Heather Hoerle
Each month RG175 does a "deeper dive" to get to know one of our Independent School colleagues. This month we are spotlighting Heather Hoerle, Executive Director & CEO of The Enrollment Management Association. Heather became EMA’s executive director in 2011. Working with the leadership team, she sets a clear direction for the staff, espousing gold-standard service to members and pushing for the EMA to continuously innovate. Externally, in her work with schools and the wider education sector, she aims to advance the profession of enrollment management and empower individual professionals.
Since joining EMA, she has led them through several steps to modernize the organization itself and professionalize the admission and enrollment industry. In that time, EMA has restructured their management, rebuilt their IT infrastructure, enhanced their SSAT test development processes and procedures, launched an elementary level SSAT, grown the use of the Standard Application Online to bring more families to the independent school community, and published groundbreaking research in the field of enrollment management.
A thought leader in enrollment management, Heather commissioned EMA’s first special committee on the future of assessment and personally led the charge to reposition the work of enrollment management as both strategic and foundational to institutional success.
To find out more about Heather Hoerle, as well EMA, please check out their website.
What do you enjoy most about your job as it pertains to Independent Schools?
I equally enjoy the two key aspects of my work which have always been a part of this particular association. First, we serve over 80,000 families a year and it’s an honor to help those families and students on their way to an exceptional transformative education. As someone who benefited years ago from going to boarding school (thanks to financial aid), I believe deeply in the power of education to transform your life and therefore I am proud to be in an association that plays a role in that journey for young people, on their way to fully realizing their potential in our schools
Equally, I am proud to serve over 1,300 member schools and their enrollment leaders with programs, services and advocacy via our association work. EMA changed its name in 2016 and we’ve seen nothing but growth as a result—even inside of the pandemic year, we’ve outpaced new membership goals again. I am happy that a spotlight has been put on the work of enrollment as it is one of the key business drivers for schools, and heads and boards need to appreciate the significance of building enrollment success and connecting the dots between admission of students and their experience in our schools. EMA has helped to tell that story and help school leaders better understand their roles in building that success.
What are some of your greatest achievements?
Well, personally, I am most proud to have a great daughter who seeks to do good deeds in the world. She’s been blessed with a wonderful Quaker education (like me) and this has helped to shape her into a thoughtful, global citizen. She’s headed to grad school next fall but I believe her generation may be “the greatest” yet in this country—based on what I see her high school classmates committing themselves to in their early careers … service, environmental issues, international relations, justice work, social work. These young people want to make the world a better place and it’s heartening to see their dedication.
Professionally I am proud to lead a growing association which continues to push forward with innovations, small and large. We’ve launched a new “character” assessment (more on that later) and we’ve built an engaged membership that is connecting regularly with EMA to further goals and our industry. The team at EMA is so hard working and professionally committed, and together with a rock-star board (also unwilling to stand still), we’ve got GREAT people pushing forward in myriad ways.
I was asked recently what my greatest strengths were as a leader. I think I am good at building smart, successful teams. It made me think back to high school when I discovered theater directing… I didn’t want to be on the stage but I did want to select the actors, direct the performance. It’s funny to me that so many years later, that is essentially what I do as the Executive Director of EMA. If I get the hiring and alignment right, then everything else takes care of itself. Hire smart people, build an inclusive culture and stand back!
How has Covid-19 affected your job/business and how have you adapted?
EMA has been pretty dramatically affected by COVID-19. Every year we normally serve over 65,000 students with admission testing; this year, we’ll just crest to 50,000. Even with EMA’s SSAT At Home offering serving about 27,000 students (SSAT At Home had numerous tech challenges as we launched which created many headaches for parents, students and schools alike—never mind the EMA staff), we saw decreases in testing due to the pandemic and the test-optional movement in many schools this year.
Yet- we also saw a 200% increase in our Character Skills Snapshot. It’s a tool that allows students to self-report on 7 different character traits deemed important for success in our schools!
While EMA is lucky to be financially sound, we’ve been grateful for both strong investments and PPP loans to help us get through a different year. We’ve also had to adapt our working environment and all staff have worked remotely for over a year. It’s proven to us that we CAN get our work done in a remote environment—even 50 staff strong!
Of course all of our PD programming and training has gone online. We launched a virtual conference last September which was our largest yet—almost 3,500 attendees! And as the year has rolled forward, we’ve been adaptive in pulling programs together to meet the unique challenges of these times. Just last month, we conducted a one day symposium on student retention which has been a hot topic for school leaders this year. We’ve also been helping schools build consistent processes which are free from bias, in a year where fewer data points were inside of each student’s application.
I believe that COVID-19 has made our community more adaptive and it’s also taught EMA that we should invest in additional enrollment services in the coming years and deepen our work with the membership as the level of connection this year has been off the charts—driven by the need to learn together around the world about enrollment management and admission in a virtual world.
Finally, a majority of our schools reported either meeting or exceeding their enrollment goals last Sept, as families made decisions last minute to send their children to private schools. I believe that trend and the long season are here to stay for a while. As we get more data about the loss of learning inside of this pandemic year, I believe independent schools are uniquely qualified to meet families and serve students who may need greater support to get back on track. I am excited by the innovations which have happened over the last year—often on the fly—but which can be now stabilized to support students who need our services and transformational education.
What is your connection to RG175?
I have long admired the talent at RG175 and knew Roger Bass via his work on the NAIS board where I was on staff for 22 years. The late Linda Gibbs was a mentor for me when she worked at NAIS and I feel the same way about two of your consultants right now—Doreen Oleson (also known through the NAIS board connection) and Jim Scott (who was the past board chair at then-SSATB when I first moved to EMA… he was exceedingly kind and gracious to a newbie.) On top of those connections, I am lucky to know John Farber, your managing director, who served in admission when I did (the 1980s and 1990s) and blessed to work with Tom Olverson who is incredibly wise and a member of EMA’s Head’s Institute faculty. (Tom has incredible experience in leading three schools where enrollment turned around thanks to his leadership.)
Anything you would like to add?
I am known to be long-winded, so I am sure word count has already been exceeded for this article. One last idea to share with your readers—if there is space—is this: the pandemic has created unique opportunity for independent schools to lead. So what are we going to do with that opportunity?
In the last year, I’ve watched as families have come to better understand the value of our institutions and their important contribution to K-12 education. We now have so many roiling issues in education and I believe in the immense opportunity before independent schools to work together to address some of these challenges: how might we help the 3 million students who never went to school last year? What is our community’s public purpose and is it time to squarely speak to the importance of why independent schools exist and what they contribute to society? How might we work as a community of nearly 2,000 schools to make a difference in the lives of children who need us like they have never before? EMA stands ready to be inside of this conversation with you and to that end, I welcome any creative thoughts (hhoerle@enrollment.org).