Almost nobody sets out to build a career in enrollment leadership. Amanda Slaughter says so plainly in this episode of TransferTalk, and that admission opens an unusually useful conversation about how enrollment leadership actually forms. She joined Fresno Pacific University in September 2025, after more than twenty years at Belhaven, Azusa Pacific, Biola, and Bethel. Host Jay Fedje asked her to trace the moments that turned a recruiter into an executive. What followed is a working theory worth borrowing.
What You’ll Find in This Article
- Why influence without authority is the first real test of an enrollment leader
- How the long payback period of recruitment changes what you optimize for
- The internal translation problem every VP of Enrollment Management faces
- Why transparency now outperforms polish with students, staff, and faculty
- What the mentorship gap in enrollment leadership still looks like
- The operational case for meeting adult learners at the moment they decide
Nobody Plans a Career in Enrollment
Slaughter wanted to work in the nonprofit sector and build up her community. Education qualified. She landed in admissions almost by accident and found she loved recruiting. “I never really aspired,” she says. “I don’t know who aspires to work in enrollment.”
That detail matters. Enrollment leadership is one of the few executive functions in higher education with no formal pipeline into it. Nobody majors in it. People arrive from admissions, student life, or marketing, and learn the work by doing it. Slaughter describes her own teaching instinct the same way: “It’s kind of like the teaching came from the doing.”
The missing pipeline creates a specific risk. When your bench is built entirely through apprenticeship, every departure takes real knowledge with it. Turnover at the VP level hits enrollment harder than it hits functions with credentialed talent pools to draw from.
The First Test of Enrollment Leadership Is Influence Without Authority
Slaughter’s first pivotal moment came at her third institution, as an assistant director. She held the title but had no direct reports. A senior leader noticed her, the president followed, and they gave her permission to run with her own ideas.
She took on campus events, which meant pulling in people across departments who did not report to her. “The execution component to bringing an idea to full fruition and bringing a bunch of people on board that did not report to you, that’s the first time I got to see what leadership looked like.”
Fedje named it precisely: leading outside your lane. Influence, buy-in, and trust, operating where the org chart gives you nothing.
Her conclusion has held for two decades. “Being a senior leader means being able to motivate and encourage and move people towards a goal when you don’t necessarily supervise everyone.” Faculty are the clearest case. They can say yes or no in ways staff often feel they cannot, which makes motivating them a real skill.
This reframes enrollment leadership hiring. A candidate who has delivered something cross functional without positional power has proven the harder capability. Title comes later.
The Seed, the Flower, and a Long Payback Period
Recruitment has an unusual feedback loop. You enroll a student, then wait four years to learn whether it worked.
Slaughter says the shift from job to calling arrived around year four or five, when her earliest recruits began to graduate. “You can see the vision come to what I would call planting the seed and seeing it grow.” Some are surgeons now. “That’s why graduation is my favorite day, actually.”
One story explains it best. A walk-in student arrived at four o’clock. Slaughter took the appointment knowing it meant staying late, gave him a full tour, then asked about his GPA. It was 1.9. “I was like, oops, I spent a lot of time on you, you can’t even get admitted.” The office was empty, so she improvised. She told him to go back to community college and get a 4.0.
Six months later he returned in tears with a 3.9. She had never been authorized to make that offer. Her director approved it anyway.
Ten years later she walked into the campus cafeteria and found him teaching there. He had finished a bachelor’s and a master’s, was working on a doctorate, and was pastoring a large church.
The lesson underneath is operational, not sentimental. Slaughter now requires her teams to make calls and do follow up, the same grind she once resented. The difference is that she has evidence it converts. Staff who have never watched a seed become a flower are managing to activity metrics alone, and that is where enrollment teams burn out. Structured exposure to outcomes belongs in your enrollment leadership development plan.
Translating Numbers Back Into People
Enrollment leadership at the VP level is a bifurcated job. One half is strategy, targets, budget, and staffing. The other half is translation. As Fedje put it, the numbers moving through your dashboards are human beings, and somebody has to keep saying so on campus.
Slaughter translates through story. She asks faculty and staff to remember being sixteen. Her example is specific. Christian high schools often will not give up classroom time, so they put recruiters in the lunchroom. Picture a sixteen year old boy there, she says. He is thinking about who is wearing what, and whether he gets bullied. He is not thinking about the table in the corner.
That is a yield problem explained without a single data point, and it is more persuasive to a faculty senate than a funnel chart.
Why Transparency Now Outperforms Polish
The second half of her method is blunt honesty. “No one wants to hear the fluff,” she says. People cut through the framing and ask what the numbers actually were. Applied to herself, that means owning shortfalls out loud. “So if I’m down, I need to be able to, with integrity, say I’m down and what are some reasons and then be open to help.”
