Mainstream media organizations have long covered the admissions process closely. And when those efforts are combined with observations and commentary across the digital spectrum, the results can feel dizzying and overwhelming to prospective applicants as well as parents. In this episode of Admissions Beat, host Lee Coffin and his guest dean provide context and perspective on the big headlines and related issues in the current admissions news cycle — including rankings, test-optional admissions policies, artificial intelligence (as it relates to application essays) and legal challenges to race as a factor in admissions. They also share tips on how to navigate the rush of information and quiet the noise. Coffin, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth, is joined by Ronné Turner, vice provost of admissions and financial aid at Washington University in St. Louis, along with two journalists: Charlotte Albright, a longtime public radio reporter, and Jacques Steinberg, a former national education correspondent for The New York Times.
Mainstream media organizations have long covered the admissions process closely. And when those efforts are combined with observations and commentary across the digital spectrum, the results can feel dizzying and overwhelming to prospective applicants as well as parents. In this episode of Admissions Beat, host Lee Coffin and his guest dean provide context and perspective on the big headlines and related issues in the current admissions news cycle — including rankings, test-optional admissions policies, artificial intelligence (as it relates to application essays) and legal challenges to race as a factor in admissions. They also share tips on how to navigate the rush of information and quiet the noise. Coffin, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth, is joined by Ronné Turner, vice provost of admissions and financial aid at Washington University in St. Louis, along with two journalists: Charlotte Albright, a longtime public radio reporter, and Jacques Steinberg, a former national education correspondent for The New York Times.
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Welcome to the Admissions Beat.
(Music)
I named this podcast Admissions Beat as a nod to the seemingly endless number of news stories that encircle the work I do as an admission officer. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, local newspapers, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, NPR, even the nightly news cover this beat with surprising regularity. And sometimes the beat gets a little loud. I'm guessing many of the listeners are parents who are beginning to guide their children through either the junior year of a search or a senior who's awaiting a decision this spring. And I imagine you get lost amidst the buzz. What's legit? What requires more nuance than the article's word count might have allowed what's just sensationalized? A headline aimed at clicks and shares more than counseling, and that begs another question that I've wondered.
Is it really the media's role to counsel high school students and their parents? Personally, I tend to grimace more than I grin as I consume the Admissions Beat. Something is missing, or something just gets lost in translation. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a grump. But people who know me usually don't call me grumpy. So I've invited one of my colleagues, Ronné Turner from Wash U to join this conversation, maybe to fact-check me, maybe to see if her head shakes or nods as she reads the same headlines I do. Ronné Turner. Hello. Welcome to the Admissions Beat.
Ronné Turner:
Hi Lee. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Lee Coffin:
Hi, I'm happy to have you. So Ronné Turner is the Vice Provost for Admissions and Financial Aid at Washington University in St. Louis. Got a really long resume though. She previously was the Chief Admission Officer at Northeastern University. Before that, she was an admission officer at the University of Maryland, and she's now the past chair of the board of trustees of The College Board. So Ronné , you've covered a lot of ground in your career and I'm wondering when I call myself a grumpy consumer of the news, are you a grumpy consumer of the Admission Beat too?
Ronné Turner:
I don't know if I would say I was grumpy. I will often get frustrated with some of the headlines because I worry a lot about how prospective students and their families are perceiving the headlines.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, well that's why we're here. So what we're going to do on this episode, my two co-producers, Charlotte Albright, who has a long background in broadcast journalism, especially public radio and TV, and Jacques Steinberg, former higher education editor at The New York Times and a twice published author of two bestselling books on this big topic. And I like to tease Jacques that he is sort of the father of the Admission Beat way back when. So Charlotte and Jacques are joining us, and they're going to pitch some headlines to Ronné and me and have us react to not just the headline, but to the topic and to help our families discern what's the difference from source to source. Is it credible? Is it something that we should put stock in? Is the topic out of the lane of what people in high school and their parents should be thinking about? And really bottom line, helping families become educated consumers of the admission beat as you move through your search. So Jacques and Charlotte, hello.
Charlotte Albright:
Hello.
