10,000 Ethical Dilemmas, One Enrollment Breakthrough
- teegemettille
- Jul 17
- 2 min read
Before Glenn McGee was a dean of admissions, he was a bioethicist. He spent decades exploring the moral implications of emerging technologies, from cloning to genomic medicine. He read and edited more than 10,000 scholarly essays as editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Bioethics. He’s used to parsing complexity, challenging assumptions, and seeing around corners.
So when he turned his attention to enrollment, he brought a question few others were asking:
What if our greatest ethical risk isn’t what AI decides—but what we never see in the first place?
At Salem College, Glenn confronted a reality many enrollment leaders share: too few counselors, too many students, and too much guesswork. Counselors relied on static lists, lagging indicators, and a heavy dose of intuition. It wasn’t sustainable—and it wasn’t sufficient.
That’s where ethical AI entered the equation.
With enroll ml, Salem College didn’t just “predict melt.” They detected drift. Not from a dashboard, but from patterns of student behavior that only machine learning could recognize at scale: a sudden gap in engagement, a drop in urgency, a mismatch between a deposit and a disengagement.
“We saw drift before the student did,” Glenn said. “That’s the ethical future of enrollment.”
And here’s why that matters.
Ethical AI in admissions isn’t about removing human judgment. It’s about directing it, intelligently. It’s about making sure the right people—the counselors who build trust and relationships—are focused on the right students, at the right time.
When you let the machine decode the noise, your team can act on the signal. That’s not a loss of control. It’s the restoration of it.
At Salem, that shift led to a 431% increase in their first-year class size. But perhaps more importantly, it also led to a healthier, more sustainable admissions culture. One where staff could focus on what they do best—guiding students—without burning out.
On July 29, Elizabeth Kirby joins us to explore these very questions in our Video Podcast event, "Planning for Ethical AI in Admissions." It’s a conversation about strategy, yes—but also about values, trust, and the future of our profession.
We hope you’ll join us.
Reserve your seat: Planning for Ethical AI in Admissions
