By Autumn Walden, Editor, AACRAO Connect, Content Strategy Manager, AACRAO
If you search the National Registry for the Strategic Enrollment Management Endorsement Program (SEM-EP), you’ll find an impressive list of over 80 professionals who have earned the SEM Endorsement Badge. We first met Jonathan Breaker two years ago as he began the SEM-EP. As a recent program graduate, Breaker joins an international network of professionals equipped with the strategic insight to tackle modern enrollment challenges.
Breaker brings his Blackfoot and Cree heritage and years of experience in both Canadian government service and tribal college administration to his role as Program Officer for Tribal College University Student Success at the American Indian College Fund. He is part of a select group of professionals who have completed the rigorous 12-18 month program. While the SEM-EP has enriched enrollment management leaders for over a decade, Breaker's focus on tribal colleges—where student populations typically range from 500 to 1,500—adds an essential perspective to the field.
In this Q&A interview, we catch up with Breaker to celebrate his achievement and learn about his journey from public service to becoming a champion for strategic enrollment management at tribal colleges with a mission to transform how these vital institutions approach student recruitment, retention, and learner success.
What influenced your decision to choose the AACRAO SEM-EP?
I started working for the American Indian College Fund (referred to as the College Fund) in 2022 as a Program Officer for the Cultivating Native Student Success (CNSS) initiative. As part of the initiative, I work with Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) to develop SEM planning. Before that, I worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, for nearly 10 years.
I started learning about SEM through the “Core Concepts of Strategic Enrollment Management” webinar offered by AACRAO. I thought it would be a good opportunity to expand my learning and application of SEM to TCUs further by taking the SEM-EP program. It was a good decision because it really helped me get a basis to understand how to apply SEM to the context of a TCU, as I could also draw on my own experiences working at IAIA. It took some time, but I appreciated the opportunity to apply what I was learning along the way.
What specific aspects of the SEM-EP do you find most valuable in addressing the unique needs of tribal colleges where staff members often wear many hats?
TCUs are different from other institutions in higher education as they are tribally chartered colleges and universities serving one or more tribal communities. Their missions promote culturally grounded and responsive place-based education, promoting tribal sovereignty and Native nation-building. Many are small and rural, and unlike other colleges and universities, they lack adequate resources, funding, and infrastructure. Despite this environment's challenges, the people who work at TCUs are resilient. Community and shared purpose bring people together, especially in challenging times.
The SEM planning frameworks covered in SEM-EP can offer TCUs a basis to better work with their institutional data to inform enrollment management priorities and goals and assist in developing decision-making processes. Undertaking processes like benchmarking and developing key enrollment indicators can assist TCUs in using their data to make it work for them, especially with respect to allocating funding and resources and aligning with existing programming. It’s essentially about working better with what you have and strategizing in a multi-year setting.
Having a representative and organized SEM committee is also helpful for TCUs in making decisions that promote accountability and transparency. It is a challenge to set up these SEM committees because there might be different ways of working and communicating, but once this is done, the committees can serve as the backbone of SEM at each institution.
How has this influenced your approach to coaching these institutions?
As a Program Officer in my work with TCUs, it’s important to understand that each TCU is unique and it is crucial to meet TCUs where they are. In other words, it’s not a “one size fits all” approach to SEM planning. What works for one institution might not work for another, but there are ways that TCUs can learn from each other to further their SEM planning because they have similar needs and deal with the same challenges.
As an Indigenous person and having worked at a TCU, I understand each institution has its own organizational culture and ways of being, knowing, and communicating. For me, building relationships based on trust, respect, and reciprocity is critical, reflecting Native cultural values and how Native people treat each other. Applying SEM must be meaningful for TCUs, their campuses, and the tribal communities they serve.
How do you envision blending traditional Native American educational values with SEM practices?
I am Blackfoot and Plains Cree from Siksika Nation in southern Alberta, Canada. I grew up on Siksika and was fortunate enough to learn my language and grow up around my Blackfoot culture, spirituality, and beliefs. For me, SEM has to be culturally responsive and reflect the mission and vision, and align with the strategic planning of each institution. In that way, I try not to use too many SEM academic concepts as they may come off as jargon. Instead, I encourage each institution to use or develop its own terms and understanding of SEM as it applies to its institutions because it has to be meaningful and understood.
Could you give an example of where you see these intersecting effectively?
I can’t speak for any specific TCU, but I can share an example from my Blackfoot language and culture. We call ourselves Nitsitapii (the real people or Native people) and to be Nitsitapii means to be a full or a complete person. It’s a way of using the medicine wheel teachings, ensuring we are working on the full mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual parts of ourselves to be complete and full people. Education is a way to be a full, complete person; it’s a lifelong process, and it never ends.
I think SEM helps Nitsitapiikowaiks (Native people) to get there. It is a process, tool, or framework positioned and integrated in a culturally grounded and responsive way that is meaningful and understood in the context of each TCU. Some TCUs articulate this in their own ways to describe how they define SEM planning and align it with their institutional missions, visions, and strategic planning, reflecting tribal language, values, and culture.
Who inspires you?
In this work, I am inspired by the early generations of TCU leadership, staff, faculty, and students who helped set up the TCU system of colleges and universities in the past 50 years. When we say TCUs have constraints in resources and funding, I can’t imagine what they all had to deal with in those early years. Thankfully, this is all documented and available for people to learn about at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC).
Personally, I am inspired by my own elders, like my mother and others from my community who persevered in their own educational journeys, particularly with respect to boarding or residential schools, racism, poverty, and the lack of Indigenous control of education. Their experience and examples give me the courage and spirit to complete my education and work in this field.
What advice would you give to up-and-coming professionals in the enrollment management profession?
From my SEM-EP program, I learned most of us never grew up aspiring to be enrollment management professionals. I wanted to do something exotic and travel, so I thought I would be a journalist or travel writer. Working in this field has allowed me to give back to the Indigenous community as a whole, and being of service has been valuable and rewarding. If you are in this field, you probably already found it, but it’s important to make those connections for yourself; it takes you a long way.
What are some of the unique challenges facing enrollment management in your region?
I work in “Indian Country.” Although not necessarily a geographic region, it’s considered more like spaces wherever you find Native people, like reservations, workplaces, powwows, and events, and it can include colleges and universities. In this space, there are challenges in enrollment management that differ from the mainstream, and underfunding has always been the main challenge, especially for TCUs and Native students.
Invisibility is also an issue, especially in the United States, where Indigenous people and their voices are often not seen or heard. This includes invisibility with respect to demographic and institutional student data in higher education. This is important because data and research drive policy and change, and there needs to be change when it comes to increasing support for Native students and tribal institutions like TCUs.