Jacques Steinberg:
Hello, Lee. Hello Ronné .
Lee Coffin:
So I'm going to pass the lead microphone back to the two of you and sit here. I feel like it's Meet the Press. And Ronné and I are ready to go and see where you take us.
Charlotte Albright:
So thanks Lee. I'll jump in and I'm sure Jacques will as well in a minute or two. We are two journalists. So you could say that we have more than the usual interest in reading headlines by some of our colleagues and we tend to read them, for this show anyway, in major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chronicle for Higher Education. I listen to NPR. So we've been reading with more than usual interest for this particular episode.
Lee Coffin:
Opening question for me on behalf of all the deans of admission out there, what is the catnip that draws the media to this Admission Beat? It gets covered with surprising regularity. It's often on the front page. What is it about the work we do in college admissions that invites this kind of coverage?
Jacques Steinberg:
Well, I would say that the role of journalists in part is to translate. There is so much interest in your world. You at your institution, Ronné , at hers, and thousands of other institutions, whether four-year or two year. And it's not always obvious to us as readers, to us as parents, to us as students, how you do what you do and why. There's enormous interest in it. So I think that one of the roles that I always wanted to play as a journalist covering your world was to explain what you do to readers, to parents and students and counselors, and to also be able to share with you the questions that were on their minds in the spirit of assuming no knowledge.
Lee Coffin:
Do you think the media sees themselves as a watchdog for college admission in some way?
Charlotte Albright:
I didn't. I saw myself as a storyteller and I found the best stories were in education. And the reason for that is that these are people that we know that we see in the supermarket that are our friends, and they don't get in the news enough, the fifth grade teacher, the fifth grader. Governors, presidents, they're always being covered. But I like the kitchen table issues. So I was gravitating to that right away. And I loved going into classrooms and I loved going into colleges. I mean, now I'm working for a college. And also I think that I thought about journalism as a form of education. So I sort of thought that being a journalist was like being an educator and these were my people.
Lee Coffin:
So your people are ready for the headlines and the stories you've pulled from your respective newsfeeds.
Charlotte Albright:
I'll start with a story that because you and I have been doing this podcast for so long, I knew people would be looking at because they're obsessed with testing. Parents are obsessed and worried about standardized tests. As we all know, because of COVID, schools have more and more made the submission of those test scores optional and the admissions process. So the Chronicle of Higher Education put some numbers to that, recently on November 16th, they reported that over 800 institutions shifted to test-optional policies between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2021.
Dartmouth was one of them. And they give you a lot of data about which institutions did that and whether they were more selective or less selective. You could really get in the weeds on this piece. There's a whole chart, you could look up institutions. But I think the big question that I have is what should juniors in this moment do with that information knowing that the vast majority of schools are not going to make them submit tests? So that makes them wonder, should I, should I not? What do we do?
Lee Coffin:
So the broad question here is the pandemic-induced test, optional policies that linger three years later and how a junior might proceed with a still scrambled landscape.
Charlotte Albright:
Exactly.
Lee Coffin:
Ronné, I'm going to defer to you as our college board trustee to see what... Maybe you're going to take the official line on this one.
Ronné Turner:
You're right, I'm going to take the official line on this one. From my perspective, standardized tests are not all bad. They get a really bad rap and there's been a huge reaction, a huge negative reaction to testing that has occurred. It was occurring before CO, and then with COVID because it was just impossible for students to take tests, all of us went test optional. Many of us, not all of us. There were some states that did not. I think that because I believe that testing does tell us something about a student's academic, what they've learned, their abilities, I still encourage high school juniors to prepare to sit for one of the exams or two of the exams, whether they're taking the SAT or the ACT.
I think it's important for a student to try it and see, and to try to do their best. Then as they are developing their list of where they're interested in applying, then their bases are covered. So if you don't take the test and you're applying to schools that require the test, then you are scrambling at the end. So I think it's really important. Actually, and this is the advice I'm giving my own daughter, she's a high school junior right now, and she'll be taking the test. Whether or not she'll use them depends upon where she applies and how well she does.
