Steve Mencarini loves a good puzzle. You name it: Wordle, Jigsaw, crossword. He enjoys the challenge of trying to untangle the problem in front of him. His latest puzzle is a full-time job: As Associate Vice President of Enrollment Management and Retention, it's Steve’s job to lead Admission efforts to recruit students to Guilford College and to then play a key role in promoting their retention..

Steve was Dean of Students at the College for nearly six years before taking his new position in July. Guilford College Magazine sat down with Steve to talk about the goals and challenges he’ll be facing in his new role – and how his love of puzzles might help him succeed.

GCM: You’ve worked at some very prominent schools – Maryland, Elon, William & Mary, and Gonzaga University – but at a Guilford Orientation day this summer, you told students that Guilford is the best place you’ve ever worked. What makes the College so special?

Steve: When your personal values align with institutional values that makes going to work and working there a lot easier. I firmly believe in the mission of Guilford College and what we're trying to do here. It’s so much more distinctive than anywhere else I’ve worked. My Ph.D. is in higher education administration. I study colleges and universities. There really is not another place like our college out there.

GCM: What excites you about this new job?

Steve: What excites me most is the opportunity to have sort of a generational impact on the institution in a different way than how I've been able to contribute to the institution before. The lifeblood of this campus is the students and how we recruit those students and get them to come to campus and set them up to be successful here. It’s a critical piece of their journey. The team that we have in Admissions and Financial Aid is fantastic, but we’re going to have to do some things that are different over the next few years to continue to recruit an excellent, qualified class coming in. That's really exciting.

GCM: This is a position that is typically filled by someone with deep experience in admission. What do you bring to the job?

Steve: Having been at Guilford for eight years, I know the types of students that are most successful here, and I think having that knowledge of how we transform students will help my staff and me find those students who are best fits for Guilford.  I also have previous relationships with the Admission staff and the Financial Aid staff. Those don't change, right? Knowing the College, knowing the people, knowing our values and the ways that we can help share that with the outside world will be huge.

GCM: I want to go back to what you said about knowing the type of students who will succeed at Guilford. What does that student look like?

Steve: That student is a naturally curious student, but maybe their environment in high school hasn't necessarily provided a space for them to be curious. A student who is a solid academic student and can do the work, but maybe hasn't developed the habits to be as successful as they really can be. And then there’s the student who is the high flier, who is all-everything in their high school and comes here and wants to continue that trajectory, and we're able to provide a ton of opportunities for both of those types of students to be able to come here and be successful.

GCM: Guilford has a reputation of being a student-centered college. What does that mean to you?

Steve: Student-centered really focuses on the reason that we are here. Faculty are here to teach students and to advise students. Research is important and we’re doing great research, but that's not the primary focus of our faculty. When we make decisions, we have to make decisions that are focused first on the students. There are a lot of other schools that are looking for the same students we are. We need to be able to share our distinct experiences that our Guilford College students have, that they can then say, “gosh, I can see myself at that school. And I know as a result of my time at Guilford it is going to be a much better place than if I went somewhere else.”

GCM: Do you think a lot of students show up at Guilford knowing what a liberal arts college is?

Steve: No, they don’t. I mean, liberal arts right now, it's being maligned in the media and pop culture as being not helpful when you enter the workforce, and I could not disagree more with that. There is a certain subset of our society that wants colleges to create widgets for the economy. And Guilford does not create widgets for the economy. It just does not. The purpose of liberal arts is to educate for the betterment of the student and the society as a whole. That can be a tough sell to parents because many say college is to help you find your job when you leave. That’s true but college is also about finding yourself.

GCM: Let’s talk about the dreaded R-word, retention. Guilford’s retention rate (percentage of first-time, first-year undergraduate students who continue the next year) has hovered in the 68-percent range. How do we hold on to more students?

Steve: This goes back to what excites me about the job. I want to bring in the highest number of people who are great fits for Guilford College who are going to really take advantage of this institution and springboard themselves into the future. I don’t just want to fill a seat in the first year class. I want to see someone who's graduating from college. When you factor in retention, it's a different way of thinking about how to go recruit somebody if you're going to think about them for the long, long term than just the first year. I love puzzles – jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles – any kind of puzzle. You can come into my house, you'll see a stack of books about puzzles. Actually, I want to teach a seminar on puzzles. I just think that would be such a cool seminar. Puzzles get you to think about things in different ways to solve problems, right? People who can think in different ways can help solve problems. I think the admission process is sort of like a puzzle.