Hello and welcome to Higher thinking on Higher Ed. I am Charlyn Carrington of Content Strong Communications, the fractional communications and marketing leader of choice for post secondary non profits and lean teams. 12:05 Sharlyn, Content Strong Today I am super excited to continue diving into the trends and challenges encountered by communications and marketing leaders in higher ed. And I am honored to welcome Jen Brock to the table today. Jen, it took us so long to get here, but I'm so happy we did it. Jen is the VP of Marketing and Communications at Mount Holyoke College where she leads strategic equity driven storytelling for a trailblazing institution with experience spanning K to 12 and higher ed and agency work. She's a passionate advocate for inclusive education and mission focused leadership. Big thank you again so much for bringing everything, your expertise, your insights, your energy, everything to this conversation. How are you doing? 12:42 Jen Brock I'm great. It's great to be here. Charlotte, thanks so much for making time for me and thanks for talking about this. I feel like a lot of times higher ed and Markham kind of gets pushed to the side. We're sort of the stepchild in some instances. And I love that you're kind of putting a focus on attention, on it because we have so much to share and we really lead our institutions often behind the scenes, by choice. There's a reason my LinkedIn profile calls me the wizard behind the curtain. I think a lot of us kind of live in the wings and the shadows, but the work we do is so exciting and so impactful. I love that you're putting a spotlight on it. 13:10 Sharlyn, Content Strong Oh, thank you for saying that. I'm happy. You know what, it's been really great because so many people are exactly, as you said, really interested in talking about it because we don't get the opportunity. 13:18 Jen Brock To do that at all. 13:22 Sharlyn, Content Strong So I just, I'd like to start a little bit with context. Right. Like, you know, I did mention that just now a little bit in your bio. You've led communications across, you know, K to 12 higher ed, non profit sectors. How has that kind of journey shaped your approach to storytelling and strategy at Mount Holyoke? 13:38 Jen Brock Sure. So I think, you know, if you look at my resume, if you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see there's a very strong thread. Right. I, I've never worked corporate. I did a four month stint in corporate health care. Not my people, not where I belonged. Realize it really quickly. Also, you know, I love education. I can never be a teacher. So I joke that I don't love kids. I love, I love what kids get from school. Right. And I think, you know, I think education's kind of the great superpower for everyone. Right. Like you. You bring in a class of 500, 5,000, 50,000 and everyone starts from go. I love what it can do in our world. I love what it can do to individual people. And I think for me, you know, I had the. 14:20 Jen Brock I had the gift of being a stay at home mom for 10 years who consulted. So I was the one who was like at the zoo field trip. And then that night I was doing a comms plan for someone and I had really incredible clients who understood that the mom part came first, but the consultant part kind of kept my brain firing on all similars. Right. And so when you've been home with kids for 10 years and you choose to go back full time, that was a choice. I was lucky that I didn't have to go back full time. I wanted to. My husband actually flipped and he became a stay at home dad. 14:50 Sharlyn, Content Strong Oh, that's amazing. 14:51 Jen Brock He had missed out for 10 years. Right. But when you're a mom and you choose to go back, you're making a choice essentially to put your time somewhere else. And so every day for that first year or so, I would ask myself, was today worth leaving my kids? Right. Because it was a choice. And I knew I had chosen to do that. Right. And they were fine, they were great, they were thriving. That was the like, personal guilt of being like, I left them today. Was that worth it? And in education nonprofit, it was worth it because I was doing work that mattered. I was doing work that was worth it. I was doing work where I felt like, yes, like my kids were great. And now 15,000 other kids, we're going to be a little better, right? Corporate side, not so much. 15:28 Jen Brock I'm not someone who would ever sell coffee cups or hotels or cars. Right. I don't care enough about it. So education has let me kind of do work that was meaningful. I think the storytelling is different in education nonprofit, but I think what we're seeing on the corporate side now is that they're getting the influence from the education nonprofit side. Right. It's hard to sell things that no one cares about. And especially with all of the dissonance and chatter and conflicting views nowadays. Storytelling lets you show what that common thread is. And there's a part of humanity that goes through education and goes through non profits that I think you'll see in corporate brands grab onto because they're realizing people don't really care about the bottom line anymore. Right. It's the what's in it. For me, education has always gotten that. 16:13 Jen Brock It is an emotional brand. You spend a lot of money on it, but you decide with your gut and your heart. And I think for me Nonprofit and higher education. Any education comms gives you a chance to really talk about the people. And the people is where the work matters. Right. I think it's taking a story of, you know, a student who maybe had adversity on the flip side, had every advantage. But they come to a college, they come to a high school, they come to a K12 and there's sort of a blank slate and blank slate that, you know, that potential for what could be I think is where education comms really shine because were all there, right. Everyone started not knowing what they wanted to do, what they wanted to major in, what their job was going to be. 16:57 Jen Brock And for those who are lucky enough to have exposure education and it is luck. Right. It's not just a privilege, it's are your circumstances setting you up to have the right luck to be in those rooms, to be in those places? It can be life changing. I mean we know higher ed has social mobility outcomes. I think for us on the storytelling side it's how are you sharing those so that you're not just selling a college. Right. But you're really introducing someone to it and building a relationship. They may not ever. You can only go to one college. 