Keeping the Mission in Admission

Monica, what drew you to Hamilton, and, more importantly, what has kept you here?

Monica Inzer (MI): I grew up near Hamilton, over the hill in Sherrill — actually on Hamilton Avenue, believe it or not, with a dog named Alex! I was a first-generation college student, but my parents made it clear that I was going to college, and my mother and grandmother really wanted me to consider Hamilton. My mother often said, “The best college you will find is in our backyard.” But I believed it was too close to home. So, I went to Skidmore and was gone from the area for 20 years when the job at Hamilton came open. I said to my husband, “What do you think about being near family?” I was loving my job as an admission dean at a business school, and before that at an engineering school, but I wanted to get back to the liberal arts. He said, “I think we should go for it.” 

Never in a million years did I think I’d get the job, much less be here 20 years later. Also, I got to tell my mother she was right. Hamilton is the best college I could find. And this is the community that I have loved more than any other I’ve ever been part of. For me, it’s the people; it’s also a place that has strong and enduring values, and it’s committed to access, opportunity, and excellence. I will always be grateful to Joan Hinde Stewart for inviting me to join her team at Hamilton in her first year, and also to David Wippman, who helped me want to stay. During both of their presidencies, I always felt that Hamilton was a place where we could “keep the mission in admission.”

When you arrived, what did the average class look like and how is that different today? What factors and decisions have influenced those changes?

MI: We look different in many ways — so does the country, and the world, and many colleges. We’ve moved forward on so many fronts, as we should have, but Hamilton had already been doing a number of things right. While our admit rate was a lot higher and our application numbers were lower, and the student body wasn’t as academically strong or diverse as it is today, my predecessor was beginning to turn the ship around and head in the right direction. He planted a lot of seeds that I got to help water and nourish and make sure they grew into a garden.

Enhancing Hamilton’s position as a school of opportunity has been foundational to your tenure. What were the first steps you took to increase access?

MI: When I got here, we had a small number of merit scholarships that didn’t seem to be making much of a difference, and for the most part we were giving those out to students who did not need financial aid. At the same time, we didn’t have enough financial aid to admit all of the students we wanted to. Those two things were at odds, and the students who were getting merit because they didn’t need money looked very similar to those who were getting denied because they did. I thought, “Well, what if we shift this merit money over to our need-based financial aid pool?” We ran a lot of models and worked with the faculty and board to socialize the idea.

It was not without risk, and, in fact, many schools were doing more instead of less merit scholarship aid. The faculty were very worried about losing the strongest students in their classrooms, and I let them know we weren’t admitting many of the strongest students because they needed financial aid. They supported the idea, as did our board, and I remember thinking that if this didn’t work, someone else might be standing in front of them in less than five years.

It worked in more ways than one. Our yield went up, our admit rate went down, the quality of our students improved, and so did the diversity. But, it also put a spotlight on the reality of Hamilton’s financial aid picture. Our board asked, “What do you mean we don’t have enough money to admit the best students?” I explained that while we met 100 percent need, we were need-sensitive in our admission decisions [meaning when we ran out of money, we ran out of spots for candidates who needed it]. We pulled back the curtain on that for people, and they began asking more questions and studying what it would take to become need-blind. Who else does this? Is this the right thing for Hamilton? 

By now, many are aware of that day in 2009 when Hamilton became need-blind: At a planning meeting with senior staff and the board, five trustees each spontaneously committed $500,000 right there in the room to make it happen (with a sixth joining later for a total of $3 million). You’ve described it as “a transformative day and momentous decision for Hamilton.” When you look back on your career, will that stand out as your favorite moment?

MI: It was the single best day in my career. Our president and our board did something incredibly important for the future of Hamilton, and it was great to have a small role in that.

As leaders at the College, we usually move forward a little bit on a lot of things. It’s rare that you can make one thing more important than all the other important things.” Our board members did that. They made it happen by providing the bridge funding, and then our alumni, parents, and community really supported it with a campaign that followed.

As the cost of college continues to increase and we try to figure out how we’re going to support students with financial aid, I hope need-blind admission is sustainable. But more importantly, I hope that access and opportunity remain cornerstone values for Hamilton.

Monica, when you hired John in 2022, what excited you about the skills he would bring? What have you learned about him in the year-and-a-half since he arrived that you believe positions him to succeed?

MI: John is so smart and thoughtful, and he is a data scientist who embraces “data with a soul” — one of my favorite mantras. He is also funny and kind, and is someone I’m going to miss having down the hall from me every day. In many ways, I believe he is the future of our profession. And one of the reasons retiring feels good to me is because I’m passing the torch to John. While I’ve loved this community, I think renewal is good for me and also for Hamilton. John brings a new toolkit and the right balance of affection and ambition for Hamilton, and it is going to be fun for me to cheer for him and the team’s success from the sidelines.

