An effective college search starts with discovery. “Start your discovery with the fundamental thing about college,” AB host and Dartmouth Dean Lee Coffin advises. “You are going to college to study, and four ‘Ps’ should guide the first phase of the search. Focus on program, place, people, and price as the building blocks of discovery for each campus." Senior admission officers from Brandeis, Cornell, and Saint John’s of Annapolis join Coffin with tips on how to explore academic programs, classroom types or formats, and general education requirements. They also discuss how place shapes academic majors from campus to campus. “Understand how every institution offers its course of study in its own distinctive way,” Cornell’s director of undergraduate admissions counsels. “And focus on what gets you excited—what learning environment lets you do your best work?,” the Brandeis dean asks.
An effective college search starts with discovery. “Start your discovery with the fundamental thing about college,” AB host and Dartmouth Dean Lee Coffin advises. “You are going to college to study, and four ‘Ps’ should guide the first phase of the search. Focus on program, place, people, and price as the building blocks of discovery for each campus." Senior admission officers from Brandeis, Cornell, and Saint John’s of Annapolis join Coffin with tips on how to explore academic programs, classroom types or formats, and general education requirements. They also discuss how place shapes academic majors from campus to campus. “Understand how every institution offers its course of study in its own distinctive way,” Cornell’s director of undergraduate admissions counsels. “And focus on what gets you excited—what learning environment lets you do your best work?,” the Brandeis dean asks.
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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As you move from now through the start of senior year, you have this opportunity to think about options that both help you study what you think you'd like to study, how you'd like to study, where you'd like to study, and you're going to have some starts and stops. You're going to begin to discover and realize, “that's not what I want.” Or you're going to begin to explore and have a couple of “aha” moments where something occurs to you that you weren't thinking about at the beginning.
And as you do this discovery, I would present to you four Ps that represent the four big questions you need to think about. Program, place, people, and price. Those are the four building blocks of your discovery. And you should be thinking about the different colleges and universities through all of those in combination. But today we're going to talk about program.
We're going to start your discovery with the fundamental thing about college. You're going to college to study. You're going to college to get a degree. You're going to college to learn how to do something that takes you somewhere. And so many of you as juniors will come up to an admission officer and say, "I'd like to study English." Great. That's a course of study. That's a major. It's not program. English in this example is part of program, but you need to be thinking about class size, format, semester versus trimester versus quarter, requirements. Does English also require you to study math? All of those things are part of program. So today I've invited three senior admission officers, myself included, making four. And we're going to talk about program at our places and how you should be thinking about which setup makes sense for you. So we'll be right back.
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I'm excited to welcome three of my colleagues from three really different places to have a conversation today about program. So alphabetically, let me introduce them. Benjamin Baum is the vice president of enrollment at St. John's College of Annapolis in Santa Fe. I don't know if that's the formal title, Ben or if it's ...
Ben Baum:
That works very well. We have an unusual configuration with two campuses. I'm physically in Annapolis, Maryland right now, but in spirit, I am also in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lee Coffin:
And I love that we just had that little sidebar because that's another example of program. You represent a liberal arts college with two campuses doing two similar but different things. So we'll talk about that. But Ben's also the chair of the board of Colleges That Change Lives, which is a consortium of liberal arts colleges around the country that may be less well-known in the public domain, but offer really wonderful liberal arts experiences that truly change lives. And it's based on a book that was published many, many years ago, but it's a consortium that moves around the country and introduces their program. So Ben's got a double dip in terms of what he represents today. We welcome back Emily Roper-Doten, a recurring guest on admission beat. Hi, Emily.
Emily Roper-Doten:
Hi, Lee. How are you?
Lee Coffin:
I'm great. Since we last said hi to Emily, she has switched seats. She is now the dean of admissions at Brandeis University, but we've met her in previous incarnations as the chief admission officer at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and at Olin College of Engineering. And way back when she and I were colleagues at Tufts. So Emily, you're going to pull from a lot of different backgrounds as we talk about program.
Emily Roper-Doten:
Sounds good.
Lee Coffin:
And making her debut on Admissions Beat is my colleague, Pamela Tan. She is the director of undergraduate admissions at Cornell. Hi, Pamela.
Pamela Tan:
Hello. It's an honor and a pleasure.
Lee Coffin:
So as we start, I always like to invite the admission people to go back to high school for a hot second and share with our listeners who we were, where we were when we were 17 or 18 years old. First question for each of you is a pretty straightforward one. What was your major in college? And let's just do it in alphabetical. Ben, what did you major in?
Ben Baum:
I was a double major in history and European studies.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Emily?
Emily Roper-Doten:
Double major in educational studies and theater.
Lee Coffin:
Pamela, are you going to extend the double to make it a sweep?
Pamela Tan:
No. I was a biology and society major, a unique major at Cornell.
