The media's admissions beat is a very active feed each fall as application deadlines approach. Headlines invite clicks, shares, chatter...and often anxiety as students and parents consume newsfeeds that brim with content. But every admissions-themed article is not "news you can use," and some advice columns need a dose of interpretation. This week, AB host Lee Coffin and producer Charlotte Albright have a conversation about several recent admissions articles from The New York Times and Forbes—and the headlines that sometimes accelerate applicant angst—as they ponder what these posts really highlight. “I want to offer a forum for explanation,” the Dartmouth dean observes, "and what nuggets of information are worth adopting as valuable guidance."
The media's admissions beat is a very active feed each fall as application deadlines approach. Headlines invite clicks, shares, chatter...and often anxiety as students and parents consume newsfeeds that brim with content. But every admissions-themed article is not "news you can use," and some advice columns need a dose of interpretation. This week, AB host Lee Coffin and producer Charlotte Albright have a conversation about several recent admissions articles from The New York Times and Forbes—and the headlines that sometimes accelerate applicant angst—as they ponder what these posts really highlight. “I want to offer a forum for explanation,” the Dartmouth dean observes, "and what nuggets of information are worth adopting as valuable guidance."
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, and this is Admissions Beat.
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Okay. If you're listening to this podcast, my guess is Google and the internet pixies have figured out that you like to listen to things or read things about college admissions. That happens to me all the time. I pick up my phone, I go to Google or my newsfeed, and it is flowing with stories. Some big, some small, but it is a news feed frenzy, a feeding frenzy of stories about the work I do.
So, it occurred to me we should take a timeout as we move through Season 8 and chat about some of these. So, when we come back, my producer and resident journalist, Charlotte Albright, will join me for a news roundup where we poke through some of the stories that might be in your newsfeed, try and make some sense of what the stories are telling you. Are they trying to get you anxious? Or are they trying to give you advice? Those are different things. So, when we come back, we will parse your newsfeed and try and make sense of the feeding frenzy that it may be. We'll be right back.
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Hello, Charlotte.
Charlotte Albright:
Hello, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Welcome back to Admissions Beat.
Charlotte Albright:
Thank you. I'm behind the scenes most of the time. So here we are, face to face.
Lee Coffin:
Here we are. Yeah. But you're two weeks in a row because we had Quiz Bowl and now here we are on Newsfeed. So, nice to have you.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
For listeners, Charlotte is producer of Admissions Beat. In her previous life, she was the host of MaineWatch on Maine Public Television and Maine Things Considered on Maine Public Radio. Was a reporter with Vermont Public Radio. And has been with Admissions Beat since the very first second, eight seasons ago. So, yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
That's right.
Lee Coffin:
So, Charlotte, we talked about having a conversation about all these stories. So, what surfaced as you were poking around the internet and thinking about the newsfeed you saw?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, it's interesting. Over the years, I see stories as falling into two camps. And they're both equally useful, but you just have to sort of understand what kind of story you're reading. So, in the first camp, we have stories that kind of shed light on obstacles to a successful application. They tend to be systemic obstacles, something that the author of the article thinks is wrong with a system or at least needs reform. There are a batch of stories like that kind of making the rounds right now. Several of them happen to be from The New York Times.
Lee Coffin:
Those are the ones that land on the front page. And I get up in the morning and my either texts or my inbox are full of people saying, "Have you seen this?" And often I hadn't yet, but it becomes the story of my day where people want comment on that.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. And let me give you an insider tip as a journalist. I often would write stories or even do radio stories and somebody else would put the headlines to that story. That wasn't my headline necessarily. I didn't want the headline to scream like that. So don't be fooled. If you see a headline that makes your hair go on fire, that might not be what the story really is. And that's true of a couple of these.
Lee Coffin:
And that's really helpful if you're a parent especially reading these headlines. It's easy to get distracted by that. And I've had the same conversation Charlotte just pointed out where I'll see a story, I'll get frustrated by the headline. Sometimes I was interviewed for the story itself, and I'll go back to the reporter who tells me, "That was the editor, not me. I wrote something and it got presented in such a way to get clicks." And part of our reason for being on this pod is to help sort through that dynamic. And admission beat, with little A and little B, is very active every fall as you get close to the deadline. And then *those decisions are released and then it happens again in the spring. So, there's a cyclical nature to the amount of traffic that shows up in the newsfeed.
And I think the parallel I would see, Charlotte, since we're recording this the day after Election Day, is there's coverage of the structural part of college admission that feels like they're covering an election. It's very horse race, it's very stats, it's very who got in, who didn't, who lost, not, "Here's the substance of the process, and let us help you understand it."