John, what drew you to Hamilton from your work as vice dean and director of admission at the University of Pennsylvania?

John McLaughlin (JM): Hamilton was the first college that I ever visited. I was 8 and helped move my brother into North [Residence Hall] when he was coming here as a first-year student. Seeing and hearing all the sights and sounds from a college campus was really exciting and inspiring, even at a young age. For so many years I had admired Hamilton from afar and then had a chance encounter with Monica at an admission event while I was working at Penn. We struck up a conversation, and then a mentorship, a partnership, and a friendship.

A lot is going on in higher education today that’s making national headlines. How do you prepare for the unexpected?

MI: It’s true, the challenges are numerous. But we’ve always had challenges. In my 35-year career, the demographics have changed, we’ve had recessions, selective college admission has been scrutinized, college rankings have impacted our work, and standardized testing has been debated ad nauseum. There are all kinds of things that have been hard, but we are smart folks who figure out new and creative ways to respond. The great thing about admissions is you get to improve every year. You enroll fabulous students, you hit reset, and you start again. You learn from what you did last year, and you do more of what works well and less of what doesn’t. You change with the students.

I think Hamilton is positioned to navigate what seems to be a fasten-your-seatbelt time for enrollment leaders largely because we’ve hired John. He’s got the right combination of strategic thinking and good gut instinct, and I’m really excited to see what he does.

JM: Your points, Monica, are really well taken. Challenges are not new to us. We persist and grow and continue to reinvent ourselves and the work that we do. 

I think about some of the things that are on the horizon right now. The Supreme Court decision is something that we’ve been thinking a lot about over the course of the last year. Many conversations are taking place around standardized testing. And I know you and I have spoken a lot about shifting demographics and what that means for our population, our prospects, and how we need to be thinking not just of what is immediately in front of us, but what’s going to be in front of us three years, five years, 10 years from now, so that we can anticipate and respond to the challenges that are coming our way.

You mentioned last year’s Supreme Court ruling as a challenge, and obviously FAFSA was an issue this year. How does Hamilton address those and other challenging topics?

MI: We learned a lot during COVID. There was no rulebook for how to handle that. The College sent everyone home in the middle of March, and the Admission Office stayed a week longer to get decisions out. We had no idea if admitted students who couldn’t visit would choose us, but we said whatever is best in class, we’re going to be it. So, we brainstormed as a team. People got creative; we knew the College was counting on us to deliver students that next fall. Lots of campus partners rallied around us. Hamilton is great that way … innovative and entrepreneurial and risk-taking when we need to be, and at the same time careful and cautious when warranted. And the same would apply to some of the stuff we’re going through now. Hamilton will persevere.

JM: Agreed. And on the subject of the Supreme Court, this was not an unexpected outcome. Over the course of the last 20 years, I remember watching Gratz, Grutter, and both Fisher cases — at any one of those points it could have been the start of a shift. And, although the Court preserved the consideration of race in those cases, they were signaling change on the horizon. When this Court took the most recent case, I felt the shift was inevitable. So, we thought carefully around how we might prepare or respond. And we needed to wait to see what the judgment was going to look like so that we could respond in a way that comported with the new interpretation of the law. 

I feel like we have responded well. We continue to work toward recruiting and enrolling a diverse and talented class within the current interpretation of the law. In fact, it’s strengthened our resolve in a way to do this work despite the new challenges that we see. But, even now, we’re awaiting the final details on the class. We’ll pull back the curtain and begin to ask some of these questions that we’ve talked about already, what worked, what didn’t, what do we keep, what do we change, and learn from the experience of the past year to shape where we want to go in the future.

MI: We went into this year thinking the Supreme Court decision was going to be the most disruptive thing that would happen to us, and the FAFSA challenges seem to be eclipsing that at the moment. Due to the herculean efforts of our financial aid team, we’re navigating it all fairly well and are in better shape than most colleges. 

We know there are hundreds of thousands fewer students who did not apply for financial aid through the federal forms this year than a year ago. In many ways this is going to be a lost generation that I think we’re going to be talking about for a while, as a profession and in general. This is one of the reasons there is so much scrutiny for higher education right now; people are questioning the value of education, and the federal government made it harder to know if you would qualify for financial aid. This is an opportunity for Hamilton; we will endure this challenge, we have generous resources, and we will be a positive light and force for our students.

Higher education has been bracing for the enrollment or demographic cliff, the predicted declines in the number of traditional-age students that are going to college over the next five to 10 years. How will Hamilton be impacted by this, and how are we preparing for it?