17:27 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. 17:28 Jen Brock Right. So you can't go to all 15 you're interested in. But hopefully you're learning something from each one of those relationships and asking the hard questions like why is that college not serving you in this specific way? Right. Why are we letting some people have access to something that should be available for everyone? You know, I worked for a private college was with a very expensive price tag. We also give a significant amount of financial aid and scholarships. Our social mobility numbers are really strong. We have a huge amount of first gen students. So I think it's that the high price tag can still come with a really significant amount of good. That's not just for the people who can afford to write that really big check one time. 18:08 Sharlyn, Content Strong I think that's a huge. I think there are several huge insights in everything that you just shared. But the one thing that really speaks out to me as I think it's speaking out to everyone frankly across the sector is this really going back to that value piece of post secondary education like you talked about more than experience. You talked about really setting up your life and being able to create that environment and being able to tell that story right off the bat so they can recognize and see themselves and see their future before they make that choice. 18:34 Jen Brock Which it's not just four years. Right. For a long time we talked about college as a four year experience, it was the best experience of your life, right? It was all this. That's all true. I mean we want these students to come and to thrive and to grow and to have the best four years. But we also know, I mean, you know, specifically at Mount Holyoke, we're asking you to spend a lot of time and a lot of money, right? Our institution, we also know firsthand, especially from our first gen students, especially from international students, that these are life changing four year experiences because it's affecting their families, right? That first generation student being able to get a higher job, to go to a graduate program, to get an mba, that's not just one person having a chance to improve their circumstances. 19:18 Jen Brock It's trickling to their families. It's a halo effect. You're having younger siblings maybe who now think, oh, I can aspire to that too, right? So I'll give you our Posse program. We have students where it's one Posse Scholar. The two year younger sibling is also coming as a posse scholar because that first sibling did it, right? They kind of cracked that barrier and said, we're the first one, the family to go to college. And then the younger sibling at home is like, oh wait, like now I can go, right? And now parents realize, oh, this is an actual opportunity for us. It's not just close off the families across town who can afford it, right? Posse lets us do this. I think we're also seeing students who come in thinking, I'm not sure what I want to do. 19:58 Jen Brock I really didn't have the parent or the high school support to figure out what my major is going to be. Liberal arts colleges, let you say, try all these things. Try it on. Maybe you're a chemist, maybe you're a artist, maybe you're a humanitarian, maybe you're a social justice advocate. You try all this, you can try it for four years. There's no penalty, right? You're going to still graduate with a bachelor's degree, right? But you can shift and work versus taking a job when you're 18 and kind of sticking yourself into a path that this is what you're going to do. College, higher ed lets you say, what could you be, right? And there's this immense positive impact on your community because now you're changing things, you're changing your trajectory, but you're taking everyone with you, right? 20:44 Jen Brock And you see where these kids then go home and friends in the neighborhood, other families, people in church, real community center are like, oh, but that one Went to college. Right. It's different. There's still this sense of like, you're changing things. And I think it's a. You know, I hate the term, the breaking barriers. I don't think you really break them. Right. I think you make little cracks in them and you have to shove your way through. Right. They're still not broken. We still have a ton of problems. There are still barriers. There are still ceilings. There's still a huge lack of equity. But I think higher ed, especially when it's done in a really intentional, deliberate way. Right. 21:20 Jen Brock Starts to chip away at some of those institutional systemic boundaries and barriers where we're like, well, wait, what does happen if you send one kid who's first generation, one kid from marginalized community, one kid who's economically disadvantaged, and then they get back to a family, to a community that says, what do you mean you're doing so and so? Right. It never occurred to us that we could all do that. I think that's the beauty of storytelling, is that without the stories, without the Marcom, it's whatever assumptions you want to make. It's a bunch of rich kids going to a rich private school. Right. It's a bunch of inner city kids going to a school that's maybe underprivileged. No. You don't know. 21:58 Jen Brock The storytelling, the marketing, communications, all of that lets you kind of open that door and say, come on in and hear our stories. And maybe it's not that every single person comes to Mount Holyo. They can't. Right. We have a limited population. Right. We're selective. But there's so many colleges in this country that I think that storytelling lets you see pathways. And what I love about college is it really is a. Choose your own adventure. Right? Right. I'm the generation that was like, you pick A or B. Yeah. Neither one's bad. They go in different directions. And college higher ed lets you say, what if I pick a B or C? What's the C path? Where does that go? What if I combine these things? 