Lee Coffin:
I agree with that advice. I think there are institutions that have longstanding optional policies as a matter of philosophy and principle and lots of in intentionality about that part of their admission battery. There's no question if you're applying to one of them. There are a set of us, a large set that adopted an optional policy because we had to. We've not landed on a decision as to what policy might be in place for the high school class of '24. We will certainly do that by the spring. But I think to the question you've posed, Charlotte, if you're a junior in high school, take a test. The public health moment does not preempt your ability to take a test. Many of the high schools around the country, around the world are giving tests in school. We're back in person. So I think proceeding with a degree of openness to the idea that this test could tell the college something important about me, take an SAT, take the ACT.
I think when you've got scores and they're broadly in range, submit them. I think the other thing I want to start saying is there's, to Ronné 's point about some of the critiques of testing suggest it blocks access for students from under-resourced schools. And I don't think the critics ever give the colleges enough credit for being able to read a scoring context and to be able to say this score from that place is fantastic and gives us confidence that As we see are also supported by the analytical reasoning that the tests showcase. So that's my sense of this. I think there's a lot of opinions swirling as one by one colleges start making their plans known for the next cycle. This is a story that will continue to evolve.
Jacques Steinberg:
It sounds like in listening to you, Lee, that another thing that juniors in particular and their parents and their counselors need to be paying attention to this winter and spring, are those announcements from schools saying whether or not they're going to be test optional come the application cycle that begins in the fall.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
So all of this leads to the question of assembling a college list and putting balance on that list and range in that list in terms of perhaps some schools that are test-optional, perhaps some that are not. In terms of headlines on this count, there was a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of days ago with the headline where applications to college have swelled during the past decade. One of the impacts of test-optional policies at some institutions that were trust required is that there has been a surge of applications for that reason perhaps among others.
And the Chronicle quantified it. The average number of applications submitted through the common application, one of the main ways to apply to college to hundreds of schools, rose from 4.63 in 2013 to 6.2 in 2021, '22. So basically on average, students applied, applicants applied to one and a half more schools. So I want to ask you a couple of questions about those figures. First of all, in many parts of the country, even students applying on average to six colleges, sounds like a small number. And it's important for families to know that, that that is the average. Those who feel pressure perhaps to apply to 14, 16, 18 colleges, the latest data is that the average applicant applies to six. But Ronné and Lee, if you are going to be an applicant to college and filling out applications this fall, how do you take into account as you build your list, the fact that some of the schools you may be interested in have had a surge of applications, which means that acceptance rates may have gone down?
Ronné Turner:
So that's a really great observation, and we have experienced, at least on my own campus, we have experienced increases in applications, particularly that first year after COVID when everybody was test optional. But when you approach this process and the approach that I'm going to take with my daughter is that first we are going to figure out institutional matches, schools that she would be very excited to attend, schools that match with her academic, cultural, and social goals and abilities. Then we will go from there.
Yes, we will understand the selectivity at various institutions, but I think when you're hyper-focused on, "Oh my gosh, it's so competitive to get into every single college," which isn't true, that families feel, parents and students feel that they have to apply to more than six or seven schools. I think that that's a bit much. And I don't think we talk enough about academic fit. We talk a lot about personal fit and social fit. We talk a lot about majors, but we don't talk about the academic culture at different institutions. That's different, and not every student fits into an academic culture. I would love it if families would think about that and ask more questions about that in the process.
Lee Coffin:
Ronné, I think that's a really wonderful point. Can you just take it one step further and share how a family might think about academic fit?
Ronné Turner:
Yes. I think that there are, and we all know that there are students who learn differently, or students who may or may not need a little bit more support. They're also students that thrive in a really fast-paced academic institution where the faculty are expecting you to come in at a very high level. There are institutions that specialize in helping students get to a high level over time in their academic career. I think there's several ways that you can find out a bit about the academic culture. One is talk to the faculty, talk with the admissions office. The other thing is look at catalogs. Look at courses that are offered, right? We will often have students applying to our institution. And our institution is one that's academically rigorous. The faculty expects students to come in with a certain level of preparation and they're hitting the ground running.
