The VineDown with Emily Smith

How UCLA's Head of Admissions Processes 170,000 Applications a Year | Gary Clark

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.

The Transcript Is Broken: Kevin Mathes on Why Admissions Is Running on Outdated Infrastructure

Kevin Mathes is the Vice President of Enrollment Management and Dean of Admissions at Bucknell University. It’s a full circle moment as Bucknell is his alma mater, where he started as a first-year tour guide before spending nearly two decades working his way back to lead the whole operation. Under his leadership, Bucknell has achieved five consecutive years of record enrollment, including the largest incoming class in university history (1,040 students). He had the dream and made it come true. But what Kevin is fired up about right now is the plumbing underneath the admissions process that nobody talks about. In this episode, Emily and Kevin dig into the most overlooked infrastructure problem in college admissions: the high school transcript. No two transcripts look alike. No two schools format courses the same way. No two readers process one identically. And AI, while promising, has yet to fully solve the standardization and mapping challenge at the heart of it all. Kevin shares his vision for a centralized repository of high school data. They also get into: → The real cost of human inconsistency in transcript review and why two readers can come to completely different conclusions on the same document → Kevin's hands-on experience testing AI transcript processing tools, and his candid take on where the technology is genuinely useful → Why financial aid and admissions need to be treated as one integrated process, not two separate conversations → Bucknell's test-optional policy, now extended through 2027, and the unexpected data showing non-submitters engaging at higher rates in academic and residential life → What it really felt like to return as Dean to a place where half the staff knew you as a student worker And Emily tells the most chaotic story of her college career, which involves a perfect AP score, a dark lecture hall, a runaway slide projector, and a professor who eventually apologized. New episodes of The VineDown drop every other week. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

From Basketball Coach to NACAC President: Todd Rinehart on Recruiting With Your Soul Intact

Todd Rinehart arrived at the University of Denver in 1997 as an assistant men's basketball coach. When the coaching staff was fired in 2001, he made a pivot that changed everything: he stayed, moved into admissions, and discovered that recruiting athletes had quietly trained him for a career in recruiting students. Twenty-nine years later, he's the Vice Chancellor for Enrollment at DU, where he's helped grow the applicant pool from 5,000 to over 22,000, increased diversity from 13% to 30%+ students of color, and navigated DU through test-optional admissions, the Matriculate partnership for demonstrated financial need, and one of the toughest enrollment environments in a generation. Todd also served as President of NACAC (the National Association for College Admission Counseling), where he chaired the 29-person steering committee that spent 19 months rewriting the profession's code of ethics during a Department of Justice antitrust investigation. He's received three of the profession's top ethics awards for that work. In this episode of The VineDown, Emily and Todd go deep on: - the merit aid arms race and why private tuition is heading past $100K while schools discount 40-60% - the "overnight shift" of students gravitating toward public flagship universities (and why Todd doesn't think the demographic cliff is the real story) - what ethical admissions recruiting actually looks like when institutional survival is on the line - how to build an enrollment team based on character and work ethic (not admissions experience) - and how Denver and DU grew up together, and why location is a strategic asset most schools underuse.If you work in enrollment management, admissions, financial aid, or higher ed leadership, this is episode of The Vinedown is a must-listen.

Why Most Enrollment Leaders Are Optimizing for the Wrong Number with Dr. John G. Haller

In this episode of The VineDown, Emily Smith sits down with John Haller, one of the most consequential enrollment leaders of the past two decades. John served for 10 years as Vice President of Enrollment Management and New Student Strategies at the University of Miami, where he didn't just fill seats. He rewired the entire student lifecycle. Applications grew 30–80%+. Yield jumped 50%+. Freshman retention hit 94%, an institutional record. The six-year graduation rate reached 82%, another record. Average student debt dropped by $10,000. And the university shifted to meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need while growing enrollment. The thing everyone says you can't do Before all of that, John was a college football offensive coordinator. This conversation also has a rare personal dimension: both Emily and John trace their careers back to George Dane, widely considered the father of modern enrollment management. This is the first time they've compared notes on air. And it's worth every minute. In this episode of The VineDown with Emily Smith: - Why "access without completion is a waste of time," and what it actually costs institutions to ignore it - How shifting from merit-heavy aid to meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need drove stronger enrollment outcomes (the move everyone says backfires) - Why students don't care about your org chart, and what a one-stop shop actually does for retention - How John thinks about AI in admissions: where it belongs, where it absolutely doesn't, and what gets lost when institutions trust the score without understanding what it's measuring - The Academy of Emerging Enrollment Leaders (AEEL): what it is, who it's for, and what gap John built it to close - What diversified enrollment streams look like in practice as traditional-age student numbers shrink - John's unfiltered take on what enrollment leaders won't say out loud at most conferences - And what he'd change tomorrow, not a policy, but a mindset, about how higher education actually measures student successSubscribe to The VineDown for weekly conversations at the intersection of enrollment management, student success, and the future of higher education.

The CFO Playbook for Enrollment Leaders with Kevin Dyerly at University of Redlands

Most boards and CFOs track one number obsessively in enrollment conversations: The discount rate. But Kevin Dyerly argues that focusing on that number can lead institutions to make the wrong decisions. Kevin has a unique perspective on this problem. After eight years leading enrollment at the University of Redlands, he crossed the hall to become the university’s Chief Financial Officer in 2020. During his time in finance, he managed a pandemic-era deficit, helped oversee multiple institutional acquisitions, and saw firsthand how financial decisions actually get made at the cabinet level. Three years later, he returned to enrollment with a dramatically different perspective. In this episode of The VineDown, Kevin explains why the real number institutions should optimize is net tuition revenue, not discount rate and why the two metrics can sometimes move in opposite directions. Emily and Kevin explore: - The difference between optimizing discount rate vs net tuition revenue - Why reducing financial aid can actually decrease institutional revenue - How enrollment leaders can tell better data stories to cabinets and boards - The rise of mergers and acquisitions as survival strategies for private colleges - Why Kevin believes enrollment leaders need to think more like CFOs - And how stepping away from enrollment for three years helped him rediscover his motivation for the workFor anyone working in enrollment leadership, finance, or institutional strategy, this conversation offers a rare look at how the numbers (and the decisions behind them) actually work.