New head of admissions aims to not just recruit, but retain

As Marc Harding rode the elevator to the second floor of Alumni Hall, he met a high school…

Chief Enrollment Officer Marc Harding

As Marc Harding rode the elevator to the second floor of Alumni Hall, he met a high school senior visiting Pitt for the day.

Though the young male student slouched unassumingly behind his father as if trying to blend in with the elevator walls, Harding, Pitt’s new chief enrollment officer, extended his hand and a greeting, asking him how old he was and what he thought of the school that Harding himself is just coming to know.

The elevator ride lasted but a minute, but in that time, the beginnings of a personal relationship were formed.

Marc Harding was hired to head Pitt’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid when the former director of the admission office, Betsy Porter, retired after 26 years of service. As head of the office, Harding will be responsible for attracting and retaining classes of students.

Debbie Rupert, senior assistant director of Admissions and Financial Aid, said Harding is already popular with his colleagues.

Rupert said that no one grows up dreaming about getting into the field of admissions and financial aid, but for people who find themselves moving in that direction, it can be a very fulfilling job.

“Once you do it for a few years, it’s in your blood and you do it forever,” Rupert said.

Harding certainly didn’t run around in his Massachusetts backyard as a boy playing dean of admissions, but he has still forged a decades-long career in the field.

Harding attended college at the University of Massachusetts, studying business. His father owned a string of automotive parts stores, and Harding said he originally felt that following in his father’s footsteps might not be such a bad path. But soon, he said, he found out that business wasn’t his passion.

He moved to education, where he student-taught elementary school for a few years, but that, too, didn’t feel quite right.

“I think I was sort of denying who my inner me was,” Harding said.

So he took a class in communications and discovered a love for interpersonal communication. He expanded on that love by earning a degree in communications with minors in psychology and Chinese from UMass and eventually landed a job in the school’s admissions office.

“I got to do aspirational things in terms of helping students succeed,” Harding said, referring to working with students, setting up programming and speaking with people. “All that was just a grand mix to me … after three years of doing that stuff, I was in love.”

Harding spent five years at UMass, moved on to Virginia Tech for three years, the University of South Florida for five and then spent 15 years working at the University of Iowa. This year, he moved his things into an office at Pitt.

Harding sees what an admissions office does as cultivating the very unique relationship that exists between students and their university.

Harding said that when students set out to look at colleges, they’re shopping — setting out to purchase a product. But after they graduate, he said, something changes. As alumni, students become an extension of the school they chose. They become the product they sought.

“That’s always given me pause and reason to take this relationship that we’re trying to build very seriously,” Harding said.

So when Harding sets his mind to building a freshman class, he conceptualizes it not as recruiting students, but as creating future alumni. Harding’s goal is not just to persuade potential students to come to Pitt, but to inform them as to what sort of place Pitt is and to seek out the ones that will mesh well into its family.

In order to make sure that Pitt’s brand isn’t misrepresented and students who pick Pitt will be a good match, Harding said he likes to encourage campus visits. That way, prospective students and parents have a chance to make connections with students and faculty that share their interests and concerns.

“It’s a pretty serious thing, this college choice … it’s our job to represent the brand as well, if not better, than anyone, but never to misrepresent it, so that students can get the best sense of who we are. It becomes part of their very fabric, because they’ll be alumni someday,” Harding said.

Rupert, who has worked in admissions for 28 years, agrees with this recruiting style.

“We don’t do, like some schools, a hard sell, because not only do we want to recruit them, we want to retain them,” Rupert said.

Though retainment isn’t particularly a problem at Pitt, Harding said he realizes that three-fourths of enrollment at any University is comprised of continuing students, and a big part of his job is to keep retainment numbers healthy.

“Retention rate is high at Pitt, and we want to keep it there,” Harding said.

In Rupert’s mind, the biggest challenge facing Harding in his new job will be maintaining the level of excellence that the admissions office has already established.

The department received an Office of Excellence award from Provost and Vice Chancellor Patricia Beeson in 2000 and has taken Pitt’s annual applications total from 15,880 applications in 2002 to 24,873 in 2012, according to Kellie Kane, an assistant director of admissions and financial aid.

Rupert seemed assured that Harding is the best man to take on the challenge of continuing the success.

“Here’s what I said to the provost: If she had called me into her office and said to me, ‘Go out through the land and find the perfect match for the University of Pittsburgh,’ I would have come back with Marc Harding,” Rupert said.

Harding’s former colleagues also praised his performance.

Phil Caffrey, director of admissions operations and policy at the University of Iowa and Harding’s co-worker there for 15 years, said that Harding was greatly respected and well liked at the University, and he said that regard resulted from Harding’s integrity, talent and occasionally goofy persona.

“We worked incredibly hard, but it didn’t feel like it,” Caffrey said.

Part of that might be because Harding focuses on the importance of relationships in his managerial style.

He subscribes to a method known as “Situational Management,” coined by author Ken Blanchard in his book of the same title.

“It’s doing the really hard work of me getting to know you as well as I can, look at the positive in you, in terms of what gifts you have, what you bring to the table, and then manage appropriately,” Harding said.

He feels that, too often, things fall apart because too little attention is paid to the personal aspect of things.

“A lot of it is just investing the time and getting to know who they are, and sometimes even trying to dig down deep and go, “What are they really asking? What are they really wanting? What are they really needing?” Harding said.

Harding hasn’t moved any of his things into his new office yet, but he says that when he does, one of the very few things he’ll put on the wall is a Maya Angelou quote recommended to him by a co-worker at Iowa.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”