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. Because losing is a relative term. If you get into college, you've won. If you haven't gotten into your first choice college, you haven't lost. In that same spirit of reassurance, we're going to talk about another batch of stories. They happen to be this time from Forbes, most of them. They're more pragmatic how-to stories or how-not-to stories. And so, stick with us, listeners, because you may hear some things that are a little dispiriting at the top of this episode, but by the time you get to the bottom of it, you're going to see what the detours of those roadblocks might be. So, let's start with the roadblock story.
Lee Coffin:
Okay.
Charlotte Albright:
Here's one. It ran the 22nd of September in The New York Times. The author is Jeffrey Selingo. He is the author of Dream School: Finding the College That's Right for You. The headline is “Don't Fall for the Rigged College Game.”
Lee Coffin:
If I can parse that headline, “rigged” is the word that jumps out at me as I hear that.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. But the article is not really about rigging. It's about admissions anxiety. And he tries to figure out where that comes from. And what he says, and I think if I fact-checked this, he'd be right, that students are getting increasingly nervous about their chances of getting into selective colleges. So they're expanding their lists to 20 or 30, but they're not expanding their lists in a balanced way. Too many of them are just making longer lists of selective colleges with the misconception that if they just apply to more reach, so-called reach schools, they're expanding their reach, they're increasing their chances of getting into one. Is that true or false, Lee?
Lee Coffin:
It's true that that's what's happening. It's false that it's a strategy I would advise. And this happens a lot for students who are focused on the very selective part of the admissions distribution where you think, "Well, if I flood the field with as many applications as I can, it's like buying a fist full of lottery tickets. Maybe one of them will pay off." And what you've done in applying to that many is you've jammed the pool at those places with a lot of candidacies that are hard to assess because you don't have the time when you apply to make a thoughtful connection between you and the place. So, as an admission officer, you read them and you're scratching your head saying, "Is this really a fit? Does this person really know us?"
In some admission environments, the phrase demonstrated interest comes up, where the place is trying to figure out, "Are you really a legit applicant? Or are you just shopping for as many yeses as you can get?" The college in that space tends to lean away from the shopper and towards the person who has done her homework and has filed an application that is very institution specific. The frenzy of overapplying takes a small number of applicants, distributes them across a lot of different pools, and it's false volume. And so that creates the headline at the end of the cycle where volume shot up. But was it really volume or was it really a few people overapplying and making it look like we were all flooded with candidates?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, here's an interesting direct quote. I'm going to run this by you. Selingo says, "The frantic competition that we've made the norm..." He's kind of blaming admissions officers here. I'm not sure that's where the blame lies, but anyway…"The frantic competition that we've made the norm is based on a lie about what makes a college education truly valuable. That lie," he says, "is that scarcity equals quality, and that a lower acceptance rate means that you're going to get a better education."
Lee Coffin:
False.
Charlotte Albright:
That he says is false. Do you agree?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah, because there are places that have thousands more applicants than can ever be accommodated in the class. That's called selectivity. And if you're highly selective, it means you're taking 30% or fewer of the people who apply. If you get into the most selective band, where I work, you're taking a tiny number of the qualified pool, because you can't accommodate everybody.
There is a broad assumption in the admissions audience that selectivity is the gold standard, that the tinier the acceptance rate, in other words, the harder it is to get in, must mean it is something more valuable than a place that is "easier" to get in. And you move across lots of campuses…I won't name them…but there are places with acceptance rates of 60%, 70%, 80% that are wonderful institutions. They are not hard to get into, but the quality of the undergraduate program is quite high. And there are other places with really tiny acceptance rates where the undergraduate experience may not be their reason for being. It may be more of a graduate-centered university, and there's a tiny acceptance rate, but that's not lining up with quality. It's just harder to get in for whatever reason.
And the other thing I have to just say, Charlotte, is, as a consumer, what you don't see in these giant pools is how has the college itself generated what I'll call false volume, making it easy to apply. So there's no application fee. There's no supplement to the Common App. There's no testing. And as you move those elements away, it's a click. And some places have said there's no application fee. So you get a big, big pool, but I don't know that that in and of itself means the tiny acceptance rate that it generated is a proof point of quality. It might be, but in and of itself, it's not.
Charlotte Albright:
So, if that's not the proof point, Selingo is offering two other ones. Well, he's offering one, which is what he calls student engagement. How engaged are students in their learning at a given institution? He says there's even a survey of student engagement that applicants could look at, but I'm thinking there are other ways of figuring that out, like visiting the school, talking to other students there, one-on-one. And I'm not sure people do that.
