Our story, an excerpt from an interview with Medium.

Tyler Gallagher . Sep 2020

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Danny and Karen Umali.

Since 2010, Danny Umali has been serving families in the metro Atlanta area as a private college planner. In 2014, Danny and his wife, Karen, launched Game Theory College Planners after realizing that disruption was needed to address the college problems of excessive student loan debt and delayed graduation. Their organization was also the first to fully incorporate professional social media guidance within the context of college admissions and financial aid. Today, Danny and Karen work with families nationwide and stay on the cutting edge of enrollment management trends in higher education

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Danny: Just over 25 years ago, Karen and I met in college. We made all the mistakes you could make. We got married right after our freshman year of college and we achieved an unintended yet unsurprising result: delayed graduation and no graduation. Faced with the obvious challenges of being married at such a young age and with limited financial resources, we had to drop out of college. Karen eventually finished college in 8 years, while working full-time. I went for 5 more years and never finished. I have about 18 months of coursework left to get my degree but working full-time in the retail industry, I never figured out a way to go back and finish the job.

In 2009 I transitioned away from my career in retail management into financial planning and wealth management. Shortly after, I was actually recruited to start a college planning agency here in Atlanta. The irony here never escapes me. I learned a lot about educational consulting and admissions counseling that year but I began to see that the traditional approaches to college planning were flawed.

So many financial planners focused on college savings plans and not at all on college selection or affordability. The slightly more talented planners did focus more on getting into college, but none of them gave a second thought on actually finishing college or paying for college. I realized that the current state of college planning and educational consulting had not changed for over 4 decades. If you fast forward to today it is clear that this is still the problem.

In June of 2014, Karen and I launched Game Theory College Planners to bring a new and truly effective approach to college planning. Our personal experience and failure at college has made us fanatical about keeping other families and students from making the same mistakes common with traditional planning.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

Karen: Our approach to college planning is grounded in the fact that colleges act more like businesses than anything else. We hacked their business model by realizing that colleges are looking to buy freshmen as much as families are looking to buy colleges. By operating under this premise, we exploit the fact that colleges compete against each other to get students to fill their seats each fall. 

Colleges go as far as hiring private consultants to manage their business model of buying freshmen. These private consultants are known as enrollment managers. Enrollment managers employ very sophisticated methodologies to achieve two basic goals: increased rankings 

and revenue. By using predictive analytics and game theory, enrollment managers encourage some students to attend (by awarding significantly more merit scholarship dollars) and encourage other students not to attend (by awarding significantly reduced or no scholarship dollars at all).

The use of merit awards can be leveraged to shape very specific class profiles with the intention of elevating the college’s rankings. An obvious byproduct of an elevated ranking is elevated revenue. It’s a very circular and self-sustaining business model.

Danny: We have taken the time to understand how the enrollment management machine works and have employed quite a few methodologies of our own. Through thoughtful college selection and an unwavering focus with on-time graduation, we create competitive markets for our students. As colleges compete with their wallets, we tilt the balance in favor of the student in the form of multiple college acceptances and maximum merit award letters.

What also sets us apart is that we have discovered that a student’s well-crafted social media footprint is a force multiplier with enrollment management. I don’t know how many colleges really read essays anymore, but we can quantify how a college will research applicants online through their social media profiles. This is why digital literacy is such a significant focus for us. Digital literacy is especially useful when college graduates eventually enter the workforce. As we all know, it’s not uncommon for employers to do online research on their job applicants. Early education in this area gives our students a significant advantage before, during and after college.

At the end of the day, we leverage an approach that helps students and families not only find the right colleges, but also use more of the college’s money to get their education paid. Families quickly learn that so-called “expensive” colleges can cost the same or less than so-called “cheaper” in-state colleges. As you can imagine, this can fly in the face of traditional admissions counseling that tends to preach the exact opposite.