Marx approach from all. According to their ability and need. We could do that and still do this just uh segregated pricing model. Um, but we are really stuck on the idea that it’s a reward and, and, you know, listen, when your lowest achieving academic student on the way in still gets a $35,000 scholarship. I, I don’t know how we could call that a reward for academic excellence. That’s, that’s just me. Call me crazy, and as you see in my LinkedIn comments, Alex, sometimes people do,
0:14:52.32	49.2s	Alex Fronduto	and that, you know, that’s fine. There’s always has, you’re trying to tell it like it is, and some people may not like that, and that’s OK. And so uh. What do you think institutions should be doing, right? Like, are you saying that they should be honest, right? We already know that if they come out with like lowering their price, there’s an issue there. If they call all of these named scholarships, that’s really again means nothing, it’s just again, formulaic especially. Especially now with the rise of so much, you know, predictive analytics to to the to the tee of like if we gave you this exact amount, we know that more, more than likely you’re going to come, or we have all these indicators to know that we don’t actually have to give you money that much to actually have you come because you’ve expressed so much interest into us. So like, where do you think this shift needs to happen and like what do you, if you had your ideal scenario, what would that even look like?
0:15:41.88	255.6s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, I have 3 answers to that. First, what you were, yeah, what you were referring to where we’re headed is surveillance pricing, uh, like leveraging the data analytics that we have to reduce financial aid. That is going to be disastrous if colleges embrace that, and I think they’re going to. I. I think some have, I know some have started. Um, I’ve heard some ask for it. Um, if you think Congress is mad about surveillance pricing for airline tickets, just you wait until they find out that you’re doing it to middle class voters. Good luck, good luck. You think you’re going to maintain the Pell Grant in that scenario. Um, but what I, what I think, uh, colleges, uh, so that’s the first answer. The second answer is what colleges should do collectively, and then the third answer is what they can do individually right now. Collectively, colleges cannot individually opt, no individual college can opt out of this system, so we’re stuck with it, right? Uh, so collectively, they should stop resisting regulations that would fix the problem, and there’s any, any number of regulations that would fix the problem. We could put a cap on merit aid. I called for that in 2021 while I was a sitting vice president. So it’s not like I’m just throwing rocks from outside. Um, so, and the cap on merit aid would put a limit on where sticker price could go, while still doing the discounting game, all that you want. There would just suddenly be some market force check on uh the upper level of sticker price. Um, we could do a cohort level pricing, where the, the 100 level courses, 200 level, 300, 400 level courses are all priced differently, and that’s how you could get additional revenue out of your returning student without pretending to increase the price every year. That could, that could be a way. Um, we could also, uh, New America is related to a proposal that, um, comes from a policy proposal for the federal government to fund $10,000 a year. Don’t quote me exactly on the details. Um. But, uh, a set number of dollars every year for every enrolled student if you manage price accordingly or kind of manage a discount accordingly. Um, there’s a few different approaches there that all could work. I also believe a final policy proposal from the federal government should be to make the Pell Pell Grant and any state grants like it, a last dollar program, so discounting firms cannot take the Pell Grant away from students, put it in where the institutional resources would have been, and then send an institutional resource, uh, resource dollars. Up to higher income families. I think that should be done immediately, and I think any college that is currently doing that should lose access to the Pell grant. That’s, that’s my hot take. There we go. Those are the collective ones. Individually, what a college can do today, right now, this is what I say to my enrollment friends, um, who have been so kind to talk through this with me, and some of them like nothing makes an enrollment VP angrier than pressing on the ethics of the discounting model, like they friends like yelling at me, right, like. You know, in a friendly way, like as we’re going back and forth. But there’s 3 things you can do. One, when your discount firm, discounting firm comes to you next August with the same 5×5 sell slop that they give to everybody, you know they’re giving this to everybody. Just be difficult. Send it back. Tell them it doesn’t align with our values. Tell them we are genuinely committed to access, not pretending to be committed to access. Give me something better, right? Like, make them work for their $75,000 of tuition revenue they’re taking from you every year. And make it clear you want a better model. They might not be able to have one yet, but that’s fine. The next thing, uh, that needs to happen, I should rephrase, that’s the second thing enrollment people should do. The first thing is we need to deal with presidents who all believe their institution is the special little gem in their state, uh, and they’re like, the only problem is that the market just hasn’t realized how cool Podunk University is. In enrollment leaders, enrollment marketers need to get a realistic market strength analysis done by a vendor that does not go to NACAC or AACRAO, not one of the vendors that are going to research the market problem and then sell you the solution that they’ve already have in their slide deck, but instead someone from outside higher ed that is going to give you the clear. Answer of what the market thinks your institution is worth, what they’re willing to pay, and then they’re out of the picture. Well then you work on the solutions. So deal with the president, send your discounting slot back, and then third, there’s nothing stopping every enrollment leader from doing this. Put out an RFP right now that says we are looking for an effective pricing model that is not high price, high discount. I do not think Alex one exists yet. I don’t know what it is, or I would tell you right now.