Lee Coffin:
I think they do it less than they used to. And hard to do it when you're applying to two dozen places. You start to dilute your effectiveness because you're spreading yourself too thinly. But I think that what I hear increasingly is, students are looking for proof points around career outcomes. "What's the return on the investment of the education itself? Can you get a job at the end of it?" That's a proof point. That has nothing to do necessarily with the acceptance rate. But it's a data point that could be discovered campus by campus if that's the marker of your own search priority. It could be affordability, which we talked about a couple weeks ago. And the acceptance rate is a less salient issue than "Does this place meet your full demonstrated need? How much debt will you have when you graduate? What's the opportunity to pay back that debt based on the job you have?" So, these are outcomes more than inputs. So, I think that's what Selingo's getting at, is there are other ways of assessing institutional quality.
Charlotte Albright:
I also followed up because this article generated a lot of comments.
Lee Coffin:
Of course, it did.
Charlotte Albright:
And so, one of the commenters made a good comment, I thought. She said that "The real proof point is the quality of the faculty." But how do you discern the quality of a faculty?
Lee Coffin:
There's so much information available to students and parents and guidance counselors about the quality of a faculty. By definition, faculty will have a PhD. Some disciplines, the terminal degree might be an MFA. Some of them have JDs. The point I'm making is, they're well-educated in their disciplines. If you go to the university or college website and search through the academic program and you say, "I'm really interested in studying political science," go to that department. There will be a list of the professors in that department. Their bios will be there. You'll see where they went to undergrad, where they went to grad school. Sometimes they had careers in government, in this example, before they came into academia. Is that interesting to you? Do you want someone who's been a practitioner as well as someone who's been an academic? What courses do they teach undergrads? What books have they written, articles have they published? What's their area of expertise?
So, when you were on public radio, I'm going to guess, you interviewed professors from the colleges and universities in Maine on different topics.
Charlotte Albright:
Right.
Lee Coffin:
So, I mean, you're going to an expert. If you're covering an environmental topic, you're going to look for an environmentalist at Bowdoin or the University of Maine, probably.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. Yeah. And I did my homework before I chose which ones. And I think that's what I say to students. Be a journalist. Be a journalist as you're pursuing college. Even if you don't want to go into journalism, kind of act like one as you're searching for a college.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And your major, to the extent you know what it is you'd like to study, is a place to start. Just go to that department at the places where you're looking and say to yourself, "What area within this big topic?" So, like, English is one I come back to a lot, was your major. English is the macro, but underneath that name, is it literature? Oh, yeah. What kind of literature? Is it poetry? Is it fiction? Is it nonfiction? Is it creative writing? Is it film? Is it comparative literature? Is it playwriting? I mean, so many concentrations within what is rolled up into the English department. Find the faculty with those interests and see who are they and what do they teach. That's an excellent way of understanding the curriculum, the program, which I talked about a lot, but also the people who'll be in the classroom with you.
Charlotte Albright:
There's a way to see this through the lens of students, but I would add a word of caution. There are these sites called Rate My Professors sites. I've taught myself and I noticed that not very many students use them. And so you might be duped, because three students say this is a not very good professor. Maybe they got a bad grade. There are a lot of reasons that go into those ratings. I think there are ways of finding out what students think of professors, but I'm not a big fan of those sites. What do you think?
Lee Coffin:
I think like so much of the world we're in now, it's easy to have an opinion and just share it. I was on a website yesterday and I clicked on... I was buying something and I clicked on the reviews. And most of them were ecstatic, a few were not. And I thought, "How could they have bought the same thing?"
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
They had such wildly different opinions. And the majority were in the this-is-fantastic category and I followed that theme for what it's worth. I'll make my own decision-
Charlotte Albright:
Well, some of them were paid.
Lee Coffin:
Some of them were paid, yeah. So you have in this rate-your-professors space the same issue that a lot of these internet-based opinions occupy.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Who is the person telling you this? And is it a reliable source?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, let's jump to what I think is perhaps the most sensational story in the group.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Oh, boy.
Charlotte Albright:
It is also in The New York Times. It's, interestingly, in the Business section. And it's about Tulane. So, an early-decision student backed out of Tulane, and Tulane punished the high school by imposing a one-year ban. It happened to be Colorado Academy. I think there were other high schools they didn't name. And they said, "Okay, you had this kid who pulled out. You can't have any more kids applying early decision for a year. And use that year to try to impress upon applicants that when they do apply early decision, they should mean it." First of all, is it unusual to have people pull out of early decision, Lee, in your experience?
Lee Coffin:
It's unusual. It happens. A couple a year will respond to the offer and say, "I can't make this work." And it's typically financial aid-based where the institution has offered need-based aid or maybe it was a merit award, but the family looks at the financial aid and says, "I can't do this." And that is the standard reason to decline an early decision, a binding decision.
Occasionally, you have other factors. We had a couple of international students last year who were admitted early, who, later in the spring, came back and said, "The geopolitics have changed since I applied and enrolled, and I don't feel comfortable coming to the U.S. today." We honored that and we released them.
