RU’s New Enrollment Guru on the Jesuit Identity, the Future of Education, and His Love of Homegrown Music

In July, Matt Ellis stepped into the role of associate vice president for enrollment at Rockhurst University, a position that had previously held by Lane Ramey, who recently retired after several decades of service to the University. The Scottsbluff, Nebraska, native said it’s a tall order to follow in the footsteps of someone who for so many had been one of the first faces that new Hawks would come to know, but it’s also an opportunity to build on past successes.

How did you first become interested in higher education as a career?

In college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I studied political science and philosophy. I wanted to make things better for people. After I graduated I worked in constituent and media relations for a lawmaker in Nebraska. This legislator was heavily engaged with education policy, so I spent a lot of time talking to representatives from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and became interested in higher education and higher education issues. Then a friend of mine who was working in admissions at UNL, talked to me about a national recruiting position, which was an awesome opportunity to travel around the country and share my university experience. I said, “that sounds amazing, you would pay me to do that?”

Your most recent position was as executive director of admission services at Arizona State University with its 93,000 students, but you also have had experience at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a smaller local school, William Jewell College. What are the differences between seemingly very different institutions?

There are not too many people who have had career trajectories like mine, going from large publics to small privates. But what I’ve learned is that the challenges each face are more similar than most people realize. The solutions you engineer for those challenges are where there’s a big difference. It’s about knowing how to approach things at scale. Understanding when to strategize like a large university, when execute like a small one, and how sometimes you need to do both.

How important is identity for an institution? 

I think if an institution doesn’t know itself well enough, its strengths and challenges, it will have a very hard time connecting to the students who will be most successful there. To me, enrollment is about more than just admissions. It’s the lens through which the school’s identity is communicated and should be a thread that carries through all the way through the current student experience and even into their alumni relationship.

At Rockhurst, we have the quality academic stamp of Jesuit education, we have a strong values-based organization behind it, and when you look at Generation Z research, those values of social justice, care for the whole person, and more, resonate with students who are about to enter college for the first time.

But we have to be able to better communicate those things to people who don’t already know what the term “Jesuit” means.

That’s our challenge — to describe ourselves and demonstrate our values without using labels. That’s the true test of how well a university knows itself.

What are some of the things that you’ve started to work on as you step into your new role?

Within our department, I’m working on how we can become fully embedded in the University community. We want the campus to feel that they all know somebody in enrollment, and if they have a question or an idea, they are comfortable coming to our staff. Because enrollment is never a solo act, it takes an entire University effort to be successful. That’s the culture I want to build.

We’re working on some exciting new initiatives in our office and across the University that I hope can help us in three main areas — developing modern strategic systems to help us be successful well into the future, enhancing access to new and different populations of prospective students, and continuing to enhance the value of what it means to be a Rockhurst University graduate.

When you’re not at work, what else do like you do?

My wife and I have an 11-month old daughter, so I enjoy spending a lot of time with them. I also love going to see live music. It almost doesn’t matter who the band is, and genre doesn’t matter, either; I just love the environment of live music — the more homegrown the band and the smaller the venue, the better. I also like reading books about creativity, innovation, movements, and organizing.