College Is Broken: Podcast Edition

Teege Mettille

College admissions is broken, and Teege Mettille helped break it. After twenty years inside colleges, he wrote the book on what went wrong. Sundays: the audiobook, chapter by chapter. Thursdays: conversations with the counselors, deans, students, and parents who lived it. September through December.

  1. 1d ago

    Policymakers

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (Amazon) The Signal Driven Playbook The policymakers chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. I open by admitting I'm no fan of Reagan and then spend the rest of the chapter arguing that the private benefit reframe worked because higher ed handed it over, including the lobbying talking point I personally used on Capitol Hill. Key takeaways Where the private benefit reframe actually startedWhat the EFC was built to do, and what families thought it didPell as a voucher system higher ed won't call one

    Policymakers

  2. 4d ago

    Betsy Klene on Rankings

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) Stop Chasing Comfort Metrics Stop Waiting Betsy Klene spent ten years at IBM, did a stint as a radio announcer on a financial station in Los Angeles, lived in Singapore where spouses weren't permitted to work, and backed into college advising by helping her own three kids and then half of La Jolla. She came into the profession before U.S. News was the thing everyone organized around, which means she watched the whole arc rather than inheriting the end of it. She pushed back on me in two places. She thinks the book is too hard on parents, who in her experience take days off work, go to the night sessions, and show up already having done more homework than I gave them credit for. And she thinks I'm behind on prestige. Her last five years of students were picking Purdue and Georgia Tech over the sweatshirt schools, including one who got into Harvard and chose UT Austin because the program was better. We agreed on more than we disagreed, which is the risk with a rankings chapter. Everyone already thinks rankings are bad. Nobody stops submitting the data. Key takeaways Whether parents deserve more credit than the book gives themWhy prestige is losing ground to program fit and valueWhat a college's career center reveals about the institution Links Betsy Klene on LinkedInHECA (Higher Education Consultants Association) — The Admissions Directors Lunchcast

  3. Oct 11

    Rankings

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Signal Driven Playbook The rankings chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. The argument is not that U.S. News built a bad formula. It's that colleges spent decades making themselves indistinguishable from each other, and the rankings showed up with a product to sell into the confusion we created. Key takeaways Why the sea of sameness came before the rankings, not afterWhat colleges actually bought when they spent on amenitiesWhether opting out is unilateral disarmament or an overdue question

    Rankings

  4. Oct 8

    Ken Cutts on Enrollment

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) The Signal Solution (on Amazon) The Circular Firing Squad Ken Cutts is a first-generation student from Milwaukee who spent eighteen years working out how the machine runs, roughly four of them on the vendor side with higher ed as the client. He is now Director of Marketing for Degree Programs at Columbia Business School. He points out early that he is a safe person to have this conversation with, since he is not an enrollment leader and nobody's discount rate is his to defend, which is exactly why he can say some of this out loud. He would not call it disagreement so much as what is missing, and the gap he named is money. The public sees a sticker price times a headcount and cannot understand why the college claims to be broke, and nobody inside is explaining where the money actually goes or does not go. From there we ended up on vendors as institutional memory, the fact that we built the entire funnel around what a vendor can track and monetize rather than what indicates a student is actually interested, and the new state surveillance pricing laws that may end up describing financial aid leveraging whether or not anyone in a state capitol has noticed yet. I also went further on for-profit colleges than I probably should have, and Ken let me. His own contribution is a piece of advice from a former boss about embracing your nemesis, which sounds like nonsense until he unpacks it. Key takeaways Where the money in higher ed actually sits, and why the public cannot see itSurveillance pricing law as an external forcing function on discountingWhy the metrics we optimize are the ones a vendor can bill for Links Ken Cutts on LinkedInThe Admissions Directors Lunchcast episode with Brian Troyer: [link needed]New Jersey Fair Price Protection Act, signed July 23, 2026House Judiciary Committee inquiry into tuition price fixing.