Lee Coffin:
Biology and society. And I was a history major with a concentration in American politics. So the four of us hit really different parts of the curriculum, but let me go back to high school. Ben, was that your plan of study when you were a senior?
Ben Baum:
I think I could have guessed that that's where I would've ended up, but I went into this thinking, I'm going to try out lots of different things. And so I experimented with political science. I experimented with classics. I took a lot of religion and literature classes, but could I have guessed in high school that I would've ended up studying history? Yeah, I probably could have.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. And when you were exploring, were you looking at colleges with that very humanities oriented set of majors?
Ben Baum:
I was. And so there were places I looked at early on where I thought I like this place, but they don't offer the thing I was looking for. And there were other places that did show up on my radar that weren't there initially because eventually I discovered they were offering those programs that I was excited to try.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Okay. Emily.
Emily Roper-Doten:
I'll quickly pull it back to junior year when I thought I was going to be an engineer. And then I took a summer program in engineering the summer between junior and senior year of high school and realized that the campus on which I took that program was not for me. And I decided based on that program, engineering was not for me. And so as a senior, I thought I was going to major in math. That shift for me sort of signaled a, maybe I actually don't know now. So wanting to be able to think about schools that had an opportunity for me to validate what I wanted. And clearly I ended up going a different route altogether.
Lee Coffin:
So you did. So theater is a long journey for mathematics.
Emily Roper-Doten:
Yes, but I certainly spent a lot more time in high school doing theater than I did mathematics. I mean, I loved my calculus class. I really thought it was adjacent to engineering for me, so it was something that I really ... I loved my calculus teacher in high school, and so there was a lot of connection there. But I spent two seasons a year doing plays and musicals with my high school. I did summer theater. And so taking courses in the theater department or English courses that were focused on drama really was partially just a, I love this. I'm excited about this. I have the opportunity to explore this in a liberal arts environment.
Lee Coffin:
For listeners, so you attended a public high school in upstate New York.
Emily Roper-Doten:
I did. Yep. First generation college and my dad was a machinist, so he ran a machine and a foundry, which was part of the reason why I was originally looking at engineering. He said to me at one point, "Wouldn't it be so cool if you designed the type of machines that I run?"
Lee Coffin:
For one second more, how did your first-gen background inform the way you were thinking about majors and program coming out of high school? And your dad, you just gave a really good example of how a parent is pointing you towards what sounds like a very logical and practical course of study.
Emily Roper-Doten:
And I loved math and science, and we often tell high school students, "You love math and science, you should look at engineering." And so I think part of it was knowing what you're exposed to coming from different environments, what are you exposed to that are jobs you can imagine. And so certainly that engineering piece came through my dad and looking around, once I was thinking, okay, maybe it's not engineering, I still like math and science. Maybe math is something I want to do. All I could envision or imagine in that moment was teaching. I didn't know what else a math major could do. I didn't have an exposure to different types of jobs that would've come from that, or I didn't have an understanding of the major path doesn't necessarily translate always immediately into exactly what a job looks like. So I was thinking very linearly about it.
Lee Coffin:
I let this example go long because I think it's a really good case study of how your thinking evolves. And to the juniors and parents who are listening, what you know today is often based on what you know from your high school or your family. And college opens different doors that you didn't know were there. And as I say that, some places don't let you open the door and you're going into a college that's got a really specific track and you're on it and you need to know that as you start it, and others you have a bit more flexibility. But Pamela, let's bring you into this. So did you start as a bio-oriented kid when you were in high school?
Pamela Tan:
Just flat-out interested in pre-med. I was one of those students. My parents were immigrants to the United States and there were some key models of success that's all I knew, that you would be a doctor or maybe a nurse, maybe you'd be an accountant. My father was an accountant. Maybe a lawyer. That's what I knew about careers at that point in time. So medicine sounded good. I wanted to help people writ large, and so I chose an institution very broadly who's like, oh, they're good at pre-med, they're good at medicine, and then ended up in a pathway in a program that was pretty specific.
Lee Coffin:
Sorry, that's great. Wonderful segue into this idea of program is bigger than major.
Pamela Tan:
Absolutely.
Lee Coffin:
As I say that, anybody want to explain that a little bit further when I say program is bigger than your major?
Pamela Tan:
I could start a little bit here, and I'm thinking about this both as a higher ed professional and as a parent. I have one kid who's off to college now in his first year, and it's great. And I think that I would start here in thinking about, for many high school students, there's not a ton of flexibility in terms of what you can do in ninth, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. In general, broad strokes, most students are doing English, math, some type of history, social science, maybe a world language, et cetera, and then that's rinse and repeat every year.
