Career Opportunities with Franklin Switzerland

Franklin Switzerland, founded in 1969, is one of the first institutions to bring liberal arts education to Europe and to be recognized by both U.S. and Swiss accreditation agencies. A leader in international education, Franklin provides an experiential and multinational learning environment through small classes, strong student and faculty relationships, a residential campus, and hands-on Academic Travel experiences. With roughly 300 students from more than 55 countries, set in the safe and striking landscape of Lugano, Franklin is distinctive: an intimate residential community, a uniquely dual U.S.–Swiss accreditation, and an Academic Travel program that turns the world into a classroom. Franklin promotes intellectual curiosity and critical thinking, strives for academic excellence, and fosters interdisciplinary opportunities for its students, faculty, and staff. Franklin acknowledges the accomplishments and global impact of our community through a culture of trust that respects representation from a variety of backgrounds, as well as an environment that strives for continuous improvement.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Franklin Switzerland is seeking an accomplished, hands-on, and strategically minded Vice President of Enrollment Management (VPEM) to help lead student recruitment, admissions operations, financial-aid coordination, and enrollment growth at a pivotal moment for the University.

This is an important institutional role for someone who understands both the human and analytical sides of enrollment. Franklin needs a person who can think strategically, act practically, manage people and processes, work comfortably with data, and remain close to the daily work of recruitment and conversion. The successful candidate will bring energy, judgment, discipline, and a genuine belief in the value of a Franklin education.

The VPEM will work closely with the President, senior leadership, Admissions,

Financial Aid, Marketing and Communications, Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Finance, faculty, staff, students, external partners, agents, and school counselors to support Franklin’s enrollment goals across undergraduate, graduate, transfer, visiting, study abroad, and partnership pathways.

This is not a role for someone who wants only to supervise from a distance. It requires a leader who can build systems, coach staff, review data, improve communication flows, speak with families, support recruitment travel, solve practical problems, and help move prospective students from interest to enrollment.

Franklin is looking for a VPEM who is genuinely fluent across the enrollment cycle and who can hold three priorities in balance:

Recruitment and conversion — building a disciplined, warm, and responsive admissions operation that supports students and families from first inquiry through application, admission, deposit, visa, arrival, and handoff to the student experience.

Data and systems — using Slate, funnel reports, dashboards, segmentation, and timely analysis to identify opportunities, address weaknesses, improve conversion, and support evidence-based enrollment decisions.

Collaboration and execution — working across departments to ensure that

Franklin’s distinctive academic, residential, and international identity is translated into clear recruitment messages, effective campaigns, strong events, and a consistent prospective-student experience.

The ideal candidate understands that enrollment management is both strategic and practical. Students and families make decisions over time, through many interactions, questions, doubts, comparisons, and moments of reassurance. Franklin must be visible, compelling, responsive, credible, and operationally excellent throughout that journey.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Enrollment Strategy & Planning

▪ Support the development, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive enrollment management plan aligned with Franklin’s mission, academic priorities, financial realities, and strategic goals.

▪ Translate enrollment goals into practical recruitment plans, territory strategies, communication flows, event calendars, staff priorities, funnel targets, and measurable outcomes.

▪ Monitor enrollment trends, application behavior, deposit patterns, yield indicators, market conditions, and competitor activity, and recommend timely adjustments.

▪ Work closely with senior leadership to support short- and long-term enrollment planning, including undergraduate, graduate, transfer, visiting, study abroad, and partnership enrollment.

▪ Contribute to regular enrollment reporting for the President, senior leadership, relevant committees, and other internal stakeholders.

▪ Help foster a campus-wide culture of enrollment awareness, shared responsibility, openness, and precision.

Recruitment, Admissions & Yield

▪ Lead and support the admissions recruitment team in achieving inquiry, application, admit, deposit, and enrollment goals.

▪ Oversee the prospective-student journey from inquiry to enrollment, ensuring timely, professional, warm, and persuasive communication with students, families, counselors, agents, and partners.

▪ Strengthen recruitment practices, admissions processes, territory management, school counselor outreach, campus visits, virtual engagement, admitted-student yield, and pre-arrival communication.

▪ Personally engage in recruitment activity where needed, including conversations with prospective students and families, school visits, fairs, partner meetings, admitted-student events, and yield initiatives.

▪ Work closely with Marketing and Communications to ensure that recruitment campaigns, landing pages, email flows, social content, events, and digital outreach are aligned with enrollment priorities and Franklin’s distinctive identity.

▪ Support strategies to grow enrollment across specific programs and markets, and to sustain Franklin's signature multinational classroom, often 15–20 nationalities represented in a single course, by recruiting broadly across countries and regions and by broadening access for students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

▪ Contribute to the development of study abroad, visiting-student, transfer, and institutional partnership pipelines.