22:36 Jen Brock You know, I think we have a lot of students who come in who really don't know where they want to be. But they're 18, they shouldn't. Right. Your. Your brain's not even fully done when you're 18, so why 18? You're saying, what exactly do you want to do? You go for four years and you figure it out, and you find a path. You find mentors, you find connections, you find peers. And then we launch you and we launch you into a host of incredible different things. Some could be wildly different from what you thought you were going to be doing when you were 18 years old. 23:02 Sharlyn, Content Strong What's interesting about that is, and I always talk about this is this idea that you go through higher ed to gain that ability to think and to gain that ability to try different things. And I say that because, you know, a career. Exactly what you said, career trajectories so long ago, where you. You take this one thing and you do it for 50 years. 23:22 Jen Brock Right. 23:22 Sharlyn, Content Strong We don't do that now. 23:23 Jen Brock We don't. 23:24 Sharlyn, Content Strong We sit here and we jump back and forth between industries, between sectors, between jobs, and we. We do different things. We try different things. You could start off as a restaurateer and end up as a teacher, and you can start off as one thing and end up with something else. And that, I think, is a. Is a. Is a big value point and selling point for higher education as a whole. And I think people. People do miss that part of it, and it really does come down to storytelling. So I love that you talked about that. And thinking about that, I think about, you know, broadly across the sector, some challenges that I think everyone is encountering. You know, Mount Holyoke is a historic institution. It's navigating all of this rapidly changing landscape that we're in. 24:01 Sharlyn, Content Strong What shifts are you seeing in how students and stakeholders are engaging with the college and how you're kind of adopting your communication strategies in response to that. You really did focus on storytelling. I wonder if there's anything else. 24:12 Jen Brock So I think the biggest change we're seeing in you, it won't surprise you at all. Right. Is that there. There isn't not just an enrollment cliff, there's a demographic cliff. Right. People had less children. 24:21 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. 24:21 Jen Brock I mean, that's. That's going to have a consequence. You can't have a nation that has less children and the same number of colleges and the same number of seats and be like, well, there's less of this whole pool. But you're all going to be fine. You'll see. We're not all fine. Right. There are colleges closing every single day. I think even the best and the brightest and the strongest are still having the conversation on, you know, what does it look like when there's just less. There's less for all of us to pick from. So I think that's someplace that, you know, we're all looking. I think it makes it that much more important to be able to tell your story in a really compelling way. But I think the difference is that as we Flip from Gen Z to Gen Alpha. 24:56 Jen Brock That personalization, it used to be like it was great if you could personalize it, right? It gave you, it was a bonus point. Now it's an expectation, it's standard, right? We know Gen Alpha relies heavily on their own families. They're the COVID the true Covid generation. They were home with their parents more than any other kids, except for traditionally homeschooled children. But for the longest time, traditionally homeschooled families were not the majority. Right now we have these kind of what I call like the hybrid homeschool families. They didn't homeschool by choice. They homeschooled because the pandemic told them you're home with your kids every single day. But that means that parent influence, that family influence is much stronger. That means you are, you're selling your marketing to two very different generations who have one common goal. Right. 25:38 Jen Brock I think we're also looking at what is the value to your point, right? We have expensive price tags. We're saying come to us for four years, give us your money, give us your time, give us your trust and we're going to make you better, stronger, whatever does at the out. That's a big promise to make, right? And so I think we are looking at, you know, what is that actual promise? Like what are we giving that student who comes to us for four years? I think for us it's the strength of research paired with liberal arts. Mount Holy has a unique designation of being a Carnegie designated school. Even though we are a solid liberal arts college. That's not common to be able to come in as a first year, a second year student and to do lab research with award winning faculty. 26:24 Jen Brock We're not massive, we're not an R1, we don't want to be an R1. But that means that we can have a 19 year old working alongside someone who's got NIH grants right now. Grants are kind of dicey right now. So we're also looking at, you know, what's that financial model? How do we keep allowing those experiences to happen even if the funding model shifts a little bit? I think the biggest challenge that we're all going to have is it's a very competitive world and it's not just competing with higher ed. Right? 26:51 Jen Brock You're competing with startups, you're competing with a gig economy, you're competing with AI both in terms of, you know, do our students actually need us the way they used to and are we preparing them for jobs that don't exist yet five years ago, if you came to a college five years ago to study comp Sci, computer engineering technology, it AI was this like, it was a buzz in very tight circles, right? No one could have thought that the jobs you were doing wouldn't even be around the way they are right now that you're competing with an LLM, right? That you're trying to have to prove why that person is still needed. We don't know what could be in five more years, right? It's moving at light speed. Speed. And so that's both exciting and it's also daunting, right? 27:37 Jen Brock Because you're asking someone to trust you for four years, that you're going to prepare them for what the world looks like in four years and who knows what it's going to look like. I think it makes it even more important for us to have that value. Go beyond what your degree is on paper, right? I mean it's, it really is about like, it's not what you think, it's how you think. Can you ask those critical questions, right? In a world of AI and social media and so much that you're like, is that real or not? Can you decipher how to navigate through that? Because we can't tell you what those jobs will necessarily look like and we can't tell you exactly what's going to happen in three, four, five years. But we know that your ability to try things out, right? 