And so to go back to what you said, Lee, about the English major or the possible English major, I'm interested in studying English. Great. Even saying that how you study English at Cornell in terms of what is expected for an English major may be radically different than what's offered at Brandeis or at Dartmouth, et cetera. So that's a place to start to think about what's expected of me if I'm a particular major, and that could be very different in one institution versus another.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no, I just realized I didn't share the last step in my story, which kind of syncs up with what you were just saying, Pamela. So I came out of high school thinking maybe English, maybe political science because I liked politics, but like Emily with theater, I had been deeply involved in the newspaper. And so my first gen brain said, journalism, you've been the editor for two years, let's look at journalism programs. And I ended up in history, which is not such a huge leap away from English and political science, but wasn't ever thinking history. The idea that I would be a history major just didn't cross my mind until I got to college and had a great history professor.
So that's the P in people who kind of grabbed me by the scruff and said, "Here's a different way of thinking about history than you ever had at your public high school in Connecticut to your point about rinse and repeat. You go from one course to the next to the next." Let's talk about majors though, because that's where I think most pre-applicants start like, I'm going to major in X. Is that wise? Would that be our advice to juniors and parents about focusing on major right away?
Ben Baum:
Absolutely not.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Ben goes for the absolutely not. Why not, Ben?
Ben Baum:
If you're like one of us, working at a college fair and having students come to the table, almost every time the very first question will be, do you offer an English major? Do you offer a biology major? Whatever it happens to be. And that is commonly the first question. And when you work for an institution like one like St. John's, my answer is a complicated one. At St. John's, we talk all the time, as you were saying, about program, we actually don't talk very much about major. We think of what we offer as a comprehensive program across the liberal arts that touches on history and literature and philosophy and mathematics and biology and physics and more, but we pull all of these different ideas together into one comprehensive program rather than separating them out into individual majors.
And so people often come, students come with a preconception of what it means to major in one thing or even to double major in two things as many of us have, but without necessarily thinking more broadly about what it means to be a part of a comprehensive program and not just a specific major to study one individual thing.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Why don't we each tag onto what Ben just did. So Emily, describe the program at Brandeis.
Emily Roper-Doten:
Yeah. So Brandeis is a Research 1 institution. So we have this sort of greater context of a research institution, but the undergraduate program is liberal arts. And so students are coming in undeclared. They have the opportunity to declare that later. We have a core curriculum that is based on sort of enduring skills that we think students need to learn. And so those are the things like communication and critical thinking, ethical leadership. And we have sets of courses that are based around learning those types of critical enduring kind of persistent skills that folks need regardless of what they're going to want to study. And those courses can have different flavors to them. So you can take a course in writing that it has a bent toward history or has a bent toward the sciences or has a bent towards social science. And so students can start that exploration even while achieving some of their graduation requirements, moving through those different things.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So I heard that and think Brandeis offers an interdisciplinary program.
Emily Roper-Doten:
Absolutely, absolutely. And we're thinking a lot about how do we help students articulate those types of skills that they're learning, whether they're those classic liberal arts skills, the critical thinkings and those kinds of things, or they're more career focused digital literacy, data analytics, those types of things. How do we help them articulate the skills that they're learning beyond what our core curriculum says, which their future employers are not going to read or what our syllabus says, because they're not going to read that either, they're not even going to look at someone's transcript.
So helping a student be able to understand these are the learning outcomes, these are the skills you're developing across this core curriculum. It's an interdisciplinary world. You have to be able to think that way. Answering the problems of today require multiple skillsets, multiple competencies, multiple different areas of content knowledge. And so wanting our students to be able to do that as much as possible.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And so listeners, you're hearing so far two liberal arts institutions approaching their curriculum in really different ways.
Ben Baum:
I'd say one of the things that's fascinating about that, actually approaching them in really different ways, but for some of the same kinds of reasons about what it means to go into the world after earning this degree, in that there's a connection between how we teach and the kinds of careers, the kind of life that you'll live after college. And so you heard Emily just refer a moment ago to this interdisciplinary world. That's the way Brandeis approaches this. At St. John's, we'll actually talk about how we don't believe in disciplines at all. And so we'll say it's not so much that there's an interaction between these disciplines, but that it's artificial to think in terms of disciplines. And when you pick up a great book, are you reading a great piece of literature? Is it psychology? Is it philosophy? Is it history? It could be all those things at once.
And so these are fascinating distinctions, I think, between institutions and where we place our different values. And then in the end for the student where it feels right for them to choose the place that's going to lead them in the direction they'd like to go.
Lee Coffin:
So continuing just to ... I'm on a degree of complexity path, so I'll go next. So Dartmouth is a version of what Emily just described. It's a Research 1 small university where our program is framed around the School of Arts and Sciences. So everybody is admitted as a first-year student into that school with 50-plus majors in the liberal arts and engineering. So Dartmouth has the Thayer School of Engineering, which offers majors for undergrads as well as masters and PhDs in the graduate space and engineering. And Dartmouth, in addition, the college has engineering school, a business school, a medical school, and a graduate school of arts and sciences that allows the undergraduate program to connect to some of those grad programs. So the Tuck School of Business is a great example of a professional school that has undergraduate courses, not a major, not a degree, but the Tuck flavor bubbles through the undergrad.