▪ Regular travel may be required, including recruitment travel, school visits, fairs, conferences, partner meetings, and engagement with students, families, counselors, agents, alumni, and institutional partners in Switzerland, Europe, the United States, and other relevant markets.

Financial Aid & Affordability

▪ Work closely with the Director of Financial Aid to ensure that financial-aid processes are timely, clear, student-centered, compliant, and aligned with enrollment goals.

▪ Support financial-aid and scholarship strategies that balance access, affordability, yield, net tuition revenue, discount rate, and institutional sustainability.

▪ Help analyze financial-aid data, award behavior, yield patterns, family concerns, and affordability barriers to support improved enrollment outcomes.

▪ Ensure that students and families receive accurate, clear, and supportive guidance on cost, aid, payment expectations, and the value of a Franklin education.

▪ Partner with Finance and senior leadership as needed to support enrollment forecasting, financial-aid modeling, and net revenue analysis.

Data, Slate & Enrollment Operations

▪ Use Slate and other enrollment technologies to support recruitment, admissions processing, communications, reporting, events, application review, and yield management.

▪ Develop and maintain clear enrollment dashboards, funnel reports, conversion analyses, and regular performance updates.

▪ Ensure that data quality, coding, source tracking, communication rules, forms, workflows, and reporting structures support accurate analysis and effective decision-making.

▪ Recommend and implement process improvements to increase speed, clarity, responsiveness, user experience, data quality, and access to services.

▪ Collaborate with the Slate Manager and relevant colleagues to improve automation, communication plans, event management, application workflows, and recruitment reporting.

▪ Identify positive and negative performance trends and propose practical action plans to strengthen results.

Team Leadership & Collaboration

▪ Supervise, support, and develop members of the admissions recruitment team and other enrollment staff as assigned.

▪ Establish clear expectations, priorities, accountability structures, and service standards for the team.

▪ Build a high-trust, high-performance culture that is student-centered, collaborative, data-aware, resilient, and focused on results.

▪ Provide regular feedback, coaching, and practical support to staff, while modeling the energy, responsiveness, and professionalism expected of the team.

▪ Work closely with colleagues across Marketing, Financial Aid, Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, Finance, Advancement, faculty, and external partners.

▪ Represent Franklin with professionalism, warmth, humility, and credibility in internal and external settings.

Budget & Resource Stewardship

▪ Assist with the development and administration of enrollment-related budgets, including recruitment travel, events, systems, agencies, and other departmental expenditures.

▪ Link spending recommendations to measurable enrollment outcomes and institutional priorities.

▪ Evaluate the effectiveness of recruitment activities, travel, fairs, events, campaigns, platforms, agents, and partnerships.

▪ Seek practical and creative ways to achieve enrollment goals with limited resources, balancing ambition with disciplined execution.

▪ Perform other duties as assigned, consistent with this position, the department’s goals, and the University’s mission.

EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS

Franklin is seeking an experienced enrollment leader with a minimum of 7–10 years of progressive experience in higher education enrollment management, admissions, recruitment, financial aid, or a closely related area, including at least 3–5 years in a senior, supervisory, or team leadership role. The successful candidate will be required to have earned a bachelor’s degree; an advanced degree is strongly preferred. In addition, the successful candidate will possess the following:

▪ Recruitment fluency — Direct understanding of the full student recruitment cycle, including territory management, family engagement, counselor relationships, campus visits, recruitment events, admitted-student yield, conversion strategy, and undergraduate and graduate pipelines.

▪ Strategic and practical orientation — Demonstrated ability to help develop and execute strategic enrollment plans, particularly in a small or mid-sized institution, while also managing the daily work required to implement them effectively.

▪ Data competence — Demonstrated ability to use enrollment data, funnel reports, CRM systems, dashboards, segmentation, business intelligence tools, and conversion analysis to guide decisions, evaluate performance, and improve outcomes.

▪ Slate experience — Experience with Slate is strongly preferred. Experience with comparable CRM, student recruitment, or enrollment management systems will also be considered.

▪ Financial-aid awareness — Working knowledge of financial aid, scholarship strategy, affordability concerns, discounting, yield behavior, financial aid leveraging, discount rate modeling, and the relationship between enrollment and institutional finances.

▪ Team leadership — Proven ability to supervise, motivate, coach, and hold accountable collaborative, high-performing staff in a fast-moving and service-oriented environment, including teams working across multiple locations or time zones.

▪ Communication skills — Excellent written and oral communication skills in English are required. Proficiency in Italian, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, or another relevant language is an asset.

▪ International outlook — Experience with international recruitment, U.S. higher education, Swiss or European markets, study-abroad partnerships, globally mobile students, or transnational education is a strong advantage.

▪ Liberal arts understanding — Familiarity with the liberal arts college market and the ability to articulate its value proposition to prospective students and families is strongly preferred.