If you look in our catalog, and if you look at our math offerings, we do not have a lot of lower level math offerings. We do not have a lot of pre-calculus or college algebra offerings, which suggests to you that students are coming in with a different level of preparation. So I would look at the breadth and variety of courses in different academic disciplines that you might be interested in. And again, I said talk with the faculty and talk with students.
A long, long time ago when I was in high school, we had two valedictorians. One chose an Ivy League institution and one chose their flagship state school. And they chose the flagship state school because they wanted to have a different academic experience. They had worked hard their entire high school career and they wanted more balance. They didn't want to be in an environment where they were studying 12 hours a day in order to keep up. So you have to have conversations with your student, with your child about what type of an environment will they be comfortable in. Students can talk a lot about that.
Lee Coffin:
But I think to the headline about swell, here's the inside baseball tip on volume. Just because you have a big applicant pool doesn't mean they're all qualified. So you can get a lot of applications from people who have no academic preparation for that environment, we don't break that out publicly. I also think volume and selectivity land in the category, things you can't control. You can control whether you get into one of those pools. And in doing so, you accept the proposition that the volume requires an admission officer to manage scarcity, because we haven't grown the size of our class. If you don't want that kind of high-stakes volume, as Ronné pointed out from her classmate, there are other options that are wonderful that will not turn your bunsen burner up so hot that your test tube blows up.
Ronné Turner:
I love the way you put that, the test tube blows up.
Lee Coffin:
That happened to me in AP Chemistry, it was like, oops.
Jacques Steinberg:
No, and I think that, look, it's hard to have nuance in a headline. A headline is just a few words, and listeners need to process these stories with nuance to remind themselves there's more than 2000 4-year colleges in this country. The lion share of them admit the majority and then some of those who apply in. Indeed, there are a handful, relatively several dozen, including your institutions that turn away more than they apply. And Lee, just help, for a lister who's new to this process as they think about building balance in terms of selectivity into a college list, while every college list is personal, let's imagine for sake of this exercise, a college list that has 8, 9, 10 schools on it, how do you bring a little bit of balance to it as a counter to that headline about swelling volume?
Lee Coffin:
My advice is always, eight is a good starting point. Two that have selectivity that suggests the odds are long, three or four that are in your sweet spot around my profile in this college lineup. Doesn't mean it's a guaranteed admit, but it means you're that you're a viable competitive candidate. If you're compelling, that's your job. And then two or three options that have a likely outcome, where based on your academic record and maybe the size of the institution where they're able to take more people than a smaller place can accommodate, you're going to have some options. And that two, three, two, two, four, two lineup, you don't want to have it be four ambitious ones and two, and two. You're stacking your search too much towards low odds. One of the things about a place with a very high degree of selectivity, we're reading for fit. Sometimes as we meet a file, it's a high achiever who has not really shown that this is the right place for you and it doesn't always lead to an admit.
Jacques Steinberg:
One last question for me about college lists and how they might be informed by media sources and how to process them. Many families will be exposed, perhaps some for the first time to the US News and World Report rankings. These rankings have for some time been in some circles under fire, particularly in the last year. There've been law schools that have withdrawn from the rankings. Harvard Medical School, just moments before we began recording this podcast withdrew. There's been some concerns including by researchers at Columbia University at the undergraduate level. I'm a high school junior, I'm a parent. In this case, you are, your daughter is. How do you process and incorporate those rankings into your college list, and how do you sort of hold that at bay and focus on things like, as you say, academic and other fit?
Ronné Turner:
That is an excellent question, and I'm really glad that we're going to talk about this at this point in time. I would just use them, if you choose to use them, I would use them as a starting point. The one thing that worries me about rankings is when students and families get so singularly focused on the numerical ranking of an institution, that they do themselves a disservice and are not looking at other institutions that may be a better match, that may have a "lower" numerical ranking. So you have to use things within context. It's not one or the other. It's looking at various pieces of this process so that you are informed but not overly relying on one piece, especially the rankings.
