New VP of Enrollment Management is a Familiar Face

There’s an ease with which incoming Vice President of Enrollment Management Mark Steinlage talks about Rockhurst University’s campus, mission, faculty, staff and student experience.

That makes sense.

“I lived it for nearly 11 years,” he said.

Steinlage, who grew up in St. Louis, came to Rockhurst first as a student, where he majored in marketing and played baseball. He stayed to work as an admission counselor (from 2001-2007) and to earn his MBA. And he has two brothers, one sister and a wife who all are alumni themselves. It’s just a few of the Kansas City and Rockhurst bona fides he can rattle off at a moment’s notice.

“There’s a lot of layers here, the people and the place itself,” he said. “I really do have a deep connection to campus and when I came back here, I felt all that again.”

This month, Steinlage is officially back at Rockhurst after 16-1/2 years at Saint Louis University, where he served as a coordinator/assistant director for admissions and had held the position of associate dean/director of admissions since 2012. In addition to his work for Rockhurst and SLU, Steinlage has been very active in leadership statewide and nationally for college enrollment management organizations, serving on the board of directors and on committees for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling and as a founding member of what is now known as the Missouri College Attainment Network.

Throughout his career, Steinlage said he has watched as who the average college student is, what students are looking for in their college search, and how they are finding it, have evolved. The challenge to institutions, he said, is to meet them where they are.

“You have to be student-centered,” he said. “If you are not student-centered you are not in the right business.”

That means continuing to focus on diversity, equity and inclusion work. And it means ensuring students have the support they need not just through the admissions process, but through graduation day. In other words, he said, it’s about access to a college degree, not just college admission.

While college admissions is in some ways more sophisticated than ever, Steinlage said being successful and continuing to be a place where students want to pursue their college degree comes down to some pretty basic concepts.

“At the end of the day, our work comes down to personal relationships,” he said. “It’s about sticking to the fundamentals, doing them better than anyone else, and making data-driven decisions — by doing that really well, over and over and over again, that is how you sustain success.”

Also important, he added, is fostering a sense of true belonging from every corner of the university for every student who comes here. Speaking from his own experience, Steinlage said that’s an asset Rockhurst University can build on. And it’s part of the reason he was excited to come back.

“The campus community was always special,” he said. “That’s one thing that I know about Rockhurst — it’s a very special campus community.”