Key Competencies for Franklin Leaders

▪ Strategic thinking

▪ Practical execution

▪ Leading and inspiring

▪ Self-awareness

▪ Data-informed decision-making

▪ Cross-cultural communication

▪ Student-centered service

▪ Collaboration

▪ Effectiveness

▪ Continuously evolving

FRANKLIN SWITZERLAND

Mission 

The mission of Franklin Switzerland is to provide a cross-cultural and multinational learning and living environment that inspires students to engage the world. We challenge students through a curriculum that integrates the liberal arts with professional pathways, and classroom learning with Academic Travel to destinations around the world.

A Franklin education produces critical thinkers who are culturally literate, ethically aware and intellectually courageous. We prepare students to become responsible, compassionate, and collaborative leaders in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. 

History 

It was the end of the sixties, and Fleming College, a program of The American School in Switzerland, was closing its doors. Four of its faculty, Theo Brenner, Wilfried Geens, Pascal Tone and Jacques Villaret teamed up with the chair of Fleming’s European board to found a new higher education institution named after Benjamin Franklin. They believed that by providing international experiences to students, Franklin College would strengthen the relationships between members of different nations and cultures.

Pascal Tone spent the summer of 1970 recruiting the first class in New York City while the others completed preparation of the first campus at Villa Cirla, an 18th century building in Lugano. That year, Franklin employed 10 faculty and offered 36 courses under 4 subjects: Study of Civilizations, Art, Politics and Economics, and Languages and Literature. David R. Grace served as First Chairman of the Board.

During the seventies, Franklin moved to Villa Ferrari and then to Villa Sassa, where it was first accredited as a two-year college by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE). In 1986 Franklin College Switzerland finally took residence in its permanent campus on Via Ponte Tresa in Sorengo. In that same year it was accredited as a four-year college by the MSCHE.

The new millennium brought new growth, as the entire academic and administrative community sought to define a new future for Franklin. In 2005, Franklin's undergraduate programs received accreditation from the Swiss University Conference, and in 2006, the college expanded to a second campus formerly occupied by the Leonardo DaVinci school. In 2010, Franklin’s first master’s degree program was created.

2013 saw Franklin receive full institutional accreditation from the Swiss University Conference, making it a recognized higher education institution within the Swiss university system and the only higher education institution in the world fully accredited in both the US and Switzerland. 

In 2023, Franklin opened the McNeely Center of Ideas & Imagination and the Giardino di Luce. Named after Rosemary McNeely and Kevin W. McNeely ’73, Trustee, the Center offers a space for students to engage and strengthen their

interdisciplinary and experiential education at Franklin. Providing a highly visible face for the University, the facade represents the exterior of a book, an ode to education and learning, and includes many living and learning areas for the Franklin community. The ground floor’s P. Gregory Warden Student Center, comprises a lounge area with comfortable, modular furniture, allowing students to come together, study, and relax. The Giardino di Luce, or Garden of Light, created and donated by Nora McNeely Hurley ’81, is a special wellness garden filled with more than 24 types of lush local flora in the naturally terraced slope. The garden encompasses a space between all three residences and serves as a holistic learning environment. Since its opening, the McNeely Center of Ideas & Imagination has become a vibrant hub on campus. 

In 2025, Franklin officially renamed itself and became Franklin Switzerland. From the beginning of the four founders believing in their idea to create a new kind of higher education, Franklin now occupies 9 buildings, including 6 residence halls, and teaches students from over 55 countries majoring in any of 19 disciplines on two connected campuses. The fundamental values, however, have always remained the same: personalized learning through interactions both inside and outside of the classroom, true understanding of people and cultures through direct contact and guided travel, and active engagement with the world as an imperative of global, liberal education.

Academic & Student Life

Franklin Switzerland offers a sense of community, unforgettable student-professor interactions, a breathtaking campus, endless opportunities deriving from its central location in Europe, unique academic experiences inside and outside of the classroom, the exposure and integration of student cultures, and a strong global alumni network.  

Franklin students originate from 60 different countries. As a result, becoming a

Franklin student means studying in a global environment while living in the heart of Europe and connecting with people worldwide as a student, not as a tourist. Franklin provides an incredible academic experience that will contribute to each student’s personal and professional growth. 

Switzerland has four national languages—German, French, Italian, and

Romansh—but English is widely spoken, particularly in universities, international businesses, and major cities. All academic programs at Franklin Switzerland are taught entirely in English. At the same time, students are encouraged to develop proficiency in one of Switzerland's national languages, strengthening both their cultural understanding and career opportunities.

At Franklin Switzerland, students have a unique set of academic opportunities, starting with Franklin’s signature program, Academic Travel.  Academic Travel blends classroom preparation with the opportunity to study with professors in a different country for two weeks every semester. That isn’t the only thing that sets Franklin apart, however. Professors use real-world experiences to teach the practical skills students need in their careers. Franklin hosts industry experts to interactively discuss current and emerging trends.  

