By next summer, colleges have to prove it. Under the Department of Education's earnings accountability rule, undergraduate programs must show their graduates out-earn a typical high school diploma holder, or risk losing access to federal financial aid. David B. Johnson has done the math on which cohorts get caught first, and he is treating a compliance deadline as the forcing function his field needed.

Johnson is Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at Indiana University Bloomington, where he enrolled 10,127 freshmen last year. He led IU to become the first Big Ten institution to go test optional, then watched COVID erase the headline when everyone else followed. Six years of data later he can tell you exactly what happened to those students. He also runs a program that brings eighth graders to campus overnight, an idea his own admissions team came up with.

Highlights:

- Why he refuses the rabbit hole of despair, and what he does with a problem overnight instead

- The three-part reframe he brought back from a summer of conferences: storytelling, ninety-second self-shot video, and outcomes over experiences

- The three questions he wants every recent alum to answer on camera

- What the new earnings rule means for programs that fall below the line, and which cohort is first

- IU Bound: eighth graders on campus overnight, funded by ATI, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Balfour

- What six years of test optional data actually shows about retention and graduation

- Where he lands on the faculty-versus-access fight over academic preparedness

- Why retention analytics moved into enrollment management while first-year experience moved out

- Orientation shoppers: 20% at the pandemic peak, 13% this cycle

- The hard feedback at Alabama that changed his trajectory, and what his boss actually said

Subscribe to The VineDown for candid conversations on enrollment, retention, and student success. Watch on YouTube, or follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Connect with David B. Johnson on LinkedIn.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:40 Welcome to The VineDown

02:15 What wakes him up instead of what keeps him up

06:01 The belief that higher education changes lives

07:41 The three-part reframe from a summer of conferences

08:26 Ninety seconds, filmed by the student

08:52 Outcomes over experiences, and the three questions

12:32 The earnings accountability rule and what it demands

13:35 Which cohort gets caught first

14:55 Whether career services belongs in enrollment

17:03 IU Bound, and getting in front of eighth graders

18:13 Middle schoolers on campus overnight

20:26 Whether admissions staff resent working with eighth graders

23:00 The faculty versus access fight over preparedness

26:15 Six years of test optional data

29:41 Where technology stops and human eyes take over

30:56 What belongs in the enrollment org chart

32:44 Retention is nobody's job until it's somebody's job

33:55 Orientation shoppers, 20% to 13%

37:45 The hard feedback at Alabama that changed his trajectory

Emily has spent years on this show saying out loud that faculty are the blockers: slow, allergic to innovation, standing in the way of anything operational. This week the other side sent a representative.

Jonathan Teubner has taught and researched on three continents (Virginia, Melbourne, fellowships in Paris and Berlin, now Harvard) and has never once sat in an admissions office. He's also co-founder and CEO of FilterLabs.AI, which means he has hired the graduates this system produces and spends his working life finding real signal underneath official narratives. He opens by calling himself an emissary from the enemy. Then he makes an argument Emily didn't see coming: the hostility she keeps running into is downstream of a recruiting war faculty never agreed to fight.

What follows is the conversation the two halves of a university almost never have out loud.

In this episode:

- Why faculty describe themselves as "pure victims" of undergraduate admissions, and the escapism hiding inside that claim

- What Jonathan sees in a Harvard classroom that no application file shows: students who optimized their way in and can't say what they love

- His "outlandish prophecy" about which institutions are still standing in 20 years, and which ones accelerate their own extinction

- Why the best hires at his AI company were history and art majors, not the people who majored in the skill

- What every other country never built, and why "3% from the state" made him question the word public

- The thought experiment he'd hand every enrollment leader: what if you only found 500 students this year?

- His magic wand answer, from a man who sells technology for a living: take the devices out

Subscribe to The VineDown for conversations that actually go there on enrollment, admissions, and where higher ed is heading.

New episodes on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

More from Jonathan at filterlabs.ai.

Most students who leave college don't fail out. They get worn down, routed through ten offices, chasing five signatures, navigating a financial aid maze a parent once called "harder than getting a bank loan." Brian Reed's uncomfortable claim: that friction isn't an accident. It's designed.

Reed is Associate Vice President for Student Success at the University of Montana and a first-generation kid from an east Kentucky coal-mining town who arrived at college terrified he'd flunk out, told only to "don't quit." 20 years later he argues that grit was never supposed to be the plan. Institutions should be built so students don't need it. In this conversation with Emily, he makes the case for treating students like the consumers they are, disaggregating data until the failures are undeniable, and redesigning higher ed around the students it was never meant to serve.