I think the nut of what that story was examining is the idea that a student who applies early decision... So it's a binding agreement. It's not legally binding, but it's an honor code. And the form a student signs says, "If admitted, I agree to enroll and to withdraw my other applications." And it's a longstanding practice that early-decision campuses have as they invite students to tell us, "This is my first choice. If you admit me, I will enroll." And that form is co-signed. And I think this is where Colorado Academy in this example got pulled into the story. It is co-signed by a parent or guardian and the college or guidance counselor. I've never heard of a scenario like this one.
Charlotte Albright:
In which the high school itself is punished, not the student, actually, the high school. And so, I want to point out that, again, this is one of those stories that could raise alarms because everybody would think, "Oh, this is going to happen in my high school." This is a one- or three-high-school scenario, and it's one college. I'm assuming you don't think that this whole scenario plays out across the country, but maybe the story is doing a service by reminding people that when you do decide on early decision, you better have done your homework way in advance to make sure this really is the school that you want. And that means getting your search started a little sooner than other people.
Lee Coffin:
Right. And what was missing in the story you're referencing was an explanation for why the student did not enroll. I don't know what the reason was. Was it financial aid? Did someone have a change of heart? And to that change of heart, I think it's the caution you're offering. Like, don't jump into a pool. I mean, here we are, mid-November, so the early rounds are already underway. But for juniors and their parents who will often say to me, "We will apply somewhere early. We just don't know where." So you kind of open a search with this expectation that by November, you will apply early.
My niece, as she goes through her search this fall, told my sister, "Well, I have to apply early action to a bunch of places." And I said to my sister, "I don't think any of the places on our list have early action." And I said, "Where's that coming from?" And she said, "All her friends are doing early action, so she feels like she must." And I said, "Well, you can't apply early action when the campuses you've been looking at don't offer that as an option." But the story there is, the peer effect kind of kicks in and everybody does it.
And I think the caution you're raising, Charlotte, is a wise one to say to everyone, if it's binding, be thoughtful about the reason you're applying. Don't do it because you think it's the easy way to get in. For seniors, you might be tempted to jump into an early-decision round 2 pool. Everybody doesn't offer that, but the campuses that do will run a second round of early in January, February. And some students will use it to recalibrate after ED1 or early action and say, "Okay, that worked," or "It didn't work. Let me try again with the second round." You don't want to be a serial early applicant, jumping from an early action to an early decision to an early decision to, unless you know the places in that order are, "That was my first choice. This is my second choice. This is now my first choice because the other place didn't work." Those strategies are what gum up the story.
But the Times story covering Tulane, I would say to listeners and readers, don't get overly alarmed as if that is a norm. It is an exceptional story that got picked up and put on the admission beat as a "Wow, look at this."
Charlotte Albright:
It is exceptional. I can also imagine a student who's sort of a high achiever. How do students get high grades in high school? They get stuff done. And they tend to get stuff done early. And they're the kind of kid that might want to get a college application done early, right? But a lot of our episodes have featured guests who advise students not to try to get this over with. This is not a process that you necessarily want to rush because you learn about yourself as you do it. You also learn more about other schools you might never have heard of. But if you rush it and you want to check the box, you've kind of cut off some of that learning and, really, some of that enjoyment. It's just hard to say to a 17-year-old, "This is going to be fun." But you could make it fun or at least you could make it educational if you stretch it out a little bit more.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, in the Parent POV episode a couple weeks ago, Sean talked about the evolution of his daughter's thinking and her priorities and what was true early was not true at the finish. And I think that happens a lot, where you try things on and realize, "I don't really like the way this fits," and you keep looking. And then something clicks. And something may click really early. Fantastic. Something may click senior spring. Fantastic.
And we'll come back to this. Our season finale will be about... I'm calling it “After Early.” We'll talk about, okay, the early round is done, you're moving into regular decision, now what? And I think that's what you're getting at.
But I think the decision to apply is one that invites thoughtfulness. And whenever you have to sign your name to an agreement, that should also invite thoughtfulness. And I think that's the moral of this story. And I'm not commenting on Tulane's decision. I don't work there. I'm not condoning it. I'm not supporting it. But I understand the intent, which was to say, "We're trying to reinforce the idea that this is a commitment that you made, and you should be ready to honor that."
Charlotte Albright:
Let's switch gears a little bit. When I read, and I know when you read, news stories about higher education, it's always wonderful to find one that's actually written by a student who just got into college. We rarely get that perspective, but we get this in a guest essay in The New York Times ran in July, July 25th. Alex Bronzini-Vender. He just had gotten into college himself. So, here's his title. You're not going to like this. “Elite Colleges Have Found a New Virtue for Applicants to Fake.” He's looking at this question that is appearing on a lot of applications now, and he calls it the disagreement question. It goes something like this. "Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was not your own. How did you find common ground?" First of all, Lee, is that a common question now that's making the rounds on applications? Or is it new to you?
