We recently shared how switching between unrelated tasks all day drains your team’s time and about which manual tasks are safe to hand off. Somewhere underneath all of that is a more simple question: what do admissions team members wish they had more time for? We posed the question to admissions leaders at independent schools across the country, and here’s what we learned.
Making authentic connections with families
Veracross allows us to be specific to a family and also allows us to mass communicate. It’s about supporting our colleagues, teachers, program directors, board members, and our head of school so that when they reach out the family feels seen and special.
Almost every answer to this question had one theme in common: Admissions team members want more time to spend with families. For some, it was the long, unhurried conversation with a family that’s genuinely torn between two schools. For others, it was simply having enough time to call, rather than email, the applicant who’s gone quiet since their tour.
This isn’t surprising once you consider why most people go into admissions in the first place. It’s rarely because they love a well-organized spreadsheet. It’s because they like people, and they’re good at helping a nervous family feel confident about a decision. When extra hours become available their first thought is about their prospects.
Creating accurate, useful reports
I like how I can subtotal headers to get quick answers when I’m in the middle of a board meeting and they’re asking for information about admissions. I can run a quick query and have those numbers available, while still having access to the deep dive into the data.
Reports. Data entry. Sorting through an inbox before anyone can decide who to call first. Hearing it echoed directly from admissions leaders themselves confirms it’s not an abstract productivity theory. It’s a lived, daily frustration that takes too much time.
What’s worth noting is that no one we heard from said these tasks don’t matter. Reports genuinely inform decisions. It matters that the numbers are correct when you’re presenting to the board. The complaint isn’t that the work exists. It’s that it is time-consuming, difficult to get right, and carries an urgency that can distract from more interpersonal work.
Why starting the week off right is so important
Admissions teams see efficiency as a means to making an impact. Nobody described clearing a backlog as an intrinsic motivator. Instead, they described wanting time for strategic, impactful work: a meeting with the applicant who needed one more conversation before deciding, time for the family that could have used a second follow-up call, a day to dig in to the strategic project that’s been pushed to “next month” for the better part of a year.
It’s not that the reports don’t get built or the reminders don’t get sent. It’s that the additional focused time that could have made a difference doesn’t happen.
A case study on how things can be different
The American School in London’s (ASL) admissions team used to spend an entire week each fall just packing envelopes for re-enrollment. Read how ASL rebuilt their admissions process around less manual work and more time for families and imagine what your team’s Monday could look like with those hours back.