Franklin’s international faculty and student body provide an immersive environment of cross-cultural perspectives. Every moment spent on campus, whether studying or relaxing, becomes a learning experience. Franklin offers multicultural events, clubs, and activities to help students grow international competence and confidence. What’s more, Franklin offers opportunities for honors students, for students who may need some additional preparation, and for displaced persons needing additional support to begin or continue university study. 

Franklin Switzerland offers students a unique and dynamic learning environment, where education goes beyond traditional boundaries. Undergraduates can explore a myriad of major fields of study that are deeply intertwined with an interdisciplinary and experiential approach. Its diverse array of majors incorporates various disciplines such as international relations, environmental studies, economics, and art, allowing students to receive a holistic and globally oriented education. The flexibility of the curriculum enables students to shape their academic journey, intertwining their interests and career aspirations.

At Franklin Switzerland, they believe in the transformative power of combining academic theory with real-world practice. Its interdisciplinary approach ensures that students explore subjects from multiple perspectives, fostering critical thinking, problem-solving, and a deeper understanding of global issues. The experiential learning components allow students to engage in practical experiences, internships, and field studies, connecting classroom knowledge to real-world applications and enhancing their professional readiness.

LOCATION

Lugano

The Franklin campus is located on a hillside in Sorengo, above the city of Lugano, in the south of Switzerland. Nestled in the Italian-speaking region, students, faculty, and staff can enjoy a Mediterranean atmosphere while remaining connected to major European cities. 

The city exudes Italian charm; the Mediterranean lifestyle on Lake Lugano, in combination with the surrounding mountains, make Lugano a popular destination. Lugano is the cultural, recreational, financial, and commercial hub of Switzerland’s southernmost, Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, the ideal melting pot of European culture combined with the traits of a small town. It is fun, sophisticated and safe, with dozens of outdoor activities around Lake Lugano, including 40 of Europe’s best mountain bike routes.

Residents can enjoy the city center with Mediterranean-style squares and arcades, numerous parks and every variety of shops and restaurants, as well as the LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Lugano’s new Arts Center where visual arts, music and performing arts come together in a single venue so as to provide the best experience of art in every form. These and other renowned events attract visitors from all over Europe. As a result, French, German and English are likely to be heard on the streets, in addition to the city’s native Italian.

Lugano is the central point of departure for all of Europe. With Lugano’s rail lines and regional airport, all of Europe is within easy reach. Only an hour’s travel from Lugano is Milan, the commercial center of northern Italy — and with a few additional hours, reach Venice, Florence, Strasbourg, Nice, and Innsbruck. 

Switzerland

Located in the heart of Europe, Switzerland borders Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein. One of the most beautiful countries in the world with its striking mountains and breathtaking landscapes, Switzerland is recognized worldwide for its innovation, political stability, outstanding education system, and exceptional quality of life. Switzerland is also consistently ranked among the safest countries in the world, offering a high quality of life and excellent public services. Its well-organized infrastructure and low crime rates make it an attractive destination. As a cultural melting pot with four official languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh), an advocate of global participation, and a well-known hub for efficiency, Switzerland is a great choice for professionals seeking to move abroad.

COMPENSATION

Franklin Switzerland offers a competitive compensation package, including relocation assistance, and a salary commensurate with qualifications and experience. The range identified for this role is 130,000 – 150,000 Swiss Francs / 160,000 – 185,000 US Dollars. This is a full-time, on-campus position based in Lugano, Switzerland. Applicants can expect a welcoming, international, and intercultural working and academic environment, filled with a strong sense of companionship and belonging. Offers of employment will be conditional upon satisfactory results of a background check.

TO APPLY

NES, a national executive search firm specializing in higher education, is Franklin Switzerland with this search for a Vice President for Enrollment Management. If you wish to have a confidential conversation about this opportunity or submit nominations, please contact: Laura Robinson (laura.robinson@nessearches.com) or Drew Nichols (drew.nichols@nessearches.com). To apply, please send the following items by email to: franklin@nessearches.com: 1) a resume detailing relevant experience; 2) a letter of interest that addresses the key areas of this job description and explains why Franklin Switzerland is a compelling next step, and 3) contact information for five professional references.

For best consideration, all application materials should be submitted electronically by October 14, 2026. All inquiries, nominations, and applications will be handled with the utmost confidentiality, and candidates will be notified before references are contacted. The VPEM’s anticipated start date is no later than January 2027.

*Please note that, due to Swiss visa and work-permit regulations, applications from Swiss or EU nationals will be given priority in the evaluation process.

Franklin Switzerland is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. For further information, please see Franklin’s website: https://www.fus.edu