Lee Coffin:
And I think the stories that are coming of institutions, especially in the professional and graduate school realm pulling out are a nod to the conversation that has been dominating the college admission landscape for 30 years, which is how valid are these rankings and how do we reorient the conversation away from a one through whatever list, and towards a more holistic assessment of program fit people? So I think for a parent seeing a story about an institution saying, "We're out of the rankings," that's a good sign that you have permission to not buy the magazine, or to listen, read it and shrug and move on.
I think it's a healthy reset. Last season we had a whole episode on rankings, which came out with a surprise and conclusion that most of the college counselors thought they were valuable at the beginning of a search as an organizing principle, but not determinative. And I think that's still a really good piece of advice as juniors start mapping out plans and as seniors anticipate a decision in a couple of months to... You might go to the lowest-ranked place and you might have four places that admit you, and number four is the one that makes you smile. Go to number four.
Charlotte Albright:
So now let's move on to something stressful, but maybe in a different sense. Jacques, what have you got on your plate?
Jacques Steinberg:
So since the late 1970s, college admissions officers have been permitted to, legally permitted, to consider race as a factor in a college admissions decision. I say a factor, one factor among many factors, including many that have been cited throughout this podcast. Currently, those policies are being challenged at two institutions, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Those challenges have reached the US Supreme Court, and a decision is anticipated in late spring. Lee and Ronné, imagine you are a student or the parent of a student who is applying in this cycle after that decision is rendered a decision, I should say, that we don't know the outcome of. What advice would you give to families as they start to see more headlines on a potentially seismic change in the way admissions offices do what they do?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, you're asking this question the day after this was a front page story in the New York Times suggesting college admissions as we know it is about to change forever. I will confess, I yelled at the newspaper because I thought it was a piece of premature story time. The ruling has not come down yet. My fellow admission officers around the country are paying attention. We're trying to plan, but it's hard to plan something that hasn't been adjudicated. So I think we assume something's about to happen, and it very well may, but it might not. So I think two things are happening. I think on the college side, we are all having conversations about what I call the principle of access and diversity in higher education. That is not up for grabs. The colleges of America still value social mobility, social justice, the ability to bring people from diverse backgrounds onto our campuses.
How we do that is what this lawsuit addresses, and TBD, what the court tells us we can or cannot do. But if the standard shifts, that one factor among many no longer includes race, an applicant still has an identity that is undivorcable from their person. So colleges are going to continue to meet whole people and their stories, and value them for the voices and the perspectives they bring to our campuses.
So I would caution that stories before the ruling are all speculative. After we get to a ruling, okay, then we know what the justices have decided and how we are going to respond. Then I think this is a huge story to cover as we all think aloud together. But right now we're wondering. So to part two of your question, Jacques, if you are a student from an underrepresented background and you're a junior or a sophomore or beyond in school and you're like, "By the time I apply, I don't know that this will be part of my application." And I guess my sincere reassurance is how could it not be part of your application? It is part of your story, and that colleges will do what we can do legally to honor our work that we're currently doing.
Ronné Turner:
The one thing that I would add, if you are a student from an underrepresented racial background, do not let this impending decision deter you from applying to college or from thinking that higher education, colleges and universities won't value you as an individual and the perspectives that you bring. That is what I'm worried about. And that's what I'm hearing from some students is that with this affirmative action case, my race, and not being able to identify that, I shouldn't apply to college as a result. If it's not important, I shouldn't apply to college. And please do not do that. Apply to college. Do the search. Do everything that you're doing because it's still valuable to us. Diversity, diversity of perspectives is still valuable to institutions.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, Lee, I think when you talked about telling your story, that raises the whole interesting topic of essay writing because that's where a lot of people tell these stories. But, Jacques talked about some headlines are better than others. You shouldn't just stop at the headline. But I got to tell you, one of the NPR headlines that I like the best over the last couple of weeks I'm going to read to you. Here it is. A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you, but it's still not an A plus student. And I'll read a little more in case you've not been keeping up with chat bot news. Why do your homework when a chatbot can do it for you? A new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT has thrilled the internet with its superhuman abilities to solve math problems, churn out college essays and write research papers.