28:19 Jen Brock To know who you are, to know your own story, to know how you fit within this framework of a really complicated nation and world is going to be what keeps you successful, right? And so the most we can do is kind of say, let's give you all the knowledge. We can help you go to a place that when you launch in four years, whatever the landscape looks like, we'll figure out you're going to have that armor on you in a sense, right? You're going to be a little infallible in terms of going out and saying, I'm not afraid of it because I tried things for four years and failure is okay, right? Fast failure is okay. Being stagnant and waiting for someone to tell you what to do. That world doesn't exist. 28:58 Jen Brock I mean, to your point, you don't take a job anymore at 18 and do it for 35 years and graduate with the gold watch, right? You just don't. No one helps you along like that anymore. There's no pension plans. There's very few career people who go into a job and just Move up. I mean we all bounce, right? And we bounce in really erratic ways. And so I think having the ability to know that you are, you have the confidence, you can learn quickly enough. Right? Right. And adapt quickly enough. But you also understand how to use a mentor network, how to lean on colleagues, how to find the information you need. It's a very self serving world right now. So we're having to serve it to people, right. To young people. Almost not spoon fed necessarily, but in like bites, right. 29:47 Jen Brock You can't give. People don't read a 25 page view book anymore, right. They want text messages and they want personalized emails, want the content they want when they want it. So you have to be really agile but still make sure they realize like just because you, Charlyn asked for this one thing we know on this side, you also need the things you're not asking about. Right? Because that's the finding out, that's the exploring, that's discovering the beauty of higher ed comes from. You have those surprises. Like I came in as a chemistry major, did not ever want to take an art class, took one RCO class and like my mind was blown. Right. And it made me a stronger chemistry major but also a better, well rounded person because I had no idea I would find a love for Matisse. Right. 30:30 Jen Brock Like we hear that all. If you look at Mount Holyoke's double majors, it's a wacky list, right. It's like I'm going to major in medieval literature, but also nuclear physics and I'm going to do this and those are some of the best minds, right? Because it's kind of taking these two things that usually one, you're interested in studying and when you love individually smash them together. Right. And that's kind of where the magic happens. 30:52 Sharlyn, Content Strong I feel like that's probably that in itself is the skill that people will need to be able to take with them as they move forward. Because of exactly that, we don't know what the landscape is going to look like. We don't know what it's going to be. And you're going to need to be able to, to be agile in your jobs and figure out how this connects with this. Right, right. 31:09 Jen Brock And then tell someone about it. Right. And you have to, because if you're going to sell it, if you're going to make money off of it or be successful, you can't just live in your own head. You have to be able to talk about it. 31:17 Sharlyn, Content Strong And I think that's the biggest challenge across the board right now is that many of us, you know, when we left higher ed and many people who are leaving higher ed now, they feel like they weren't necessarily equipped with that. It's the soft skill, understanding how to present themselves with. Yeah, I took this class, but here's the transferable skill that I actually took away from that. And this is the way that I could apply it in different areas that actually serves you, an employer or a company or whatever. 31:40 Jen Brock I mean, we will often say, you know, take. If you take 15 grads in the same major. Yeah, right. Same high level of classes, exposure to great faculty, internships, all of that. And you line them up, right? You can point out the liberal arts grads and the women's college grads because they can talk about it. They don't just have the, like, technical, right, really high level, like book knowledge. They can explain to you why this one's better. They can argue with you. Right. In a really beautiful way. And they can talk to you about why it matters. And the why it matters, I think, is sometimes what's lost in higher ed, right? You hear a lot of like, oh, well, it's so expensive. What do you get from it? Just go get job exposure. I agree with all that. 32:25 Jen Brock That's why we put internships so much, is right. It's why higher ed needs these kids to be working, interning, externally, doing all those things. And the education gives them the ability to communicate about it. Because I think, you know, when went to Covid generation, when we all live on our phones and it's all texting and G chatting and all this, what you lose is, can I sit in front of you and actually tell you why my work matters? Because if I can't, we have a problem, big problem with expressing why you're spending your time doing something and why you're better than the person next to you. Right. And education is where you get the ability to be your own storyteller, but it's going to get lost. Yeah, right. 33:04 Jen Brock Because I think a lot of universities aren't putting emphasis on besides knowing what's in the book. Can that person even talk about it? Right. I can tell you A, B or C. B is the right answer. But can I tell you why B is the right answer and why it matters and why C is the wrong answer? If you lose that ability, we're no better than the robots running AI, right? You're spying back information. You're not actually synthesizing it and making it your own. And Spinning it in a way that lets someone else be like, oh, now I understand. You just shoot answer. Anyone can shoot answer back. Yeah. Put you and me against chat GPT and ask the same questions. It'll be faster. 33:39 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 33:40 Jen Brock But ask it why that's important, what the consequences. And that's when you and I would shine. 