That's an example of program. And the other part for Dartmouth that I think is really important to link onto this program piece is we have a quarter system, now the semester system. We have 10-week terms. Students take three courses, so you're doing it deeply, quickly, and we have a summer term that's required of our class as it finishes sophomore year. So that type of program may be something a student says, "Oh, I don't want to take three courses at a time in a 10-week term." And on top of that, we're small. So our program is delivered in classes that are usually 15 or fewer, and it's a very discussion-oriented program, not often a lecture. Those are distinctions. But then let's go one more step across the Ivy League from the smallest to the biggest. Pamela, you represent a very different version of what I just described, and yet we are siblings in this thing called Ivy.
Pamela Tan:
Absolutely. And Cornell is very different in the sense that absolutely there is a college of arts and sciences that what I consider a more traditional liberal arts college with a diversity of majors. But the key part is that we have a total of eight different undergraduate colleges and schools, each with its own educational mission, with its own set of majors and its own curricula, its own educational philosophy.
And so it's very different for my students who might be studying architecture, art and planning, what's expected of them in terms of their time here versus my students who might be in the College of Community College, a very different part of campus that's focusing on human needs in areas such as design, nutrition, human development of when students approach you about, this is what I want to study telling me about a major. It might be different at Cornell where somebody might come to me and say, "Hey, I'm interested in psychology." Well, there are a number of different ways and flavors in which we might offer psychology a place like Cornell. So I could talk about it, being able to do that in arts and sciences, but look at the curriculum to make sure this is what you want and really helping families and students understand that you could study this theme very different depending on the part of campus that you'll be studying.
Lee Coffin:
I love that you just said that, Pamela, because I often push back on the English major example and say, well, English has a lot of different pathways. Are you like literature, poetry, film, creative writing, playwriting, communications? I mean, what are you hoping to do under that topic called English? And they often say, "Oh, I hadn't really thought about that." That's part of this program discovery. If you know you are interested in film, film studies, film writing, then the English department better teach it, or is there an actually department of film that gives you a whole nother way of moving through? And Cornell's got lots of examples of that. But Pamela, go a step further. So you've named a couple. What are the eight, just so listeners have a sense of it in a university setting, human ecology, you said architecture and planning, arts and sciences.
Pamela Tan:
That's right. And the other colleges that we have are the College for Agriculture and Life Sciences. We have the College of Business, we have a College of Engineering, and we have something pretty specific called the School of Industrial and Labor Relations that focuses on the world of work, labor, employment relations. So some very broad programs and very specific programs.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And hotel management, is that ...
Pamela Tan:
That's right. And that is within the College of Business. So within College of Business, you have two totally different accredited undergraduate business programs. One is the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and then there's the Nolan School of Hotel Administration. So there's a lot. And thank you, Lee, because I think that the key takeaway is that when a student applies to a place like Cornell, the next question is what part of Cornell interests you and why? And really being able to do the deep dive of understanding the program of why you are attracted to this part of campus because of the curriculum in terms of how it's set up is a really important part of how we consider candidates.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I love that. And also when we talk about place, the other P, you've got a hotel as part of your campus. So when people think about what you'd like to study, well, in that example, the hotel management program actually has a hotel.
Pamela Tan:
It's a great opportunity to learn by doing.
Lee Coffin:
One of our big signatures is environmental studies and sustainability. And we have an organic farm as part of our campus, which harder to do when you're an urban campus, but easier to do when you're in the woods of Northern New England. And that place piece of our program is really important. I read a file yesterday and the student was a sunflower farmer and I thought, well, how interesting is that? I hadn't encountered that before, but he framed his candidacy around that really specific type of farming and plugged it into our program and was talking about, as I explored options, I wanted a place where I can continue to study sunflowers.
To listeners, you don't need to be that specific right now, but if you know you love sunflowers and that's going to be part of what you're studying in college, then the program has to be able to do that. Emily and Ben, how does place inform your program?
Ben Baum:
At the beginning of this segment we talked a little bit about that St. John's has two campuses. We have one in Annapolis, Maryland, to the other in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We actually do the same academic program on each campus where a great books college students are reading roughly 200 classic books going back 3000 years. They're discussing them in small classes. They're all earning the same degree, the Bachelor of Arts and Liberal Arts.
So there's a sameness across these two campuses, and yet place plays a major role in why students might choose to be at St. John's generally to be at one of these two campuses. And that's both in the curriculum, it's outside of the curriculum, it's what they might want to do after they leave. In Annapolis, we've been here for a few hundred years where in the-
Lee Coffin:
Say that again, a few hundred. You're one of the oldest colleges in the United States.