Lee Coffin:
I think it's new-ish. We have a question in that spirit which points toward our institutional commitment to dialogue and to say part of your experience in college is to learn how to listen and to learn how to absorb information, find common ground when you can. So, that's the spirit of any of these questions. And if you look at higher ed over the last couple of years, there have been a lot of campuses upended by political unrest.
So, I think the reason we're asking what is dubbed the "disagreement question" is it's an interest from a campus in trying to find voices to include in the student body who will facilitate conversation and to give evidence from your life about how you have been someone who brings your opinion to the fore, but can do so in a way that is constructive, not always combative. And that's a really interesting perspective to try and highlight. What do you want us to know?
Charlotte Albright:
Alex is wondering how to answer that question. Should he avoid hot-button issues in which he and another person really went at it? He doesn't want to look like he's right and the other person's wrong. On the other hand, he doesn't want to showcase a conversation in which he was wrong.
Lee Coffin:
I think the rabbit hole in this question is trying to anticipate what the admission officer "wants" to read. And I've said this many times, "I don't know. You tell me what you want me to know about you." And so, if you are a hyper-opinionated person and you want the college to know that, you're saying, "If you admit me and I enroll, I'm going to be the person with my hand in the air every class. I'm going to go to protests. I might start one. I might say something outrageous." And then the college can decide, "Does this voice make this place more dynamic and interesting?" Don't hide yourself. Don't be obnoxious. I think that's the one caution I would say.
I can think of lots of examples where I've been in a debate where somebody gets nasty. Don't go there. Being rude, being disrespectful, being bombastic is not something that is going to make an admission officer say, "Yeah, wow." It could make the admission committee say, "Okay, do we really want to drop this voice into this student body?" Some places might say, "Yeah, that's who we are. We're a bumpy, loud collection of individuals that have opinions." If you're applying to a place that's celebrating and prioritizing consensus, how do you show that place that you're a consensus builder? I mean, those are the invitations in the application, not that you're going to say something right or wrong. It's what's the evidence that responds to the question.
Charlotte Albright:
The other thing I like about reading stories on the admissions beat, small A, small B, is that often there's room for comment. And so, if I were commenting to this one in a very civil way, again, I would question his final conclusion. He's a bit cynical at the end and he thinks students who are applying to colleges will game this question. They will fake their earnestness. And they will get tutors to help them fake their earnestness. And it seems to me, what I've learned about college admissions from you is, that kind of fakeness is easy to detect. Am I right?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, yeah. The poetry of earnestness is, it's organic, it's sincere, you can feel it. And when you read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications each cycle, as you move from one to the next to the next, you do develop a way of understanding something that is true versus something that's been spun. Can't always catch it. I love that word, earnest, anyway. An earnest voice does resonate. And I think you have to trust admission officers for our humanity. We're meeting 17- and 18-year-olds in their own words. And there's not a magic formula that if you sprinkle a few words in and a couple of numbers, you're going to charm us or fake us into an outcome that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Charlotte Albright:
All right. So, let's jump into a set of articles that Forbes has published.
Lee Coffin:
Okay.
Charlotte Albright:
A lot of them have to do with extracurriculars. We haven't talked about that much on Admissions Beat here. And so, I was really fascinated by that. There's one by Liz Doe Stone. She's the CEO of Top Tier Admissions. So I guess that's a company that helps people.
Lee Coffin:
It's an independent counseling.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay. So you can see this is going to be pragmatic. This is going to be advice-driven. It appeared, actually, on the 3rd of November. It's pretty recent. And the title of it is “Why Showing Up Still Matters In College Admissions.” Here's a direct quote I want you to respond to. "Many students can articulate empathy, but they struggle to experience in real time. They write eloquently about leadership but feel paralyzed when faced with genuine collaboration." The question here is, if we are entering an era where students are learning to talk about how they feel about other people, they are going to tell you about empathy, is that enough or do they need to show it? And if they show it, how do they do that?
Lee Coffin:
Show's better than tell. There are certain qualities that bubble out of an application that appear beyond the student's part of the file. So, the teacher recommendations, the counselor recommendation, an interview, a peer recommendation. You start to see them saying the same thing about the person. So you didn't have to say, "I'm empathetic." The other people all said it about you and became a chorus that helped the reader say, "This person is empathetic." I started reading files yesterday, and that happened, where each piece of this student's application described him in the exact same way. The supporting players in the file, the recommendations especially, were the ones who knit all those threads together and helped me conclude, "He is this."
Charlotte Albright:
And it's not enough for him to say, "I am this." He needs to say, "I did this," or "I am doing this." And one of the things that this author is warning about is something called performative service, where it looks like you just racked up a bunch of volunteer hours at a bunch of nonprofits, just as you say, flood the zone. That doesn't work, does it?
