Higher ed has never been this scared. Fewer students, political pressure, budgets under a microscope, and Reggie Hill thinks it's the most exciting moment of his career.
For the first-ever live episode of The VineDown, Emily Smith brings back her favorite repeat guest in front of a room full of enrollment professionals. Reggie is Vice Chancellor for Strategic Enrollment Management at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and he's spent three years breaking a regional public "down to the studs": cutting vendor contracts that don't grow enrollment, rebuilding the playbook from scratch, and using an AI agent with live access to his CRM data to compress a week of analysis into ten minutes.
This one is candid, occasionally profane, and packed with the kind of things enrollment leaders usually only say off the record.
In this episode:
- Why the "scariest chapter" in enrollment management is forcing the reinvention higher ed has dodged for 15 years
- The $10 million question: the college Reggie would build, with the largest makerspace in the country and zero tenured faculty
- How Apple, NASA, and Disney helped design a major at Florida Poly, with a promise to hire the students
- The $100,000 vendor test: "If it hasn't grown the institution, it's gone"
- Reggie's 5AM data ritual and why he manages his outbox, not his inbox
- How AI agents cut turnover by giving admissions staff back the human connection
- The 30-year-old "one-stop shop" promise AI might finally deliver
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