  5. Oct 4

    Enrollment

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon) Ten Moves To Rebuild Your Admissions Team The enrollment chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. This is the one where the indictment includes me. Discounting from Robin Hood to house of cards, what the scholarship letter is actually engineered to do, why the enrollment manager who tells the president the truth gets replaced by someone who won't, and the bacon problem. Key takeaways The factory farm comparison, applied to enrollment ethicsWhat a scholarship letter is engineered to produce, and it is not affordabilityWho actually invented discounting, search campaigns, and application bloat

    Enrollment

  6. Oct 1

    Carole Chabries on Faculty

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon): Small College Consulting National Small College Conference Carole Chabries has three degrees in English literature, got the PhD fully intending to be a professor, and figured out in graduate school that she did not want the job. She spent 25 years in academic affairs instead, ending as vice provost at Carroll, which is where she and I were colleagues. She is also an HLC peer reviewer and team lead, which means she walks onto campuses she knows nothing about and watches every single one of them explain how it is unique. She now runs Third Rail Leadership. She did not disagree with much, which she is upfront about, so the useful part is where she pushes past me. My chapter frames the gap as enrollment selling job outcomes while faculty deliver formation. Her version is that both sides are talking to themselves and the actual gap is the student, whose real problem nobody has asked about. She got there by learning sales when she started her consultancy, discovering she had never once in academic affairs asked what pain the person in front of her was trying to relieve. We also got into why this is close to impossible for an adjunct teaching five hours a week, why faculty get drafted into recruiting with no preparation for it, and why nobody in a leadership meeting has ever asked whether the committee they are staffing is eating someone's teaching time. Her answer on that one was that calling it accidental was generous. Key takeaways Excavating what the student is actually trying to solve, underneath the jobWhy the adjunct model makes the case for the curriculum nearly impossible to makeThe generational shift in what being a faculty member even isLinks Carole Chabries on LinkedInThird Rail LeadershipThe Leadership LiveWire newsletter

  7. Sep 27

    Faculty

    College Is Broken: Print Edition ( on Amazon) The Signal Solution (on Amazon) The Signal Driven Playbook The faculty chapter of College Is Broken, read by the author. The one where I side with the faculty and then explain why that is not the compliment it sounds like. Includes the original deal, the moment the pitch shifted to lifetime earnings while the product stayed the same, and the kitchen conversation about British literature that ends up doing more damage than any student loan statement. Key takeaways Why the pitch changed for first-generation families and the curriculum did notThe kitchen conversation as the place trust actually breaksWhat it costs when no president decides between the first job and the whole career

    Faculty

  8. Sep 24

    Jaime Hunt on The Water

    College Is Broken: Print Edition (on Amazon): The Circular Firing Squad Jaime Hunt spent 22 years in higher ed marketing, nine of them as a cabinet-level CMO at Old Dominion, Miami, and Winston-Salem State, before launching Solve Higher Ed Marketing in 2024. She also teaches the graduate higher ed marketing course at West Virginia University, which means she gets to watch the next round of people learn the water while they're still standing outside it. She is candid about her own position in the story, including the part where the administrative bloat everyone complains about includes jobs like the one she held. Her pushback was on persistence versus retention. She agrees the language flipped, but she does not want to hand the responsibility back to the student, and she thinks retention pressure can just as easily push a campus toward admitting the right students instead of lowering the bar. We got into whether the fix is bringing in outsiders who have never worked in higher ed, why the early career admissions counselor is treated as a consumable, and what happens if you measure a counselor on the graduation rate of the cohort they recruited four years ago. Also a brief detour into presidents who believe their campus is the best kept secret, which it never is. Key takeaways Whether retention pressure lowers the bar or sharpens fitThe case for hiring expertise from outside higher ed entirelyMeasuring admissions counselors on graduation rather than census Links Jaime Hunt on LinkedInSolve Higher Ed Heart Over Hype: Transforming Higher Ed Marketing with EmpathyConfessions of a Higher Ed CMO Podcast (Enrollify)

See All (16)

About

College admissions is broken, and Teege Mettille helped break it. After twenty years inside colleges, he wrote the book on what went wrong. Sundays: the audiobook, chapter by chapter. Thursdays: conversations with the counselors, deans, students, and parents who lived it. September through December.

Information

You Might Also Like