33:45 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. It's so true. I think that's the nail on the head and I feel like that's you. That insight in itself, but will for sure shapes this entire conversation, I think. Shapes so many other conversations coming out of this. I think about what you're doing, like more on a. I don't want to say tactical, but I'm going to say tactical. 34:02 Jen Brock More tactical. 34:03 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. What. What kind of initiatives and strategies have been particularly, I don't know, successful in your role as of late? And where have you kind of encountered opposing to that? Where have you kind of encountered those challenges? 34:15 Jen Brock Sure. You know, I think one of our biggest struggles, honestly, is not just with enrollment. Right. It's with our own current student population. Yeah, they are. It's. It's a difficult generation because they're inundated. Right. I mean, they. I can't. I don't know how they function. Like, it makes me tired thinking about what's hit on their brain every single day. Right. And keeping up with news alerts, social alerts. Right. Keeping snap runs going, figuring out what the latest thing is, getting on TikTok, knowing who else on TikTok, things like fizz that are anonymous and have a really high, you know, mental. Mental health risk to them. And then you add in that classes that are hard and challenging. Right. Social dynamics, family dynamics. And so I think keeping their attention. Right. 35:01 Jen Brock I joke a lot that, you know, when my kids were young, the thing with toddlers. Right. Is it's like seven food exposures before they realize that they like carrots, are not like carrots. Right. And I feel like with this college generation, it's seven exposures before they really hear what you're trying to tell them. 35:14 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. 35:14 Jen Brock Right. Because I can put it in an email, a newsletter, a TikTok, a digital sign, a banner, and I'll still hear that. I had no idea were having an ice cream social with the faculty. Right. And from what I said, I think it's annoying how many times we've told you, but their vacuums are different because I think they have. So there's so much that comes through and crosses them every day. Right. That what actually sticks, it will Blow your mind. Sometimes I'm like, that's what you remember from what we told you. And all these really important things we tried explaining just somehow got through the filters. All the filters, right? And so I think our biggest challenge is making sure that we come at it in multiple ways. Right. Which from where I sit, is really frustrating. 36:02 Jen Brock I should be able to tell you one time, it's important information. You should want to know it. But I've learned I can have that expectation. It's not true. Right? So being understanding about that generational difference and also the pressure they feel, right. I think, you know, I can sit in my 52 year old marcom leader self and go, it can't be that hard. Like you're a student. And then when you sit down with someone who's 19 or 20 and you say, show me what your inbox looks like in a day. Show me what your phone alerts look like in an hour. It's mind blowing. Right? And the amount of attention we expect them to have on 55 different things in an hour. And now some of that is self chosen, right? They want to have all those social alerts and news alerts coming in. 36:48 Jen Brock They want to know all the things all the time. But we've conditioned them to do it. Right. We gave them all phones when they were teenagers. We got them hooked on having all of this kind of instant knowledge and everything. We expected them to keep up with all of it. And so now, you know, they're in college and we're saying, hone in. Right? Figure out what you want to do. Figure out where your strengths are. And they're having the 52 messages still coming in, you know, which I think about a lot when I worry about them, when those guardrails do drop off. Right, Right. We're preparing them to be incredible citizens of the world. And higher ed's a safe place. Right. 37:27 Jen Brock We have really phenomenal, but also caring faculty who will have the conversation of, I get it, you didn't mean to not turn that in or you didn't mean to miss whatever. Right. Employers won't always be that kind. Right. The world won't always be that kind. And so I think it's a really fine line between how are you preparing them, but how are you still making sure they're ready? I think from a marketing communications perspective, it's that it changes so quickly. Quickly, Right. And the minute I get my staff like, okay, we're gonna jump on this. You still don't jump on it instantly. Right. You have to still market, test it, research it, make sure, get the systems in place. And by the time you do that, because it moves at light speed, sometimes we're behind. 38:10 Jen Brock And so then you're playing catch up, and no one likes playing catch up because then you're scrambling or you're making quicker decisions than you want to. You can't be strategic. Right. You're being truly reactive and tactical in that moment. But if you don't do it, then you're not in that space. Right. And we know from how Gen Z Agent Alpha work, if you're not in that space, you get one chance. 38:31 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 38:31 Jen Brock You're either there or you're not. Right. And if you're not, it's really hard to like, clamor your way back in. So, you know, for someone who likes to sit in the strategic. We're having to make some. Just. Okay, just go with gut. 38:43 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. 38:44 Jen Brock And you know, I, I'm lucky in that my staff runs the gamut from my age down to an almost recent grad. Right. So we do a lot of like, you know, I'm to make you the young person in the room, but I'm going to ask you, as someone who's much younger than me, is this the right place? Is this. And you know, and he'll be like, maybe not. Right. And then on my side of it is like the. Okay, you know, for the parents. 39:07 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 39:07 Jen Brock Like the people who are paying the bills in many cases. Is this going to land the right way? Right. And can we get it between both where we're not going to completely annoy one, but we're also not going to complete discount the other because they're both in the conversation. 