Lee Coffin:
It shouldn't be why you're doing it. Performative service, to use this phrase, falls into the category of this looks good for college. I mean, I go back to my own high school experience. I remember people signing up for clubs saying, "This will look good for college." And the activities list is just a list unless those organizations and activities mean something to you. And when they do, the other parts of your file are going to show it. When we had the episode last season of Lessons from the Stage, and I shared my own history in drama club and community theater, I didn't just write drama club treasurer in junior year, president in senior year, best actor, senior... I mean, all true statements. The experience of being in those shows was what animated me.
The student I was reading yesterday was the founding president of a mindfulness organization. So I wrote that down. And then I got to the essay, and the student talked about his parents' challenges with mental wellness. And the mindfulness activity that the student had founded at the high school directly connected to what was happening at home. So, that was impressive, that someone took this life experience, what is it like to have a parent with mental health challenges in middle school and high school in the student's experience. And how in the extracurricular space is this student leaning into that family dynamic, trying to understand it, trying to bring other peers together who might have the same thing but don't know how to talk about it.
Charlotte Albright:
So, that makes me think that when you're choosing people to write your recommendations, don't stop at your academic mentors or tutors. Maybe the drama coach is the best person to write it if that's the thing that you put all your heart and soul in.
Lee Coffin:
Well, the teacher recs are supposed to be from a classroom.
Charlotte Albright:
Oh, okay.
Lee Coffin:
So, if you have a teacher who is also your extracurricular coach, perfect. But if you're just going to your dance instructor as an extracurricular, not as an academic, that's an extra letter that you certainly can send in. If somebody from outside your course of study has something you might want to bring in, like maybe you're in the church youth group and you want your minister to talk about you and your character, great. And just kind of as I say that, I had a question the other day from someone who was asking about extracurriculars and, "Did they all need to be school-based?" And I said, "No." In this example I'm giving, church youth group is certainly an extracurricular, but it's not happening within the walls of your high school. Generally, you might be in Christian fellowship. You might be attending a religious high school, so it falls really organically inside that. But the things you do in your community, those count. The jobs you have, those count. You might be someone doing volunteer work. That doesn't happen necessarily through your high school. That's part of this extracurricular portrait you're sketching.
Charlotte Albright:
There's news you can use, which is that you can ask for letters outside of the classroom and add them as extras, as long as you've covered the ground with your teachers.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I would say, the other little news you could use, so borrowing from the Dartmouth application, we have an optional peer recommendation where we say to an applicant, "You're welcome to submit a letter from a peer, however you define it, who can speak to your qualities as a member of a community or an organization." Anyone could do a peer recommendation. College doesn't have to ask for that for the applicant to say, "John, will you write this letter on my behalf and I'll send it in as a peer recommendation? Perfect." That's a really good example of something you can initiate that, in my experience, brings a really lovely perspective into a file.
Charlotte Albright:
So, as we wrap up, let's jump into two Forbes stories that are really specific and succinct because they are lists of dos and don'ts. Both of them are written by Christopher Rim. He's the CEO of Command Education. Is that another-
Lee Coffin:
It sounds like another independent counseling.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay. So, they appeared this June and also this fall. And the one that I want to start with is titled “The Surprising Curriculars That Can Get You Into The Ivy League.” Surprising. So, of course, people are going to read this.
Lee Coffin:
Hate the headline.
Charlotte Albright:
First, Rim gives you some don'ts, the curriculars that might not get you into the Ivy League. The first one, avoid pay-to-play volunteer programs abroad, which he calls voluntourism. What is that?
Lee Coffin:
So, pay to play, it's someone purchasing a program overseas with a service component to it.
Charlotte Albright:
So you bought your way into it?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. It's kind of a packaged program that sounds like something, "Okay, I'm going to plop down some money. I'll get to go to maybe a developing country, have a service project that I can then use as my story."
Charlotte Albright:
Okay. Doesn't sound like that's going to float your boat.
Lee Coffin:
No.
Charlotte Albright:
Not so much. Okay. The next one he says not to do is “The Club You Joined Senior Fall.”
Lee Coffin:
Yes and no. If you get to 12th grade, or for juniors, you're in 11th grade and you're like, "Uh-oh, I don't have a lot on my activities resume. Let's start joining everything," that late-breaking set of activities doesn't necessarily move your needle. However, I said yes and no. You may get to your senior fall and there's something that only a senior can join. Like, at my high school, the only people who could be on yearbook were seniors.
Charlotte Albright:
Oh, fair enough. Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
So, there are going to be some senior year activities that are senior specific. Or it's a new club. Your friend started the mindfulness club, and you say, "That feels like something really meaningful to me." So, I think you have to be careful about sweeping away too many things that appear later in the four-year sequence. Because you don't know when you're 14 what club is going to be meaningful. Sometimes you do and it evolves, and sometimes it's a later opportunity to try something new.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. So, here are his dos. Do choose extracurriculars that highlight your unique personality that better your community around you, that give you hands-on experience and promote your growth as a leader.