0:19:58.25	1.9s	Alex Fronduto	Sell it right now for 599.
0:20:00.68	53.3s	Teege Mettille	We got into this mess because there were, there was money to be made by taking essentially financial aid from poor students and giving it to wealthy students as scholarships. There was money to be made, corporations came in, found that now venture capitalist firms are coming in, taking that money. I believe. In the good and bad of American capitalism, and if there is a demand for a better way, someone will design that better way. And one enrollment VP putting out this RFP, it’s not going to do much, but one becomes 5, becomes 25, becomes 75, and when there’s 100 colleges, all saying, we will, we will divert our 50,000, 60,000 dollars, $70,000 $80,000, $100,000 contract to you if you can convince us there’s a better model. Suddenly you have the ability for a collective shift without violating collective action, uh, uh, issues with the Department of Justice, and American capitalism will find a new way.
0:20:55.43	5.8s	Alex Fronduto	I love they’re so strategic. I, I just, I just wanted to like listen to all of it. I was like, I think.
0:21:02.14	20.3s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, the, the criticism, let me tell you my criticism, it did just start with this sucks, and then I flipped the table over and I left. And it is, it is my friends, a special call out to, to Nathan, the co-host of the admissions director’s lunch cast podcast that I do, where he just kept saying like, you can’t just tell us that what the problem is. We know that we need to know where to go, and it kept making me think more and more of where to go.
0:21:23.36	60.9s	Alex Fronduto	And so I loved the analogy of like someone from the outside talking about market for me that like puts a real estate spin on things like getting an appraisal done on your house, right? Someone that is separate and really able to give you that professional opinion and not again going to sell you something, and so I, I haven’t heard that type of model as much, and so I appreciate that that was something that you shared, um, kind of in this space, my last kind of point and only because you brought it up. We are seeing so many different ways that institutions are coming out to essentially. Just re-advertise discounting, but for example, many institutions, right, that have maybe strong endowments, things like that are now saying, you know, X amount of thousands of dollars, if your income is here, you won’t pay a dime, or we’re getting a lot of, you know, you will have all of this amount that is, you know, no pay, no loans, and so I’m curious what your spin is on those cause it’s making it seem like there’s access, but is there actually access?
0:22:24.94	172.9s	Teege Mettille	No, um, so yeah, it’s, it’s good. Listen, I appreciate any attempt at transparency. A step in that direction is better than not taking that step. So I appreciate that some of, some of my closest friends in admissions have rolled some of those announcements out this year, and I’m glad they’re doing it. I’m glad they’re doing it. However, access in admissions, when you Follow the 5×5 slop from the discounting firms has shifted from providing access to students, I’m sorry, for students to providing access to students. And that that subtle shift is colleges are not looking at, let’s say they’re low income students and saying, how do we help them get here if they want to come? Colleges are looking at that based on their actions, based on their discounting model, and saying, OK, there’s 100 students in there, we need 10. What’s the maximum amount of financial pain we can apply to that group to get our 10? And that’s the access to the students. If they were trying to provide access for, the question would be, how do we reduce the financial barriers for the 100 students, so however many of them want to come here are able to come in colleges are not doing that, they’re not trying to do that, they’re not pretending that they’re doing that, um, and so the the access mission, such as it claims to be, is not happening in practice, and I, I don’t know how anyone can make a defense otherwise. These pricing models though, or these, these uh transparency models that say, if you make under $100,000 you’re not going to pay a thing. First of all, they’re not all need blind institutions, so some of them are just capping and putting a cap on that otherwise. But then others are like, sure, if you make under $1,000,000 and somehow got a 35 on the ACT without without retaking it 4 times and somehow like wrote the perfect essay without hiring a consultant and blah blah blah blah blah, like, sure, if you make it through the gauntlet and you’re one of the lucky ones, we’ll bring you in. But the other metrics that they are using, you know, everybody, all of your listeners know this, Alex, the metrics that colleges are using are linked to income over and like that is so clear. So like, sure, I, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe you’ll pay students if they make under $100,000 and still get into Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, but you know that they’re not going to, so it’s the safest bet ever. And the, the final thing I will say. The colleges, before they put those statements out there, of course, are going back and making sure like we don’t, we don’t have, we’re not going to have too many students in that bucket, right? Like they’re not locking themselves in what they, so sure, like it is making it better and I do appreciate that this effort from transparency is coming from the more selective institutions. Because that is where a lot of the oxygen is taken up in the room. So, if some of the IVs are saying, you know, the, the, I think they’re relatively silly as far as the effect that they have on actual cost for families, um, but it does help families get over the idea that sticker is sticker. Um, but it’s, it’s such a small, such a small drop in the bucket. Because as you said, Alex, they are just trying to rebrand high price, high discount. And do you know what’s one way to do that? Just stop that. You could just stop. We could just stop this.
