Our own Charlie Melichar, alongside John Haller, just published a new piece on the American Council on Education’s Higher Education Today blog.
The article, Return on Relationships: Why Higher Ed Is Still a People Business, starts with a deceptively simple question: Are all the new platforms, CRMs, and AI tools actually helping institutions build stronger relationships? Or just process them faster?
Charlie and John argue that the answer depends on how you think about the connection between enrollment, student life, and advancement. Most institutions treat these as separate functions with separate systems and separate goals. That framing, they say, is the problem.
The piece explores what changes when an institution treats the full student-to-alumni arc as one continuous relationship. There’s a sharp thread on the role of frontline staff, on why data integration is a mission decision rather than a technology decision, and on a metric they call “return on relationships” that challenges how we measure what counts.
We’d encourage you to give it a read.