Lee Coffin:
And you should be doing things because they make you happy. I keep coming back to that. Do things because you love them, because they're interesting, because they're fun. And when those characterizations are true, they're meaningful. And when you share them, we meet you accordingly. I walked home the other day and there was a group of young men playing hacky sack on The Dartmouth Green. And I paused and watched them because the dog was sniffing something, and they were having fun. And was it their most meaningful activity? No. But was it a moment of play? Yes.
Charlotte Albright:
It might've been meaningful if they needed that for mental wellness after an exam.
Lee Coffin:
That's what I mean. Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
But did they write hacky sack on their extracurriculars? That's what I was trying to say. Probably not. But moments of play are important.
Charlotte Albright:
The other thing that I've always loved that you say about what you're looking for in an applicant is kindness. And I think people forget when they're applying to colleges, it's a solitary experience and you've sort of singled yourself out from a crowd. That's your point. On the other hand, you are part of a community as a senior in high school. You're part of a family. And you're about to be part of another community. And so, aren't you looking for the ability to make that transition from one community to the other and bring with you your kindness or whatever else comes with it?
Lee Coffin:
Totally. Totally. You don't know how college will play out. The things you do in high school, including what you like to study, but certainly your extracurriculars... I mean, the clubs that your high school offers may be limited based on the high school you attend. And you get to college and you think, "Wow, there are all these things that I'm going to explore." I did not go to a high school that had a debate team. If we did, I 100% would have done it, because I like to talk and I like politics, and that would have been really intriguing to me. But it was not something I could have done at any point in high school. There's a lot of examples like that where the list of activities is going to be high school specific, and there's going to be a bunch of things in college.
We don't admit you thinking, "You were the debater, you must be the debater. You were the senior class president, you will be the first-year president." You might be. And those are markers of achievement and of interest. But how do you translate leadership? I will often say on the first day of school to the entering class, "There are X of you who are the senior class president or the student council president," and the X is usually a triple-digit number. If that's your only way of being a leader in your community, you're not going to have 300 presidents of the class of 2030. How do you take this quality called leadership or service and translate it into some other space when you get to college?
Charlotte Albright:
But first you have to get in.
Lee Coffin:
First you have to get in.
Charlotte Albright:
So, let's end, again, with Christopher Rim and Forbes. He writes an article called, in October, “The Top 3 College Application Mistakes That Cost Students Ivy League Acceptance.”
Lee Coffin:
Can I just say this?
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. Sure.
Lee Coffin:
Because this is the second headline from the same source that are framing this around Ivy League acceptances. And that always makes me kind of frosted.
Charlotte Albright:
Right.
Lee Coffin:
Because there's only eight places in the Ivy League. I work for one. There are hundreds of wonderful places. And the advice we're giving, especially on this pod, but just broadly, the things we care about at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Penn are the same things every place care about. So I just wanted to say that because whenever the headlines in this newsfeed spotlight the Ivy League, I think it's so frustratingly narrow.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, it takes us right back to our first piece in The New York Times where anxiety is rising because people think the Ivy League is the only place that they can get education.
Lee Coffin:
That's right. Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
So it's full circle there.
Lee Coffin:
And that's why I stopped. So I just wanted to jump in and say that headline without getting into the Ivy is still valuable. So, go ahead.
Charlotte Albright:
Absolutely. And interestingly, one of the no-nos on his list of three is “Neglecting Specific and Demonstrated Interest.” He's saying too many people just say, "I'm going to go to an Ivy League school," and they don't choose the one that's right for them because they think they're all alike. I mean, Dartmouth and Penn are very different.
Lee Coffin:
All eight of us are very different.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
They're eight very different campuses. And I think too often, there's this expectation that we're equal. I have friends who work in schools who tell me, families will say, "Well, let's just see what happens. Any of them will be a win." They're very different places. And I work for the most distinct of the eight, I think, just based on where we are. So, if you're saying one of the super urban places and this quite rural place are interchangeable, you're a pretty flexible person because those are really different environments in which you might thrive. But beyond location, the curriculum we offer, all liberal arts, but some open, some great books, some more interdisciplinary, those are really different ways of moving through your undergraduate program that aren't cookie-cutter A=A=A.