0:25:18.65	7.5s	Alex Fronduto	No, we just need to call it something else so then they don’t question it and it just becomes a vicious cycle. Come on, it happens in many business models.
0:25:27.0	1.5s	Teege Mettille	You deserve a scholarship for that idea.
0:25:29.41	28.1s	Alex Fronduto	Thank you, um. So, uh, shifting gears a little bit only because again you’ve talked about the idea of presidents, you’ve talked about, you’ve made the comment that they think that they’re the best thing, their institution is the best thing, and you actually talk about one of your subjects coining role oppression, and so I would love you to talk a little bit about like where did that come from, cause I assume it didn’t come out of nowhere and like give some context around that first.
0:25:57.83	140.4s	Teege Mettille	Yeah, yeah, yeah, roll oppression that came from David Dysart, who I actually I don’t think I interviewed him for this book. I interviewed him on the podcast, the admissions director’s launch cast, and he wrote a book, The Innovation Forge. He’s really focused on maximizing the power of slate and enrollment and admissions, but enroll oppression was a term he developed about the unique set of pressures that coincide all at once to create kind of like this, this weird environment where like nothing, nothing works, um, or, or nothing is gonna work well enough, maybe is a better way to say it. And I, I, when I talked to David and kind of understood what he was writing about with um in role oppression, I thought of a quote, I believe it was Audre Lorde. I hope my, um, gender studies friends don’t drag me if I have that wrong, but I was a women’s studies major, but it was a long time ago, um, who said that, you know, they were talking about what, what Audre Lorde, what I remember her writing about, um, was. Intersectionality when it was kind of a newer idea in the third wave feminism. And she talked about that the definition of oppression isn’t the lack of choice, right? It isn’t the absence of choice. It’s an environment where there’s plenty of choices, and they’re all terrible. They’re all bad, right? And the question is like, what do you do when you only have bad choices available to you, to us? And that’s what I think with enroll oppression and and with Audre Lorde’s comment. You know, we live in an environment where because of any number of factors, many of them self-induced, and I like that’s what I, what I, I just hope people who read the book take away is like we did much of this to ourselves, right? We’re to blame. No, we’re to blame like and and and there’s a positive side of that which I’ll which I’ll come to, but because of the enrolled oppression, there is no good choice, right? Like. You have a goal this year, you have a budget that you have to meet, you have a target that you have to get to, and there’s no good way to get there. So, the question is, what is the least bad way or what is the quickest way or surest way, etc. Um, the challenge is just, this is what I see with with enroll oppression. You get there and it wasn’t enough, so you got to do it again, and you now you got to dig deeper or compromise more or, or, or, I mean, this is how we got used to gapping students, poor students, Pell eligible students. 14, 15, $16,000. Gaping port, like the poorest students that we admit. I, I, I have yet to see anyone make a defense for that other than what else are we supposed to do? We need to give the money to the richest kids, otherwise they won’t come.
0:28:20.23	28.0s	Alex Fronduto	And so when we talk about presidents and you’re talking about this idea. Is it that they just choose to find this like least resistance? Are they coming in with anything prior, like as a president, of course, some are well knowledgeable about enrollment. I think more so nowadays than ever, but there are still many presidents that don’t understand anything about enrollment, just know it’s how they get their money.