Ben Baum:
We were founded in 1696 here in Annapolis.
Lee Coffin:
You buried your headline.
Ben Baum:
The third-oldest right there. We're in the state capital. We're just down the street from the federal capital from Washington DC. We're on the water. Students tend to be drawn here for this curriculum that they're excited to explore, but also because they might be interested in something like politics. They might want the internship opportunities we have for them at the local theaters. They might want to row or sail at the same time that they're reading great books like Moby Dick. And so there's a connection between that physical space and what we're reading and doing in the curriculum. The same is true in Santa Fe. We're in the mountains, in the southernmost point of the Rocky Mountains. Students often find a connection between what it means to read these books and to look out on these glorious sunsets and these giant landscapes to be really engaged in the arts community in Santa Fe.
The arts can spill into what we do in our program, and yet to be in one of the greatest art capitals in the country, this fusion of Native American art, of Anglo art, of Latino art. Those kind of connections are very specific to being in New Mexico, and students live that out through what they're studying at St. John's and then also how they're living their lives. And so our two campuses, I think in some ways reflect how those differences in place also appear within the program itself.
Lee Coffin:
Brilliant. I love that. I love that example, especially of the Santa Fe campus and the Native American and Indigenous art. That's a vivid example of this connection between program and place. Emily at Brandeis, so you're right outside Boston. Tell us about place and program there.
Emily Roper-Doten:
Yeah. So Waltham is nine miles outside of Boston. Waltham as a city played a really strong role in the Industrial Revolution known as The Watch City. That spirit of the Industrial Revolution, that sort of meeting the moment and sort of pushing and innovation is certainly a piece of what informs who we are. We're close to Boston. And so both Waltham, the neighboring communities around us and Boston provide a lot of opportunity for our students to do internships. We have a very strong supportive structure for students through our Center for Careers and Applied Liberal Arts for students to get experiential learning opportunities, whether that's research on our campus or it's connecting to companies throughout the Greater Boston area. So I think there's a piece there that's the physical sense of place, but I also think there's a sense of place that's cultural that comes back to an institution's founding.
And we were founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community to respond to antisemitism at the time and exclusion at the time, both for faculty as well as for students. So things like social justice have been a part of who Brandeis is forever. And so it informs curricular choices. It informs the type of thing students do outside of class. There's this really strong beat. The spirit of “tikkun olam,” the kind of Hebrew phrase of “repair the world” is a piece that Brandeis, it's always been there. And so being in an industrial revolution city, being founded at a time post-World War II where we were trying to make great change in terms of access to education and being innovative in that way, that sense of place I think matters just as much as our physical location.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and you elegantly and poetically touched the other P, which is people. When you talk about the Jewish history of Brandeis, I think P could be V, vibe. What's the vibe of the place? What's its purpose, different P. So all three of you are giving really dynamic and vivid examples of the way program gets synthesized through place. And for applicants as the discovery plays out, this is what you're feeling and exploring and testing, and you may not know the answer today, but those are the kind of things you should be paying attention to. Another thing they should pay attention to is the ponder program is something very abstract but important, which is how does someone learn and what kind of classroom is their best space? So I mentioned Dartmouth is small, we're on a quarter system, we have tiny classes. So let's start there.
If you're discovering program and the idea of being in a classroom with 10 other people gives you itches, then cross these small places off your list. Or on the other extreme, years ago I was working a large university and the first year economics class had over a thousand people in it. And I had some of my first year advisees come back and tell me that. I thought, what? A thousand people? And most of them loved it. Some of them were intimidated by it. So let's talk about that, the classroom experience. Let's start with Pamela, because you're at such a heterogeneous place where there's probably a version of everything I just said, some really small classrooms and some huge ones.
Pamela Tan:
Absolutely. And I think it's so important to ask those questions because again, it's about what is the learning environment that you feel like you can truly thrive in. And at a place like Cornell, you're going to have some giant classes where there might be a thousand students and many places that have large classes will end up breaking those off. So you'll have discussion sections and an opportunity to discuss a topic even further. And there'll be the opportunity to also take classes that might be 10 to 20 students as well.
And beyond that as well, in terms of thinking of class size, it's thinking about perhaps who's teaching the classes. Is that something that's important to you, that a class is taught by a professor versus a grad student who knows the topic very well? What are the expectations in terms of learning by doing? Are there opportunities, all right, this is what you're doing in the classroom, this is what you're doing in the lab, but you need to be able to demonstrate it by doing something in a special project that's above and beyond. So if that's something that excites you as well.
Lee Coffin:
So Pamela, how does a junior in high school figure out if a giant classroom is their best space? Most high schools are nowhere near that big where you would have a lecture of a thousand people. So how do you explore that?