39:22 Sharlyn, Content Strong And I, I think that's a huge point. Specifically in higher ed is this idea that your audiences are so vast. Right. Like you're dealing with people from different economic backgrounds, specific, different ages, who have different interests across the board. They want to take different subjects, they want to be different things. It is difficult because it's hard. 39:40 Jen Brock It's. 39:40 Sharlyn, Content Strong It's almost harder to target. 39:41 Jen Brock Right, right. And you don't always know. Right. I think with a lot of like, you know, retail and product marketing, someone who's going to buy coffee, you know, they're at least interested in coffee. 39:49 Sharlyn, Content Strong Coffee. 39:50 Jen Brock Right. With higher ed, they may not be fully interested in. They may be skeptical or testing it out or have no idea. They don't come to us with, you know, a dossier that says we can buy data. But when you're buying data you're making assumptions, right. That the person who checked that box when they took the psat, that's still a circumstance. Right. And first gen means different things to different people. Right. Everyone's backgrounds can sound similar as profiles, but in the details of it, right. Is it a single parent home because the parents are divorced or because one parent died or because one parent's incarcerated? Like, those are vast differences in how that person's going to come to us. We may not know that. Right. And now with SCOTUS rulings, we know even less. Right. Because we can't ask certain questions. So we need. 40:35 Jen Brock I mean, I think that, you know, the beauty of holistic admissions is that essay will tell us who are you really? Because we do want to get past the check boxes and we want to get past demographic profile, but it's hard to know what is that? What is this young person bringing to us, and what do they not get the chance to have? Right, Right. Because it's not fair otherwise. 40:55 Sharlyn, Content Strong Is that your biggest challenge? You'd say? Like, if. Would you say that's your biggest challenge right now? 41:00 Jen Brock I think our biggest challenge right now is what happens nationally and globally. Right. Like, we're. We're having to deal with what everyone's having to deal with, which is, you know, higher ed as a whole is under attack. Right, Right. We have a lot. We have 22% international students. We have kids coming from countries with travel bans. Right. And what does that look like for them? Right. For their families and what does it look like for us financially? Right. You know, we also have. We are a gender diverse women's college. Right. In the 70s, there were 200 women's colleges. There are currently 29. And we are one of them. And in a time when DEI is under attack, women's colleges, as our president said, that's a DEI initiative. Right. We were founded because women were not being educated. Right. So you fast forward to now. 41:49 Jen Brock We exist in a space where marginalized people still face a ton of challenges. Right. And we have chosen to be gender diverse. We have chosen to remain a women's college. And those two things put us in a really challenging situation sometimes. Right. A small percentage of high school students actually want a women's college. A small percent can pay for a liberal arts college that's private. So I think, you know, we. But through all of that, we know why we matter and we know why, especially now, it's so important to make sure that gender diverse people are seen to make sure women are educated and go into Leadership roles. Right. Like we've seen when you threaten democracy. Right. Education is what kind of keeps people going and moving forward. 42:36 Jen Brock I think, you know, having women's voices in the room, having people who are gender diverse in the room now is what's going to make us thrive. Right? Right. A time when there's so much being suppressed and. And oppressed. But I think it's hard. I think it's hard to look at a nation of very divided people and explain why you should. You should choose a small college in Western Massachusetts that has 2200 students, that is a women's college that is gender diverse, that maybe you haven't heard of, but we do phenomenal things because lots of colleges do phenomenal things. Right. I'm not trying to attract every student. I'm trying to make sure the ones who are going to work for us find us and we find them. But it is a sea of cacophony right now. Right. And I think it's. We try to. 43:25 Jen Brock I say we speak up for kind of who we are, and we know we are marketing a very expensive commodity. Right. Small liberal arts colleges. We're very expensive. We know we are. And we have to make it clear why, like, what that investment is, what that value is. With a lot of really strong opposition, questioning higher ed in general, questioning liberal arts in particular, and especially wondering why women's colleges still matter. 43:57 Sharlyn, Content Strong I think that is. I mean, it's a huge undertaking. It's a huge insight. And I. And I don't know, how are you. I would almost say, how are you navigating that? Like, what is the biggest thing that you've seen that it's helping you navigate? I want to get into goals, and I want to ask of you about metrics, but I want to know if. 44:12 Jen Brock That piece is like, I mean, so, you know, it's. I think we. We talk a lot about our history, not to hearken back to it. Right. To say we have been around since 1837 doing what wasn't supposed to be done. 44:25 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 44:25 Jen Brock Right. We have. I mean, our founder literally went door to door with a little bag collecting money because she was like, I refuse to accept that women can be educated. Right. So now we refuse to accept that women, that transgender people, that marginalized community, that students of color cannot be educated to the highest level possible because we know that they are going to do phenomenal things if someone believes in them and gives them a chance to have what somebody else has. Right. 44:52 Sharlyn, Content Strong And you're leveraging that in your storytelling, for sure. 44:54 Jen Brock Because if, I mean, we have a whole Forge and Descent page, right? Like were founded in the descent of this should not happen. Okay, well, we dare you tell us why. Right? And we're, I mean, if you've heard our president, like we are unapologetic. This is who we are and it's important and it matters. And especially if you're going to question higher education, right. Then don't question why we're important because we're telling you this is what the difference is. Like we know we have, I mean, it's everything we've talked about, right? You take a student who's first generation, you take a student who comes from not first generation, but who maybe isn't sure what they want to do later on. They have these wild different interests and you put them into a liberal arts college for four years, right? 