0:28:48.45	124.2s	Teege Mettille	That there are, you know, I, in my book, I refer to presidents, I say they’re like pop stars and politicians and that they believe their own hype to their detriment, and that’s the final key that matters, right? Because why do presidents believe their institution is the most special hidden gem? Well, they, they. have to, right? Like, they had the president, like part of the job, and this is what the book does. It doesn’t say there’s a villain. It says, the unique challenges every group in this book is facing makes what they’re doing rational and logical on its own, but collectively, it creates this toxic stew. Presidents, they have to go to wealthy families, and they need to say, hey, I’m gonna need $10 million of your dollars. You’re gonna have to take it from your children’s inheritance, and we’re going to use it to build a science building, and they can’t, the follow up cannot be. But don’t worry, because that money is going to build an average building at a below average in a nearly impoverished community and produce graduates at a low, actually, not a lot of these students are going to graduate actually less less than half will graduate on time, and they’re gonna go out into the world and be fine. Right, but definitionally half of colleges are below average, right? Like half of them are, so like that that’s just, that’s just the fact. But a college you can’t possibly go with a clear conscience and make that ask for this huge donation for a substandard education, but many colleges are are they’re below average, right? So you have a president has to believe that their institution is that great, and I don’t begrudge them that. But then we need to remove them from the decision making process at any number of things. The discounting model shouldn’t be running through someone who has that vision over their glasses about how special the place is, because the place is not as special as the president thinks it is, just as much as, and I hate to say this because my son. It’s perfect, right, but I, I should not be making decisions for everybody else about how they interact with my son, just the way parents can’t always see their children as clearly as everybody else does, uh, same true with presidents.
0:30:53.89	52.6s	Alex Fronduto	And are you feeling that it’s essentially everything kind of starts and stops with the president? Are you saying that that, how do you remove someone from that conversation? Do they, how do you right, like you have to think about that, like, how can you go to your president and say, I don’t want you involved in this. I’ll report info to you, but you can’t take an active role in this, and I think that’s what a lot of people struggle, especially in enrollment management, you know this yourself, to get your foot even into like the idea of the C-suite board of trustees connections, getting to that executive leadership, enrollment wasn’t even always at that table, right? Like the whole goal was to get to that table now, and now most are. Mhm. Now you’re saying, OK, well, we still need to be there, but probably the president shouldn’t have as much say. So like how does someone actually deal with that?
0:31:47.3	48.1s	Teege Mettille	Sure, sure, sure. Well, I mean the the short answer, run it through the provost, right? Like that, that’s a like a the the solution right there is just sitting on the table waiting. Um, that does not mean like get enrollment leaders out of the cabinet. Enrollment leaders um need to be a part of the conversations about long term institutional planning and like where, what are we going to do with residence hall. And and academic programs and all of that. But where I think the problem is, is if setting the price runs through the president, the president generally, and there are exceptions, and I, I can name exceptions, you can name exceptions, there are of course exceptions, but generally, presidents really believe their institution is worth more than they’re charging, and that therefore, they want, they want to charge more and they, and we get into this cycle, um, that just keeps, that just keeps repeating.
0:32:36.45	29.3s	Alex Fronduto	And so tell me more a little bit on the provost side, right? So there’s, you even talk about this a little bit about like the faculty side of the house, and so there’s a lot of this, you know, charge between, you know, the staff administration side and the faculty side, depending on how an institution is structured. And so if you’re now putting enrollment management and this connection into the provost side like Do you think they suddenly don’t feel like their institution is worth the same amount?
0:33:07.81	70.4s	Teege Mettille	Uh, no, I don’t think that. I, yeah, I don’t know if the correct answer is yes or no. What I mean to say is, no, I do not believe provosts are as delusional as the president, because the provosts aren’t going out there and saying, needing to convince themselves, hype themselves up that a $25 million gift from this family or $5 million or $1 million or even $25,000 from a non-wealthy family, right? Whatever the ask is going to be, you can’t make that ask. Without truly believing that you’re doing remarkable work, and I don’t want presidents to not believe they’re doing remarkable work, but that mindset cannot infuse into the market reality that is, many of these institutions are just not that special. For many institutions, and the biggest draw is just that they’re close by, right? And, and that that they are the nearby college. So long as a president is at least outwardly suggesting that they are the Harvard of the of Utah of Ohio, Iowa, wherever, we’ve all heard that we laugh about it, like we laugh about it at our enrollment conferences. I don’t, I don’t know about the AACRAO’s. I don’t know that the AACRAO’s laugh as much as the ACA, uh, but. I’m kidding, I’m kidding to my registrar friends.
