Running An UPDATE Statement Only If A Column Exists

I'm trying to write a script that would only update a column if it exists.

This is what I tried first:

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'Enrollment' AND COLUMN_NAME = 'nosuchfield')
BEGIN
UPDATE dbo.Enrollment SET nosuchfield='666'
END

And got the following error:

Server: Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Invalid column name 'nosuchfield'.

I'm curious why MS-SQL would do syntax checking in this case. I've used this type of check with ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN commands before and it worked perfectly fine.

The only way I can think of to get around this is with:

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'Enrollment' AND COLUMN_NAME = 'nosuchfield')
BEGIN
declare @sql nvarchar(100)
SET @sql = N'UPDATE dbo.Enrollment SET nosuchfield=''666'''
execute sp_executesql @sql
END

which looks a bit awkward. Is there a better way to accomplish this?