Fedje connected it to students. This generation sees through everything. If it is fake, if it is AI generated, they identify it instantly. Slaughter agrees, and does not soften what follows: “This generation is extremely difficult to build relationships with.”
Here is the strategic read. When your audience reads polish as evasion, transparency stops being a virtue and becomes a conversion advantage. The institution that tells a student exactly where they stand, quickly and without spin, is not being generous. It is being competitive.
The Mentorship Gap in Enrollment Leadership
Slaughter is generous about the people who shaped her. She names Greg Von, Scott Shoemaker, and the late Tim Fuller among the figures she calls the Mount Rushmore of enrollment professionals. Among women she names Heather Petraeus, Dina Porterfield, and former CCCU president Shirley Hoekstra, along with her current president, Andre Stephens.
Then she says the thing most panels leave out. “I have not, I’ve yet to have someone to have my lived experience.” She has always had to translate the guidance she received across a gap, as a woman, as someone young in the role, and as a Black woman in rooms where the mentors were mostly white men.
She raises it without grievance and moves on. But it is the most actionable moment in the episode for anyone building an enrollment leadership succession plan. If your emerging leaders cannot find mentors who have navigated what they are navigating, that translation cost falls on them, on top of the job itself.
Watch the Numbers, Not the Résumé
Slaughter is unsentimental about who she learns from now. She watches results. She cites Houston Christian University, growing sharply, and rejects the easy explanation that faith-forward positioning alone drives it. “They’ve learned how to serve their community,” she says. She names Tiffany Charles as someone she would listen to.
“If you’re going to watch the schools to watch, I’m going to watch the numbers.”
Fedje made the companion point from thirty six years in the field. Wisdom does not equal age. In enrollment leadership it equals battle scars, and sometimes the person with fewer years has been in harder fights.
Build the Relationships Before You Need Them
Fedje asked how she leads through real crisis, describing a spring when his admissions director and financial aid director resigned within days of each other.
Slaughter’s answer is preventive. She invests in her fellow vice presidents during the calm season, so the relationships hold later. “We have to start to break bread and be good in the good season. So that at the time of there is hardship, we can dig in together.”
She is also deliberate about not escalating. She does not route daily problems to her president, who needs to stay where he is. She asks instead which colleague can help. She calls the team her president assembled the Avengers.
With her own team she pairs candor with hope. Transparency alone frightens people, so she pairs it deliberately, “but with also some hope, lots of hope and building those two things together.”
The Vacation Test
Slaughter measures her own effectiveness concretely. She knows the team is working when she can take time off and nobody calls.
She took a long weekend in April, in the thick of the season, which she would never have done earlier in her career. What she told her team is the whole philosophy. “You can always call me, but I believe in you.” And then: “When you trust your gut, you’re trusting your experience.”
She budgets for mistakes as part of that deal. “I try not to smile when my team makes mistakes,” she says, because they learn so much from them. That tolerance is what makes delegation real. A team that expects punishment escalates everything, and the leader becomes the bottleneck in the weeks when speed matters most.
Where Enrollment Leadership Meets Infrastructure
One line here should land hard with anyone running an adult and graduate strategy. Slaughter notes that a growing share of Fresno Pacific’s students sit in that population, and that her job is making sure they are seen, heard, and represented.
Then she describes how those students behave. “Going back to college, you’re busy. So when you decide to do it, you decide to do it and you need help right then.”
Right then. Not after an application, a fee, and a two week credit evaluation. Drew Melendres made the same argument from the technology side in Episode 27.
More than 37 million working age adults in the United States hold college credit without a credential, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Each carries prior learning and a narrow decision window. An institution can be genuinely mission-driven and still lose that student, because the process could not answer the only question that mattered: what counts, and how much longer will this take.
Speed here is not a technology preference. It is the difference between honoring a student’s investment and quietly discounting it. Institutions that answer in minutes are the ones whose values and student experience match. That alignment is where enrollment leadership either shows up or does not.
Fresno Pacific added more than 1,200 new students in fall 2025 and posted an overall enrollment increase. Mission and execution are not competing priorities at institutions that grow.
The Big Takeaway: Enrollment Leadership Is Measured in Who Leads After You
Fedje closed by asking what she wants said at her retirement party.
Slaughter told one more story. She had worked a student through the process alongside his mother. He enrolled. Then the mother asked whether the university had a program for her. She had waited until her son could go, so that she could go too. At commencement he walked the stage, turned around, and handed her flowers as she walked it herself.
What she wants for students is access they did not believe was available. What she wants for the profession is quieter, and it is the truest test of enrollment leadership. She points to a former director at Biola who now leads in her own right. “To see her leading shows me that I didn’t toil in vain in the investment of future leaders.”
Enrollment leadership is not measured in a single cycle. It is measured in who is still leading after you have gone.
Listen Now
Worth your time if you lead an enrollment team, if you are moving from practitioner to executive, or if you are holding a team steady through a hard season.