45:34 Jen Brock And they graduate and they create the most incredible company afterwards. Right? Maker culture comes from liberal arts education. It comes from these two very disconnected things that someone shoves together and says, what if? Right. What if we did this instead? I think we know that making sure that students have a sense of kind of what those infinite possibilities are, right. We describe as an intellectually adventurous education. Right. You're not in these boxes where we say, okay, here's what you're going to do and then you're going to do this and you're going to do this. Right. Although it's guided, right. Kind of a wide open path. Right. And the wide open path is where you combat the narrow minded thinking. Right. 46:15 Jen Brock If you're gonna have someone who says, oh no, this is all that you can do, we're like, no, I'm sorry, that's like complete foolishness, right? Like, no one just defined by these little check boxes. You know, I think one of our challenges is how you say that, Right. It's taken us almost an hour for me to explain to you what we do. It's not as simple as saying we do X, Y and Z and that's it. Right? That's where the, it's messy and there's beauty in that messiness. There's also a complicated way of having to explain and market and share what we do. Because when you have storytelling, it takes a story to tell it, right? I don't always get time to tell someone a story. Right? Right. I might get a one line banner ad. I might get a one social media post. 46:59 Jen Brock I might get them hearing our name in an interview that someone does. Right. And so it's consistently and continually making sure that Mount Holyoke College isn't overlooked as like, oh, I had no idea what that was. Right. We are very well known in the Northeast. We're the first of seven sisters, one of the oldest women's college in the country. 47:20 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 47:21 Jen Brock And we are aware that's a shrinking body of people who know and care what that means. 47:26 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right, Right. So you talked about just now, you talked about some of the things you do. Like, on the tactical side, you talked about banner ads, and you talked about social posts, and you talked about really trying to tell that story and all kind of the different meth that you're using to do that. What. In terms of metrics, how are you tracking your success? How are you. Other than enrollment, I'm assuming, but, you know. 47:43 Jen Brock Sure. So, I mean, enrollment's a big one, right. You know, we look at inquiry numbers, we look at applications, we look at yield. For us, specifically in marcom, we look a lot in social engagement responses to, you know, when we. When we put out CTAs on emails and things. The two big audiences we track obviously are, you know, prospective students. Right. And then alums. So we have an alum community, about 40,000. Those are also our biggest donor community. We look at awareness, right? Responses to posts, how they engage with us, what they come to, questions they ask. I think it's also, you know, a market awareness in terms of, like, where. Where are our peers and are we in those same spaces? 48:25 Jen Brock Are we mentioned and share a voice to know, like, are we being talked about in the conversations we want to be talked about? Anecdotally, Right. It's things like, you know, who's. Who's calling us, who's calling us to get a quote, who's calling us to find out if we want to be involved in an event, are we in the right conversations? But, you know, for enrollment, it's hard. You know, we don't. There was a time when I would tell you that women's colleges competed with women's colleges, Right. When we would have gone, our. Our competitive market was very small. It was northeast, and it was, you know, schools like Smith and Wellesley and Barnard. Right. We compete with UC Berkeley. Yeah, Right. We complete with Texas. It is a national market now. And some of that is because, right. Women's colleges have this little niche. 49:10 Jen Brock And so most people are not. Most prospective students are not only applying to, like, five women's colleges, Right. They'll have one or two in the mix, but they're also considering a lot. But when you're competing with an R1 at 50,000 students in California, right, And you're a small liberal arts college of 2200 students, Massachusetts, there's no head to head. You're not going head to head. But we know that, we do. We know that we lose. When we lose students, we don't lose them to just the five other women's colleges around us. We lose places like UC Berkeley. And that's mind blowing, right? Because how would we ever. We don't even recruit from the same places. But digital marketing has totally leveled that landscape, right? Berkeley is no longer only recruiting in state. 49:54 Jen Brock Kids in Northern California, they don't have to, they can post one social post and it goes across the world. And so I think, you know, for us in terms of goals, like we're looking at where is our reach and where are we reaching? Because we can't reach everywhere, right? Where are those kind of untapped markets that may be, you know, this may be a place that we traditionally have not put a lot of effort into, which means we may not have seen a lot of results from. I think it's staying relevant. I think, you know, I, I think of enrollment marketing not as just about prospective students, but it really is brand marketing, right? Because if a 16 year old in Texas is like, oh, what was that school again? 50:31 Jen Brock We may not have targeted going after them, but if we're staying in the conversations enough that they see a random TikTok, we did that. We never expected that to be used for marketing, right? I'll meet them where they are, right? And I'll say like a, hey, here's one more tick tock. Here's another post on Insta, right? Oh, now we're going to geotarget you with an email because we're seeing a lot of interest from there. That's the beauty of what we now have, right? The analytics and metric side, before it would have been guesswork, but because it shifts so quickly, it's really hard to keep up with everywhere we need to put our attention because the risk you take is you dilute everything down, right? And you oversaturate in a really gross way where you're just trying to be everywhere. 