I remember clearly the phone call I received from a parent about my grade 6-12 school.
“I see you are offering spring tours for applicants eligible for admission next year. My son is only in third grade, but we really need to get a head start on the process, so we were wondering if we could sign up for a visit.”
Normally I might have chalked this up to something a former head of school once told me: “Always remember that parental concern knows no bounds.” But this seemed different; I couldn’t help but wonder if this call was speaking to something bigger. Prospective parent and guardian communications have become notably more frequent, repetitive, and intense in the past few admission seasons. There seems to be an even greater air of constant worry and concern, with families exploring our schools sooner, asking questions about college placement well before high school, and generally expressing concern about their child “falling behind.”
I recently stumbled upon the April 2024 New York Times article “Anxious Parents Are the Ones Who Need Help,” which describes the increasing frequency of calls to university counseling centers from anxious parents and guardians about their child’s school performance and experience. As I read the article, one sentence stood out to me: “But parents are allowing their anxiety to take over, and it’s not helping anyone, least of all their children.”
I remember thinking to myself, Is this what we are seeing in independent school admission? And, if so, what are we doing for parents and guardians from the start of the admission process to reduce their anxiety?
After reading that Times article, I got to thinking about Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead, in which she famously describes the notion that “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” I started thinking about how that fundamental idea—receiving half-truths or unclear expectations leads to confusion and frustration—relates to the application and admission process and how I might use it to better partner with parents and guardians throughout the admission process.
Reframing the Admission Process
I believe a better partnership can reduce anxiety and also reduce the demands on admission and enrollment teams, so I set out to make changes to the admission process at UPrep. These changes occurred in four phases in a family’s experience with the enrollment management team: inquiry, application, decision, and re-enrollment.
I set out to make these adjustments over time, after having conversations and gaining buy-in with key stakeholders, like our head of school, division heads, and business office. This inclusive process was critical to our success because it created a level of trust and support between the enrollment office and other school leaders that helped us navigate moments of conflict.
Inquiry. Over the years, the language in independent school marketing pieces and websites has started to sound similar across our schools. Rigorous academics, check. Community and diversity, check. Outstanding outcomes, check. How are parents and guardians supposed to differentiate our schools if we all use the same language? And if our schools all sound the same, does this create an exploratory phase that is unclear and anxiety-inducing?
For the past three years, the admission and marketing teams at UPrep have built intentional connections with our academic and program staff to understand our true differentiators. We have done this work by attending division meetings, visiting classrooms, and joining instructional leadership team sessions.
During this process, we discovered that our school program cannot be everything to everyone. So we reworked how we communicate our offerings and their intentionality as well as showing how students benefit. For example, we offer a challenging college-prep math program, and we do not accelerate students outside our existing math scope and sequence. If a prospective family is seeking acceleration that is not in our program, we communicate that their child they might be better suited to another school.
Application. The application process can seem overwhelming to families, especially given the many requirements that can seem like barriers. I often reframe this for families, explaining that these requirements are points of information that allow us to get to know their child. I ask them to rethink what they know about the process, explaining that admission committees are looking for reasons to say yes instead of reasons to say no.
At UPrep, we worked with stakeholders to look at everything from the questions we asked on the application, our student assessment process, and the admission test requirement to ensure they accurately reflect what we value and why. Families should know what our admission committee is looking for in a student and who we think is a good fit for our school. We’ve found these changes created an environment where families are comfortable applying to our school and are supported in completing the admission process. Our spring 2024 post-admission survey data shows that parents and guardians leave our process feeling that our school is authentic.
We’ve also started measuring parent and guardian net promoter score (NPS), which measures how prospective families view the school’s brand and how likely they are to recommend the school to other families. At UPrep, we found that tracking our NPS gave our admission team, our senior leadership team, and the board a clear measurement of prospective family satisfaction. For us, the result was a three-point gain in our NPS of newly enrolled families, demonstrating that we are doing a better job of enrolling families aligned with our program.
Decision. Recently, there seems to have been a consensus among admission directors to send wait pool decisions to most applicants who are not a fit. Perhaps in part because a denial for children can seem unkind or that a wait pool decision might reduce liability. However, I counter that a perpetual wait pool decision with no chance of admission is unkind. This tactic creates false hope among applicant families and reduces trust in the process. And I believe it’s the school’s responsibility to have a fair and equitable denial system.
At UPrep, we have worked to incorporate best practices into a well-formed rubric to evaluate candidates. We train our file readers how to assess in a way that reduces bias and supports compliance. We have developed a denial letter that balances empathy and clarity. We are confident that when we decide to deny a student, we have sufficient justification that they would not be served well by our program.
Therefore, denials are clear and, in the end, kind. Ultimately, denial decisions, as opposed to a perpetual wait pool, allow families more time to plan for their children's future. By pivoting to this way of communicating decisions, we have seen less parent and guardian angst over the spring and summer months. And since we are not managing anxious families over the summer, my team can use that time to be strategic and plan for the next admission season.
Reenrollment. Every year, during reenrollment, we ask families to reevaluate their decision to be in our communities. Parents and guardians have more educational options than ever for their children, so it’s important to ask how schools are partnering with re-enrolling families to communicate the importance of this process.
In the last five years, and at two schools, I have worked to set clear expectations about the reenrollment process: We do not grant extensions. We do not refund deposits. We do not waive tuition liability. We do not negotiate financial aid awards. At first, families responded with frustration and accused me of changing the rules. I responded clearly and directly that these policy changes supported fairness to other families and the faculty and staff who depend on tuition revenue to educate their children.
At UPrep, after having this policy in place for a year, more reenrollment agreements were received on time, requests for extensions diminished, families paid when they broke their contract, and net tuition revenue increased from financial aid families. We had these outcomes because we were clear with families about the school’s expectations, and families could trust that the policies were equally applied to everyone.
Serving Both Parents and Our Schools
When I started my position here at UPrep, I shared Brent Kaneft’s Independent School article “The Problem with Nice: Moving from Congenial to Collegial Cultures” with my team. I wanted them to understand that we need to build a culture where we can be clear and direct with each other, and we need to be prepared for conflict. As Kaneft puts it, “sometimes clarity causes conflict.”
Conflict is hard for admission professionals because we work in service of both parents and guardians and our schools. Many of us want every family to have a positive experience with us and, therefore, inadvertently create environments that are unclear and not consistent. As Kaneft notes, these comfortable or congenial cultures foster stress, frustration, distrust, and resentment. Partnering with prospective and current families has to be centered on being clear, even if this means there will be moments of conflict.
I am confident that our admission and enrollment processes at UPrep are fair, equitable, and consistent. This consistency in being clear allows parents and guardians to know what to expect and, therefore, reduces anxiety as they engage with my team. We know that parents and guardians are experiencing high levels of anxiety, and as the New York Times article reminds us, we cannot let parent and guardian anxiety become detrimental to our students.