Pamela Tan:
That's a great question and I'd love to hear from my other colleagues as well. Because I'll be very straightforward, students are not able to sit in our classes at Cornell. It's just something that we're focusing on the education of the current students. And I would start asking questions from students who are currently on campus. What does this feel like? Wow, this is intimidating to think about a thousand-person class. What was that like when you took astronomy in that particular class setting and to be able to understand and get a student-to-student perspective of what that might be like?
Lee Coffin:
They basically need to take, I call it “an existential selfie.” They have to ask themselves, where do I do my best work? And am I a talker? I mean, I would say a talker or a listener, do I like to take notes or do I like to roll up my sleeves and just do it?
Emily Roper-Doten:
Sometimes at this age, that reflection is hard. They're not used to doing it. And so maybe sometimes even shifting the question to say, which class have you gotten the most out of in high school so far? Or which class made you think the most? Or which one made you say, oh, maybe this is something I might want to study. And then doing a little bit of picking apart, okay, well, how did that teacher teach? Being able to help them do that kind of existential selfie or excavation through the observations of the experiences they were in might be a little bit more accessible for some students to be able to do that. Or even thinking about, are they the person who goes to a movie and then wants to go have ice cream after and totally dissect it where it's like part of that learning for them is actually absorbing and then reflecting.
And so that big class that breaks down into a smaller recitation section may feel less intimidating because it actually follows a model that they're interested in. I often think about this in terms of my experience at Olin as well where no lecture, no tests, it's a truly 100% project-based, hands-on experience. And so for some students, it may be that the thing that got them the most excited was robotics or when they were in a lab. And so the time, their ability to clue into, that's when I felt the most academically engaged and excited. And then Olin is four years of that. And so being able to then, for some students, Olin is super small, they're willing to accept the super small because of the educational environment it delivers. And so it comes with understanding that that changes what assessment looks like and those kinds of things.
So helping them think of it, frame it in that way might help them start to think about, okay, how do I situate these different programs or majors into different styles of education?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I think people overlook something really important about a big place like Cornell where they think, oh, it's huge. I don't want a huge place. But Pamela, I'm going to guess under that big umbrella, what Emily just described about Olin is probably true at Cornell as well.
Pamela Tan:
Absolutely. Where I feel like your academic home base, the college or school that you're affiliated with, that becomes your academic home and it kind of makes this a smaller experience within a larger university.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So program and place. Pamela, you said something a bit ago that I just wanted to come back to as we're talking about figuring out what you want. And about yourself, you said, I looked at places and I said, well, they're good at pre-med. How did you know that?
Pamela Tan:
No, I wish I could say, Lee, that 30 years ago, my college process was robust and thoughtful. And that's part of the reason that I was interested in participating in the podcast. There's so much that I just didn't know that I thought everybody else knew. And I realized that most people, unless they're thoughtful about the process, are probably doing it because it makes sense.
So you're a good student, you think you know what you want to study, you heard about the institution because of the word of mouth or because of quote unquote prestige, and then that's what leads you along as opposed to having the more self-reflective. What are my learning styles? I love what you said, Emily, in terms of thinking about how do I learn best and what resonates with me in terms of how I study and what kind of sparks joy? These are wonderful things to think about now so that you're thinking not, am I good enough for an institution that's a little pretty procedures, but is this institution good enough for me in terms of what I want to study, how I want to study, how I want to be able to tackle my education. And so it's great to give it some thought beyond, ooh, this broad idea of what I want to study, how is it that I want to go about this pursuit?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And at the risk of turning this into an episode of Sesame Street with all the Ps, you just put your finger on the fifth naughty P, which is prestige. It's word of mouth, it's perception, it's what you read on the internet. Sometimes I think people go through these searches and they think they know things. College X is good at blank. How do you know that?
And so what I'm inviting families to do is dig down a little bit and let's help them dig. Where are their reliable sources of information, whether data or narrative? If you're sitting there saying, "Okay, I know I love marine biology and my guidance counselor needs to give me a list of places that have that." Because for me, marine biology is non-negotiable. I have to study that. I know already that that's my jam. So you get a list of colleges. You can Google it and it says this place offers marine biology. How do you know it's good? How do you know what the requirements are? How do you know who teaches it? Ben, where do you go?
Ben Baum:
So I mean, the tools most of us use to find colleges are extremely limited. And I don't think we often recognize how limited they are. And that's across the board. I mean, whether it's you know the colleges because they are the ones that people in your community or family are talking about, that's a very limited pool. Maybe it's because they're listed on a ranking. Of course, most of those rankings are more correlated with size of a college's endowment than they are with the quality of the actual experience itself. Maybe it's as simple as a popular search engine online where you plug in a particular major and it just churns out those colleges that have those majors. But of course, as we were discussing a moment ago, we have all of these non-disciplinary, interdisciplinary programs. If you try searching for philosophy on one of these search engines, you actually won't find St. John's because we don't call our program a philosophy program, and yet we're probably one of the best places to go in the world to study philosophy.