Highlights:

- How Montana saved half a million dollars by redesigning one work-study form

- Why Brian tells his team to "stop being gatherers" and become hunters

- The "four flavors of Deb" framework for getting staff to change how they work

- Why he calls the career fair (and the campus tour) dead

- How he makes career readiness "inescapable" across gen-ed courses

- The "design for the margins" method he borrows from human-centered design

- What he'd tear down first with $10 million (and why he insists he doesn't need it)

Subscribe to The VineDown for candid conversations on enrollment, retention, and student success. Watch on YouTube, or follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Connect with Brian Reed on LinkedIn.

Most students who leave college don't fail out. They get worn down, routed through ten offices, chasing five signatures, navigating a financial aid maze a parent once called "harder than getting a bank loan." Brian Reed's uncomfortable claim: that friction isn't an accident. It's designed.

Reed is Associate Vice President for Student Success at the University of Montana and a first-generation kid from an east Kentucky coal-mining town who arrived at college terrified he'd flunk out, told only to "don't quit." 20 years later he argues that grit was never supposed to be the plan. Institutions should be built so students don't need it. In this conversation with Emily, he makes the case for treating students like the consumers they are, disaggregating data until the failures are undeniable, and redesigning higher ed around the students it was never meant to serve.

Highlights:

- How Montana saved half a million dollars by redesigning one work-study form

- Why Brian tells his team to "stop being gatherers" and become hunters

- The "four flavors of Deb" framework for getting staff to change how they work

- Why he calls the career fair (and the campus tour) dead

- How he makes career readiness "inescapable" across gen-ed courses

- The "design for the margins" method he borrows from human-centered design

- What he'd tear down first with $10 million (and why he insists he doesn't need it)

Subscribe to The VineDown for candid conversations on enrollment, retention, and student success. Watch on YouTube, or follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Connect with Brian Reed on LinkedIn.

Higher ed has never been this scared. Fewer students, political pressure, budgets under a microscope, and Reggie Hill thinks it's the most exciting moment of his career.

For the first-ever live episode of The VineDown, Emily Smith brings back her favorite repeat guest in front of a room full of enrollment professionals. Reggie is Vice Chancellor for Strategic Enrollment Management at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and he's spent three years breaking a regional public "down to the studs": cutting vendor contracts that don't grow enrollment, rebuilding the playbook from scratch, and using an AI agent with live access to his CRM data to compress a week of analysis into ten minutes.

This one is candid, occasionally profane, and packed with the kind of things enrollment leaders usually only say off the record.

In this episode:

- Why the "scariest chapter" in enrollment management is forcing the reinvention higher ed has dodged for 15 years

- The $10 million question: the college Reggie would build, with the largest makerspace in the country and zero tenured faculty

- How Apple, NASA, and Disney helped design a major at Florida Poly, with a promise to hire the students

- The $100,000 vendor test: "If it hasn't grown the institution, it's gone"

- Reggie's 5AM data ritual and why he manages his outbox, not his inbox

- How AI agents cut turnover by giving admissions staff back the human connection

- The 30-year-old "one-stop shop" promise AI might finally deliver

Subscribe to The VineDown for more uncensored conversations from inside higher ed. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Learn more at collegevine.com

Most enrollment leaders own the front door. Rachel Beech owns the whole house (admissions, financial aid, the registrar, the career center, student success) "from first postcard to first job offer." From that rare full-funnel seat, she argues something the industry rarely says out loud: the best thing an enrollment team can do is get comfortable saying no.

Rachel is the VP of Enrollment Management & Student Success at Miami University, and she's led enrollment across wildly different institutions, from a first-gen Hispanic-Serving Institution to one of the most selective publics in Ohio. In this conversation with Emily Smith, she makes the case that authentic counseling is what keeps a pipeline healthy, and that the families who choose somewhere else still send thank-you notes for exactly that reason.

Highlights from the conversation:

- Why Rachel coaches some students toward other schools and how that protects Miami's brand

- The "yeses firm, noes squishy" rule and how it changes who you hire and trust

- The icky family conversation about money and odds that nobody wants to start

- How admissions got gamified, and what the 90s did better

- What changes when one leader owns admission all the way through job placement

- How a "yes culture" (down to the registrar) built one of Ohio's best four-year grad rates

- Why AI is quietly cutting enrollment teams out of the process

New episodes of The VineDown drop regularly. Subscribe on YouTube and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you never miss one.

Everyone in higher ed agrees the ground is shifting. The disagreement is about what to do while it's moving. Dr. Ramon Blakley, who leads admissions at one of the most-watched public institutions in the country, has a deceptively simple answer: stay in your lane, keep moving, and check on your people before they break.