0:34:18.61	1.2s	Alex Fronduto	Um, they’re gonna come after you.
0:34:20.54	37.9s	Teege Mettille	They’re gonna come after me, yeah, um, but as long as the president is performing that Harvard Harvard of Alabama mindset, it’s going to impact, infuse into everything. As long as the president is, if the buck is topping with the president, then yeah, the pricing model is going to stop there. If you put some External check on that as far as um the provost who is likely to take a more academic assessment of market position than the president will be, I think we’d be in a better spot. It is not perfect. Nobody has a clear eye towards like the clearest eye towards the institutional standing, but I do believe presidents are uniquely, uniquely, uniquely warped in their mindset.
0:35:00.11	17.1s	Alex Fronduto	I, uh, I, I love how you make that distinction, and I think. I’m curious just because you’ve been saying it. I’m gonna throw another position at you. What about someone’s CFO? No, I just had to. Why? I don’t understand why they shouldn’t make the call.
0:35:18.7	63.2s	Teege Mettille	I believe I’m contractually obligated to not speak of several CFOs, so I, and, and the thing is, right, like this is where enrollment management as a discipline came up. It can be, it is very complex and complicated, uh, in parts again because We made it so, right? Like they, they, you know, Jack McGuire like built this model. Um, but if you look at the net price as just a pure algebraic equation, you’re going to miss something, right? If you look at it as just we’re the best kept secret, you’re going to miss something. If you look at it as, um, A marketing challenge, you’re going to miss something. We need all of these different perspectives coming together, and the enrollment management people, I think, are uniquely positioned to bring it all together, but positionally, with the president looming over their shoulder, the president believing we are the Harvard of the Midwest, although I want to talk about that, with the president believing or pretending to believe that. It, it, it warps the good decision making process that would otherwise come. Enrollment managers know when they have a a generic institution on their hands. They know it. They often can’t say it on campus.
0:36:22.10	3.4s	Alex Fronduto	Of course not. Why? How could, how do you sell that? How do you package that,
0:36:25.83	3.9s	Teege Mettille	right? Well, I mean the challenge would be change that, but that’s a different question,
0:36:29.94	23.7s	Alex Fronduto	right? That’s a different, but the mentality is how do you continue to sell, um, so we’ve covered a lot, but ultimately someone that hasn’t read your book. What do you hope someone would get out of it, right? Other than this idea to change, like, like your final thoughts, like what is the goal that you have in mind and or your next steps? Anything you want to share.
0:36:54.13	94.9s	Teege Mettille	Oh, Alex, I’m so glad you asked that question. First, if you haven’t read the book because you just haven’t gotten around to it, it’s on Amazon, go pick it up. However, if you haven’t read the book because you don’t, you, you don’t prefer like reading paper, I am recording it. It is all recorded actually, a podcast style as like audiobook style in a podcast feed. College is Broken podcast edition. You can, I don’t know when this episode drops, but several are out. And every time I read a chapter, I also then interview someone about that group. So, like, I read the chapter about presidents, and then I interviewed Tom Chesney, who’s a college president at three institutions. Um, and, and we have a great discussion, and I specifically looked for people that disagreed with me, um, on, on what I was writing about for those conversations. So, you could check it out that way, but I hope That what they take away is that this is an inherently optimistic book, no matter what the title says, because I believe strongly that we created most of this mess on our own. We did it. This pricing model is not biblical, right? It did not come down from on high. The Constitution does not demand high price, high discount for US institutions. We did this, which means We can undo this. Whether it’s the pricing model, the recruitment strategy, the, the disconnect between, are we a liberal arts institution or career focused institution? Are we the best kept secret? Do rankings matter? Does every student need to be in the top half of their high school class? All of those are decisions made by people that could be listening to this podcast, which means we can all make different decisions. Maybe not drastic tomorrow, but we can start to move in a different direction.
0:38:29.88	38.9s	Alex Fronduto	I appreciate even the idea of like just moving the needle, right? It takes an action and you’ve said this a couple different times with different examples, right? It can’t be one institution, but that one can obviously multiply into many, many different individuals or like you said, RFPs for a different company, anything like that. And so I appreciate you sharing that so that people know that they could be the change, right? That’s something I always say is right, like you have this idea and you can, you’re not an imposter, you can do it, and so you can do it again. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, writing the book, and I can’t wait to hear what other people say about it. Thank you.