And so the tools are so limited, and that forces, I think, students and families to find other ways of really exploring these colleges. It's one of the things that's our mission at colleges that change lives, that we're a collection of over 40 small liberal arts colleges, and the idea is that we're bringing these college fairs to people's hometowns. We have a search engine on our own website that's designed to encourage people to explore much more broadly than the narrow confines of what it means to be ranked something or what it means to have a particular major. But a lot of it does require students to push themselves a little bit to explore. And at St. John's, where I work, one of the principle ways we do that is to try to get people to campus so they can experience what this learning culture actually is like themselves.
And that will look really different from one institution to the next. I mean, when we have students come to St. John's, we give them a tour of campus, but then we try to get every single one of them to sit in the back of a classroom to observe what it's like. And every class at St. John's has no more than 20 students in it. There's nothing larger than that. And so a student has to sit in that classroom and think, okay, I want to be someone around this table discussing this idea, but we also don't let them talk when they observe the classes. And so they're in the back. And what we often tell students is if you are sitting in the back of that classroom and you are just holding yourself back from actually speaking, there's something you really want to say, then that's how you know this is a good sign that this college might actually be a fit for you.
Lee Coffin:
Great example. And then just from your own living room, you can open up your computer and click your way through a college's departmental listing. So Emily, talk about that. Stick with marine biology, you found the college and it might be hiding under biology or environmental studies. I mean, what you hope to study may be embedded in a bigger department, but you get there. What are you looking for on the website?
Emily Roper-Doten:
Yeah, I think one of the things I would encourage students and families to really be leaning into in this process is you have to be really critical. You have to bring a critical eye to what you find, especially from the top level search of anything. Certainly as we think about all of the AI generated responses and the fact that there are a lot of institutions that are investing money in their program being the top answer in your search when it comes back, when you're searching for a particular program. So just being critical of all that, but when you start to zero in on some institutions to look at for those particular programs, I do think looking at either department pages, searching within our own website so that you're not missing that it's in a different department or a different school than you might've thought. I think Pamela's examples before of you can do psychology in a lot of different ways or there's different places where you might have overlap.
So searching within our own websites to make sure you're finding that source information. But the discussion in the country right now around ROI and value, a lot of institutions are looking at how can we best tell the stories of our alumni in terms of what they're doing. Yes, the department website or the major website is going to help you understand, okay, what are the requirements? What's going to be asked of me in terms of marine biology? Am I going to get a chance to do something experiential? Where am I going to do that experiential thing? Do I have to go do something else somewhere else for a semester or is my campus situated in a way that I can do that? But I'd also encourage folks to look at the career services or alumni relations websites for those institutions to be able to see what kind of information they're providing.
You can go to the career services website at Brandeis and you can look up a major and actually see a visualization of what jobs the alumni have gone into in the last five years, or you can start to find information about what's the starting salary for different majors, or you're able to get a sense of what does five years out, 10 years out look like for majors for this particular program at this particular institution. So being able to go that little bit deeper, not just to the program page, but I would also encourage folks to look at what kind of outcomes data is this institution providing for you. So you can see not just what am I going to be expected to do over those four years, but what does that translate into on the other side?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Pamela, what about the course catalog?
Pamela Tan:
You can go online, look at the course catalog. And again, look at what Emily was saying about department pages. You could do that as well through the course catalog. What are the courses that are available in this particular major? And is that light you on fire? Oh my goodness, I can't believe the thrust of where we're going to study. This is incredible. Also, the course catalogs could be very helpful in terms of understanding what many places call distribution requirements.
Besides this, here's other things that you're going to be expected to do in order to graduate with this particular degree. And then eyes wide open. Understand that some places are going to require you to do a world language for X number of semesters. Does that light you on fire? Fantastic. Do you know that in the engineering curriculum, you're going to have to do X, Y, and Z taking up to, I don't know, you tell me engineering friends, a differential equations. I don't even know what DFEQ is. Does that make you excited as opposed to, oh no, oh no, I don't want to do this. So that's a great place to start in terms of also understanding the depth and breadth of offerings and the specificity of what is going to be expected of me if I'm studying this course of study.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you went to distribution requirements. That was my last question because I think the most overlooked part of program are the distribution requirements or the lack of distribution requirements. I mean, you've got places when I was an undergrad at Trinity and it had an open curriculum, there were no requirements outside of my major. So as a history major, I had a set of things I needed to cover in four years, but that was it. Everything else I took was my own choice.
There are other places that have a very robust set of requirements that everybody has to touch once or twice over the course of four years, sometimes as a way of exploring that pre-major part of the curriculum and say, "Well, my high school didn't offer anthropology, but I see that that course meets that distribution. Oh, look, I like this. And I didn't even know that was a thing." So that's the beauty of distributions.
