The University of Lynchburg has named Aaron Basko associate vice president for enrollment management. Basko comes to Lynchburg from Sweet Briar College, where he led a turnaround recruitment effort as vice president for enrollment management.
“I’m thrilled to have Aaron on board,” said Vice President for Enrollment, Marketing, and Communications Mike Jones. “His wealth of expertise in admissions and financial aid will help bolster our efforts as we continue to merge marketing and enrollment.”
Basko’s hiring comes as Lynchburg’s marketing and communications team, under Jones’s leadership, has joined forces with the enrollment office to better support an integrated recruitment strategy.
“I have seen increased collaboration between marketing and enrollment under Mike’s leadership in the last few months, and I am confident that with Aaron’s depth of experience in recruitment and retention, we will continue to move in the right direction,” said President Dr. Alison Morrison-Shetlar.
In addition to Sweet Briar, Basko has held key roles at Salisbury University in Maryland (2008-20), Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania (2001-08), and Rivier College in New Hampshire (1998-2001).
At Sweet Briar, Basko helped engineer a comeback from a four-year enrollment low to a 21% increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020-21, he grew applications by 37% and new enrollment by 40%, leading to a 60% increase in revenue.
At Salisbury, where Basko served as assistant vice president of enrollment management and career services, he delivered the largest and most diverse incoming class in university history, including a 14% growth in first-year students and a 20% increase in diversity in Fall 2019.
At Franklin & Marshall, he co-led an enrollment team that transformed a 15-year decline into a five-year turnaround. His team reinvented all aspects of customer service, publications development, programming, outreach, and diversity recruitment. During his five years there, applications grew by 64%, with the yield rate increasing from 27% to 30%.
“I’m excited to join the University of Lynchburg community,” Basko said. “This is an amazing place, with everything students need to develop into difference-makers. I’m grateful for the support of the community as we set a new course for the University’s enrollment strategy.”
Basko has a master’s in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s in international studies from West Virginia Wesleyan. He has written and presented extensively and recently published two pieces, The Small-College Enrollment Playbook and Have We Gotten Student Success Completely Backward?, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