Charlotte Albright:
His second “don't” has to do with the application itself. He's really implying that applications that fail to be constructed with a throughline don't always make it to the top of the pile. And by throughline, I think he's meaning what you've been saying, telling the story about yourself in several different parts of the application in a way that kind of adds up to yourself. Can you talk about through line?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I'm sort of struggling with that advice because I don't know... A through line suggests all the different parts of a holistic application have to tell a cohesive story. Or you've said, "Here's the headline, and I'm going to make sure each piece of it reinforces Charlotte is a high-achieving student focused on literature who wants to go into politics." I just made that up on the spot. And all of the parts of the file are hanging off of that through line. You may have that. You may be, "I'm a pre-med, I'm really interested in prosthetics. I want to serve in a veteran space around that." Great. But you might also love to bake cookies. And that isn't part of the "through line" that the headline suggests. But it's something I would say, don't get so preoccupied with creating an avatar that is you, that has to be performing in a certain scripted way from part one to part two to part three to part four. Do we look for themes? Of course. Do we often see connections across the file? Yes. But sometimes you read the file and you say, "There's no connective tissue between all of these different bubbles of information, but they're interesting."
The thing, too, to remember, applicants, especially if you're looking in a very selective space, almost all the people who apply are academically talented. We're not stuck on "Can you do the work?" in most files. That's not true everywhere. But I've often said this podcast focuses on selective and highly selective admissions because that's the harder proposition. So, if you see yourself applying to a place where the acceptance rate starts to get tight, the way you navigate that storytelling is by using each piece to be you.
Charlotte Albright:
I guess what also worries me about the word “throughline” is that I think it would be very hard, if I'm thinking back many decades to being 17, to know what your throughline is. And isn't that what college is for, is to find it?
Lee Coffin:
Yes.
Charlotte Albright:
I mean, if you're not going to go to college with an exploratory turn of mind, why go?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But you may be a super talented preternatural teenager where something has defined you. You come out of high school, and I'll use debate. I mean, Dartmouth was the national champion debate a couple years ago. We get a lot of high-profile debaters. So maybe you are someone presenting your story as, "I am a top-ranked national debater." That's remarkable. That's going to be your story. But there's a lot of people who don't know, to your point, that you're still discovering, you're introducing yourself, you're using your application to say, "Here I am. This is where I've been."
I went to a unremarkable public high school. I had a great high school experience. My friends, my teachers, it was a meaningful moment. And the story I was able to tell based on that place was defined by that place. That's an environmental factor. Other classmates, when I got to college, were in much more resourced environments and came to college with a lot more razzle-dazzle in their repertoire than I did. They weren't better than me. We both got admitted.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, I think you did fine. You did fine. Here you are.
Lee Coffin:
No, I did. But I was reminding people that there's so much of these advice columns are predicated on being in a school or a community where there are resources. The file I read yesterday was from a student from a very rural community. And she wrote about her main extracurricular being life on the ranch.
Charlotte Albright:
Ah.
Lee Coffin:
And she said, "I live far away from school. I don't have a car. I can't do afterschool activities because I have no way of getting home. So my activity is taking care of the sheep and the cows and making sure they don't die."
Charlotte Albright:
That is a perfect segue to his third piece of advice with which we will end. And that is, “Make sure that you demonstrate hands-on experience.” And you just talked about somebody on a ranch. I don't think you can get more hands-on than that. But people sometimes fail to do that in their applications. They'll talk about what they like to do, but they don't really show what they did. And what they did might include some things that are highly intellectual, but maybe there's some things that are hands-on that are worth talking about.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, you could work in a thrift shop.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
And you're talking about the virtue of recycling clothing. The most important part of the advice you're getting from this conversation but also the article Charlotte has referenced is, think about the different fingerprints you have in your high school world and which ones are meaningful to you, not to me, to you, so that I meet you as an applicant and could fast-forward nine months and say, "The class is enrolling in September of 2026. Who's arriving? And how does that group of people gel into this thing called a class?"
Charlotte Albright:
Well, this has been such a fun conversation. It's the sort of thing I think we would've done if we were, both of us, riding on the bus together. So, I'm just going to throw it back to you, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, thank you, Charlotte. And it's the conversation I have every day, because everyone I know reads the stories we're referencing, not exactly these, but something pops up in the newsfeed. My mother-in-law will text me, and she's almost 90, and she'll say, "I just read this." And you're like, "Oh my God." So, the conversation we have been having is one of the reasons I wanted to do this podcast at the beginning, was to give a forum for explanation and saying the headline isn't always the thing you should get stuck on. If something seems amiss, ask your guidance counselor and say, "I read this. Is it true?" Don't go on Reddit and ask that question. I mean, Reddit's fine for some things, but don't stoke the fire with more fire. Thanks, Charlotte.
Charlotte Albright:
Thank you. This was fun.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. We got a couple more episodes to go. Next week, we'll have a conversation about being first-generation college bound, how to tell that story and what does it mean. And then after that, we'll be on a sprint to the finish as Season 8 wraps up. But for now, this is Lee Coffin and Charlotte Albright. Thanks for listening.