51:16 Jen Brock You know, we're not for everyone and we're really okay with that. And I think it's trying to figure out who really needs to know about us. 51:24 Sharlyn, Content Strong It's also time consuming to be everywhere. It's expensive to be everywhere. 51:28 Jen Brock And you look, you lose and it's ineffective. It's Effective, like it's ineffective. We're not going to be, we're not gonna be the college that pulls from every state every single year. And that's okay. I think for us, I'm more, you know, to me it's a two part. Right. Like one part is, yes, enrollment is always key and who are we recruiting, who are we attracting? The other side of it is that we're a voice that's needed and that has nothing to do with enrollment. Right. That's the, that's the former women's college grad and the education advocate saying people aren't speaking up right now. And so we have like, we have a responsibility in quiet spaces to be really loud and to remind people of what you can lose. 52:12 Jen Brock When higher ed is threatened, when women's colleges are threatened, when liberal arts are threatened, that has nothing to do with enrollment targets. Right. That's like a personal mission for us to say this is not okay and we are not going to be quiet. We've never been quiet. And if no one else will say the uncomfortable and hard words, then we're going to. Because that's how we are founded. Right. So I think I look at things on. It's not even pr, it's sort of just being true to who we are. And if we're not true to who we are, we may as well close our doors. Right. Because it's a mission for a reason. Right. And I think we're not going to stop talking and saying and questioning and kind of, you know, proclaiming to the world that this matters. 52:57 Jen Brock Higher education matters, Women's colleges matter. Gender diversity matters. It makes everyone better. And if you're going to look for the future. Yeah. Education is the way to get there. 53:10 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. And I feel like that's where you'll see that connection between brand identity and people self identifying with your brand as something that's a part of themselves and why they choose to go to an institution like yours. I have one last question for you. It's a question I ask everyone and it's, you know, if I give you that magic wand right now and you could wave it across and remove that one big barrier that's standing in your way, what would that big barrier be and what would that mean for what would that transformational impact be? I guess for your work? 53:38 Jen Brock That's a good question. I think the barrier would be the national misunderstanding about what liberal arts means. Liberal has become a bad word in a lot of places. And the word liberal from a political standpoint and the world liberal from liberal arts could not be more different. Right. And I don't have the ability, the time or the money to educate our entire nation on why liberal arts is not a bad phrase. Right. If I could. You cannot show me a single parent who would not want that for their child. Right. The chance to learn and to be educated and to have the ability to take hard information and combine it and twist it and understand it and do incredible things with it and to, you know, reach into. 54:29 Jen Brock Into majors and classes and programs that they might not have any interest in, but see through lines in their thinking and in understanding how this all comes together and makes your brain better and makes those connections and exposes you to ways of learning and being able to write and talk. Right. And, and communicate who you are. Any parent would want that. 54:52 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. 54:53 Jen Brock And a lot of people hear liberal and the. The wall goes down. Right. And so if I could basically just do like a national primer on why liberal arts is not a bad word and why you actually want that for your kid even before college. Right. The best K12 programs take a liberal art to poach. They expose children to a number of things. It does not mean your family's ideology and values are threatened. It actually means they will strengthen because that child will understand how you live in a very complicated world and hold on to the values that you have. That to me, for higher education would be like a sweeping change if we could just get past the barrier with the name and not worry about that part. Doesn't really matter. Right. 55:40 Jen Brock Here's the potential gifts your child is going to have in this education. Most kids get it. Right. They understand. They don't want to just take chemistry. 55:49 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 55:49 Jen Brock Or just taking those classes. They understand what that means. Right. A lot of parents don't. And I think liberal has become convoluted with politics and it's hurting a lot of really incredible colleges because people are not willing to get past that barrier of a word. 56:06 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. I think that's a huge insight. I don't know. I have zero solutions for you on that one other than, yeah, we could solve that. 56:13 Jen Brock Right. We'd like, take over the world, so. 56:15 Sharlyn, Content Strong And we would take. We would take over the world for sure. We probably need some of us to take over the world. The world. I'll leave that there. Jen, thank you so much. I mean, huge insights I've gotten from this conversation. You shared your time, your experience, your perspective. It's been such a Thoughtful and generous conversation to our listeners, to our watchers. I hope the episode sparked ideas, affirmed your own experiences or, I don't know, helped you see a challenge in a new light. I guess if you're a communications or marketing leader or any leader in higher ed across the board and you want to contribute to this conversation, we'd love to hear from you. Because the truth is these conversations are more than just talk. They really are ideally a shared roadmap for the future of our field. So let's get to work. 56:52 Sharlyn, Content Strong Thank you so much, Jen. 56:53 Jen Brock Thanks for inviting me and it was great talking to you.