But Pamela, to your point, there are some colleges where the program has a very specific point of view. And I was the dean at Tufts for 13 years, and I used to always chuckle when I would do an info session and say, so part of our philosophy in the liberal arts is that you all need to be proficient in a language other than English. And as part of that, we have a sixth semester foreign language requirement because your career's going to play out over a very global moment and you're going to be stronger if you can speak something besides English. That's part of the faculty in that place saying, "These are the things we care about. " And that wide range from open to specific is something to ponder because if you really hate math and your college is going to say two courses, how brutal is that for you?
Ben Baum:
If you think that language requirement at Tufts is a hard sell for some students, you should try the two years of ancient Greek, two years of French at St. John's and to see how people react to that one. But I think in the end, these are the kinds of distinctions between places and programs that should excite some students and not excite some other students. These institutions are different and people should find the places where that requirement actually is exciting for them and that's the place to apply. And another place where maybe they thought initially it was appealing, but they learned a little bit more and they discovered, in fact, this doesn't align with their interests or their goals. That's a great thing to discover in a college search process because they can cross that place off the list.
Lee Coffin:
Great point, Ben. And I think as we wrap up this conversation, I think the takeaway from what you just shared is it's okay to explore something and realize, this is not my cup of tea. Better to know now than you're about to enroll and you say, wait, what? Six semesters of a formula or I have to do ancient Greek? That seems pretty fundamental to the way program and major flow together. So before we wrap, any last thoughts from any of you, any advice you want to give to the juniors and their parents about ... Or to seniors. Some of the listeners are in our applicant pools right now and they're going to have a decision to make in April. So this question of program is germane, whether you're at the beginning or close to the end of your search. Any tips before we wrap?
Emily Roper-Doten:
I'm going to take a little bit from that last question too about distribution requirements and thinking of them as potentially complementary to what you want to study. You often will have some choice there. So how can you think about it as supplementing, complementing, elevating what your core content in your major is going to be? I think that that's one way that some folks can wrestle. If it starts to feel restrictive, figuring out is it actually something that can elevate the thing you want to study? That this four years, yes, is going to help put you on a path to a career, to what your job might look like. It's also the rest of your life.
I think of my husband, who is also a liberal arts grad, who we have a poster of Metropolis, a German film on our wall in our home because he stumbled into some film courses, film study courses and German courses when he was at our undergraduate institution that's a passion for him. He seeks out really interesting movies because he has leaned into that experience. Does he need that right now as a middle school math teacher? No. Does it make him more interesting sometimes or bizarre to his sixth graders? Sure. But it's part of, this is yes outcome, but it's also your full outcome in terms of that professional experience, but it's also your full life. So I love that we keep coming back to what gets you excited, but this is life too.
Lee Coffin:
Yep. Pamela.
Pamela Tan:
If you take away anything from this podcast it’s realizing you have a lot of choice. Have your eyes wide open to the fact that every institution is going to do program differently and that should excite you. Not all of them are going to be a great fit for everybody, and that's okay. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the emotional self-awareness of what do you want? What do you want to center in terms of your college experience? And then find the institution that's going to give you what you want.
Lee Coffin:
Last word from Annapolis.
Ben Baum:
Digging into the kind of learning culture that you want might be something to think about. It's not just the specific details of the classes offer, the requirements to graduate. Those things matter, but it's also the culture you're going to be surrounded by in that learning environment. And I come back to just a few weeks ago, St. Johns is actually in the New York Times, our Santa Fe campus, because there's a whole student group that has built their weeks around a tech-free environment. They want to be in a classroom where there aren't computers on the table, they want to come home and not be scrolling through their phone. They want to be having engaged each other in conversation about books.
That kind of learning culture is something that's really hard to understand just by looking at a college website or reading the requirements. And so digging that much deeper to find, is this the culture that you want to learn in? I think that's an essential piece for students to consider too.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, that's true. I'm smiling as you say that because for people who don't know this, when Ben signs the offer of admission, it gets sealed with a wax stamp, like the official stamp of St. John's College. And the first time you did that, I thought that is the perfect metaphor for what you're doing. But yeah, I would think a place that teaches ancient Greek would also be responsive to no tech.
Ben, Pamela, Emily, thank you for joining me on Admissions Beat as we start season nine and give our friends in 11th grade around the world a way of thinking about the exploration of program as this really, to me, fundamental part of their search to own it in a way that opens up a lot of different pathways that they aren't thinking about.
And listeners, we will be back next week for a conversation about what counts, which is probably the question I get most often, whether I'm at the dentist, on an airplane, or just going about my own business and someone finds out what I do and they go, "Oh, what counts?" So we're going to bring a conversation back from our archives with Logan Powell at Brown. That's next week. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.