Founder, Director of Content and Marketing; Chief Executive Officer
J. Andrew Waugh is a boarding school admissions and student engagement professional, researcher, and self-described marketing nerd who is fascinated by what makes families choose a school, what makes students feel like they belong there, and how schools tell those stories authentically.
As Founder and Director of Content and Marketing for Beyond the Bell, Andrew leads the website, social media, editorial strategy, digital marketing, and multimedia content while also supporting schools with student involvement and co-curricular programming. He is particularly interested in where enrollment marketing and student experience intersect. To Andrew, the best school marketing is not simply a polished website, clever campaign, or beautiful viewbook. It is finding the stories already happening in dorms, weekend programs, student organizations, traditions, and everyday campus life and helping families understand why those experiences matter.
That perspective comes from experiencing boarding school from both sides. Andrew is a proud alumnus of Brehm Preparatory School, a boarding school for students with learning differences, and his career has since taken him across admissions, alumni relations, residential life, student programming, international education, and enrollment marketing.
Andrew currently serves as Admissions & Student Engagement Associate and Research Fellow at Franklin Academy, where his work spans prospective family engagement, Student Ambassadors, student involvement, engagement data, co-curricular transcript development, and residential life within a learning-differences boarding school community.
Previously, he led boarding activities, weekend programming, and underclass residential life at Tallulah Falls School and served as a Royal Thai Scholars Summer Fellow at Brewster Academy. Across those experiences, he became increasingly interested in a question that now sits at the center of both his professional work and doctoral research: What happens after a student says yes to a school?
Andrew is pursuing an Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership, studying how student involvement and residential programming influence re-enrollment decisions in boarding schools. His work connects that research with a practitioner’s perspective on enrollment, marketing, belonging, and the experiences that make a school feel like home.
When Andrew is not thinking about enrollment funnels, website analytics, student participation data, or whether a boarding school’s social media actually shows prospective families what it feels like to live there, he is probably writing the next Beyond the Bell article, brainstorming another student programming idea, or finding a new way to connect the story a school markets with the experience its students actually live.
For Andrew, that is what Beyond the Bell is ultimately about: helping schools tell better stories because they are creating better student experiences worth telling stories about.