As Assistant Vice Provost for Admissions at UT Austin, Blakley sits behind what he calls a loud institutional megaphone: decisions made in his office ripple across Texas and nationwide. In this conversation with host Emily Smith, he trades the inspiration-poster version of leadership for the specific practices that keep a public admissions office functional when everything around it isn't. He says the quiet part out loud about the May 1st "finish line," makes the case for why college isn't the right path for every student, and explains the difference between being data-driven and data-informed.

It's a credible, grounded look at leading under pressure… useful whether you run a team, advise students, or are a family trying to understand how admissions decisions actually get made.

In this episode:

- Why "mission drift is real" and the one rule Blakley uses to avoid it

- The May 1st truth most colleges won't admit to families

- How he spots burnout on his team long before someone says "I'm done"

- The hidden, exhausting job every manager does and never names

- Why he insists leaders are built, not born and where they're actually made

- Data-driven vs. data-informed, and why the difference matters for students

- His case that college isn't the only valid pathway from someone who sells four years of it

If conversations like this help you make sense of college and leadership, follow The VineDown so you don't miss the next one. Watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Jenny Sawyer has been telling families no for over a decade. She'll open ChatGPT mid-call, run the math in real time, and tell a student their second-choice school is a better financial decision than the one she runs admissions for. Then she'll wish them well.

She's the Associate Provost and Executive Director of Admissions at the University of Louisville, a public university in a poor state that has just posted five consecutive years of enrollment records, including a class of 3,373 students that broke the all-time record the year it was set. Jenny built that record by starting her career in student affairs, not recruitment, and never fully leaving. In her view, retention work starts the moment you pick up the phone.

In this episode:

- How Jenny's background in student affairs rewired the way she thinks about recruitment and why she tells her staff to think of themselves as enrollment counselors, not admissions counselors

- The live call where she opened ChatGPT, ran the numbers, and talked a student out of taking $25,000 in freshman-year loans at her own school

- Why she thinks media coverage of student debt is actively scaring away the students who would actually benefit from smart borrowing

- What the "missing middle" looks like (families who don't qualify for Pell but still can't cover the gap) and what UofL is doing about it

- How UofL grew transfer enrollment 22% by getting ahead of the credit evaluation problem with AI

- Her honest read on what the demographic cliff means for schools that won't adapt and why she thinks it's the most exciting time in higher ed to be paying attentionSubscribe to The VineDown on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Emily Smith on LinkedIn for more conversations at the intersection of higher ed and what's actually working.

Gary Clark has 175,000 applications landing on his desk every year as Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at UCLA. He's also one of the loudest voices in higher ed arguing that selectivity is not a proxy for quality.

In this episode of The VineDown, Emily sits down with Gary to pull apart the pressure cooker that college admissions has become, why the system is producing "college farmers" instead of curious humans, and what he'd actually tell his own kid about where to go to school.

What you'll take away:

- Why the head of UCLA admissions thinks prestige is overrated, and why he's one of the few people with the standing to say it out loud

- What a "college farmer" is, why admissions offices can spot them immediately, and what Gary would tell students and parents who are building a resume instead of a life

- How UCLA actually reads 175,000 applications

- The strongest case for community college you'll hear from anyone inside a flagship university, including why 93% of UCLA's transfer students came through that path

- What Gary tells incoming students about surviving their first year at a place the size of UCLA and why feeling lost doesn't mean you don't belong

- The hard truth Gary is sitting with about the next generation of enrollment leaders, and what he hopes they hear from people like him

- Where AI fits (and doesn't fit) in the future of admissions and the parts of the process Gary says will stay human

Subscribe to The VineDown for weekly conversations at the intersection of higher education, enrollment strategy, and the humans navigating both. New episodes every week.

Gary Clark has 175,000 applications landing on his desk every year as Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at UCLA. He's also one of the loudest voices in higher ed arguing that selectivity is not a proxy for quality.

In this episode of The VineDown, Emily sits down with Gary to pull apart the pressure cooker that college admissions has become, why the system is producing "college farmers" instead of curious humans, and what he'd actually tell his own kid about where to go to school.

What you'll take away:

- Why the head of UCLA admissions thinks prestige is overrated, and why he's one of the few people with the standing to say it out loud

- What a "college farmer" is, why admissions offices can spot them immediately, and what Gary would tell students and parents who are building a resume instead of a life

- How UCLA actually reads 175,000 applications

- The strongest case for community college you'll hear from anyone inside a flagship university, including why 93% of UCLA's transfer students came through that path

- What Gary tells incoming students about surviving their first year at a place the size of UCLA and why feeling lost doesn't mean you don't belong

- The hard truth Gary is sitting with about the next generation of enrollment leaders, and what he hopes they hear from people like him

- Where AI fits (and doesn't fit) in the future of admissions and the parts of the process Gary says will stay humanSubscribe to The VineDown for weekly conversations at the intersection of higher education, enrollment strategy, and the humans navigating both. New episodes every week.