JM: We’ve been talking about the demographic cliff for a long time, and I think we are beginning to see the impact of the demographic cliff across the sector at large. We know that there are some portions of the country where the number of high school graduates is going down. Those portions of the country include the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. And, historically we have drawn a number of students from those areas. At the same time, we are a national and international college. With that in mind, we are attentive not only to maintaining our backyard, but also cultivating and developing new markets and giving attention to the areas where we are seeing greater growth and greater interest, and perhaps places where Hamilton is not yet as well known.

MI: A lot of companies don’t know who their business or customers are going to be in the next couple of years because consumers change from year to year.  But our profession is a bit different. We know who our customers will be in seven years; they are in fifth grade. We know where they live in the country and what their demographics are. We have been preparing for them. 

Are there issues specific to liberal arts colleges like Hamilton that may be different from some of the challenges other higher education institutions face? How is Hamilton equipped to tackle those?

JM: The questions around the value proposition of higher education are more numerous and louder in recent years. This is especially true with regard to a liberal arts education and how that translates into outcomes, employment, and satisfaction. The connection between pre-professional education and outcomes is ostensibly clear. You learn this job skill to perform this job. But what happens when that job requires a different skill set in five years? 

The adaptability of thinking that we develop at Hamilton is just as important as the content. It’s how to think; it’s how to make connections between different ideas and areas. It’s how to look at a complex problem with the lens of a scientist, a social scientist, with perspective from the humanities and the arts, and bring all of those different lenses to bear. It’s how to communicate points clearly, persuasively, and effectively. I think that, collectively, liberal arts institutions can do better in terms of articulating the real translatable benefits of a liberal arts education. That’s something that we strive to do here, too.

I’ve often heard admission described as an art and a science, and I think that’s something Monica and I share, combining a lens of humanity with a lens of analysis to try and understand and make sense of what it is that we’re seeing and how we can learn from these data to do better work for the people that we interact with and for the community that we serve. Monica, you mentioned that you’re excited for Hamilton and excited for me. I’m excited myself, with thanks to you for the work that you’ve done over the 20 years to help position Hamilton to move forward. I’m excited to help lead the enrollment division into its next chapter.

MI: John and I have known each other for years. I’ve admired his work and saw him as a rising star in the profession, and it makes me feel really good knowing that the admission process and Hamilton’s commitment to access are in excellent hands. 

JM: I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Monica over the last year-and-a-half. I’ve tried to absorb as much information about the field, about Hamilton, Siuda House, and everything in that time. And I know that you’ll not be far away, which is reassuring. It goes to show that we’re always learning and not just improving our processes and the work that we do, but improving ourselves.

MI: I’m going to miss this, but I’m really excited for Hamilton, for the future, and for John. Someone told me you should always leave the party while it’s still fun. It’s the right time. 

Monica, there have been a variety of unexpected challenges throughout your career. In the spirit of the College’s motto, “Know Thyself,” which one(s) taught you the most about yourself and your work?

MI: My answer probably won't surprise you. I think the COVID-19 pandemic might be at the top of my list, for the reasons mentioned previously. We learned that we were more creative, innovative, and resilient than we had the right to imagine.

But the real heroes, in my mind, were the prospective students. They lost out on proms, in-school classes, sports, mentorship of teachers, graduations, and so much more. But they persisted, Zoom after Zoom, staying focused on their dreams, and undeterred by COVID. I believe in them and think they will be a generation of consequence.

John, what have you seen as Hamilton’s biggest victory that you played a big role in since arriving here in January 2023?

JM: A few things come to mind. I started mid-cycle while the application review process was underway. I could see immediately how Hamilton worked, and Hamilton works well. But, I could also identify opportunities for growth and change early in my time. I worked with my colleagues to improve our process, not reinventing the wheel but improving the wheel we have. My first goal was “do no harm.” Let’s make improvements while preserving the strongest parts of our approach that define Hamilton as a best-in-class admission office. 

And I know that part of Monica’s success over the last 20 years is the fact that she has not only built relationships, but built trust and confidence in her and, by extension, the enrollment division. That’s not something that happened by accident; that’s something that happened because Monica put the time into building those relationships to do good work and to demonstrate her good work to the people in the community. We talk about how much relationships matter and they do. I’ve really been trying to invest time into building those relationships. 

We are nearing completion for the class of 2028; that’s a milestone and a victory. Despite the challenges of the past year, the fact that we are going to be enrolling a phenomenal and talented and diverse class is a testament to the incredible work of the entire division. I'm proud to be a part of that success.

What’s next for you, Monica?

MI: Good question. I keep saying that I’m more worried about Monica without Hamilton than I am Hamilton without Monica. Maybe that is the point. I’m looking forward to travel adventures with my husband, and more quality time with our kids and parents. I might have one more chapter in me; after a bit of a break to catch my breath and see what I miss, I’m excited to see what challenges and opportunities emerge. But I’ll always bleed blue.

Originally published in Hamilton’s 2024 Impact Report, this interview includes additional excerpts not in the print version due to space limitations.