And to that, for this podcast we might add, and write college application essays. Now that article was on NPR on December 19th. Emma Bowman wrote it. On January 9th, Emma Bowman reported a little bit of a follow-up, which is that a college student has created an app that can tell whether AI wrote an essay. But the whole issue may sound like, we journalists call a kicker, at the end of the podcast, kind of a lighthearted story. But how lighthearted is it?
Lee Coffin:
It makes me sad is my honest opening sentence. The essays have always been one of my favorite parts of a student's storytelling. I think about the idea that this central component of a story could be manufactured by someone other than the applicant is disheartening. And I think I'm just getting older and frustrated by the digitalization of the world. I worry that we're in the matrix now and that everything around us is virtual. To me, if we see lots of plagiarism, I'm going to call it that, where someone is submitting an essay that they didn't write, at some point, if there's no testing and there's no essays and you know, start to strip away all of the components that make an application sing or inform it, what's the point? What are we doing?
And just the authenticity of it bothers me. So I joked with someone today, we were talking about this in the office and I said, "When I was in college, the professors would pass out a blue book and you had to handwrite your essay in the blue book and turn it in. Maybe everything old is new again, and we're not going to allow students to do essay submissions that are typed through the internet and you're going to have to write it with a proctor watching and that's your college essay of the future. As, I mean that seems so antediluvian, but might be where we end up.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, that's exactly what some college professors are doing. They're actually asking students to handwrite their essays. The problem with that is, at least my students, they weren't taught handwriting.
Lee Coffin:
I just think the moral of the story, whether it's a chatbot, whether it's test prep, whether it's somebody overly helping you shape your story when you apply, this is your application and it's a moment to bring yourself forward in your own words and give us your best work. And to look in the mirror at the end of that and say, "Do I feel good about something I didn't even write." But I think as I answered this one, Charlotte and Jacques, I'm feeling wistful about an admission process that's shifting. I mean, these last two questions about holistic review and what can we consider about chatbots writing essays are part of the noise that flaps around this process and it's not something that makes me smile.
Charlotte Albright:
I want to ask a question of all three of you, because Jacques has been in the business of writing about college applications and the college admissions process and higher education for a long time. What hasn't changed? What is still constant about this process that people can count on and feel reassured by no matter how often the headlines change?
Jacques Steinberg:
I've spent a good bit of my professional life, quite literally following around people like Ronné and Lee and dozens of their colleagues. I would argue that one thing that hasn't changed is the people who do this work are deeply committed to making their institutions accessible and are deeply committed to making sure that every applicant has the floor to make their case, to tell their story, and to make their case of why they think that they would be a fit. For all the noise that we've picked up from our listening post of this podcast, I would argue that that is not going to change.
Charlotte Albright:
Ronné?
Ronné Turner:
I was going to say exactly that, that this is a profession of people who care deeply about students accessing higher education and making a good fit however you define fit, and we care about individual applicants. And that hasn't changed at all since I started over 30 years ago.
Lee Coffin:
We're recording this in mid-January. So I'm two weeks into my 32nd reading season, that period from New Year's Day to the end of March where you one by one, read the files, evaluate them, ultimately make decisions, but then now we're in pure reading mode. And that hasn't changed. I'm not using a pen. I used to have a pen and I would take notes on a kind of piece of manila, I don't want to say cardboard, but it was called a work card. And I would write out my hieroglyphic notes on the file I just read. Now it's all online and I'm typing it into my MacBook. But I'm still reading. I'm still thinking, I'm still meeting 17 and 18-year-olds from all around the world.
What has not changed is the hopefulness that is organically part of college admission. You see families of all backgrounds looking at Wash U, Dartmouth, or peer schools everywhere saying this institution is a gateway that's something new and we help bring people there.
So that hasn't changed. The way we read is different mechanically, but the spirit of it, crystal clear, 1990 to the present. So Charlotte, Jacques, Ronné, we've covered a lot of ground. I think the moral of the stories we've been telling about headlines and just be discerning as you read the story. There's that old cliché, don't believe everything you read in the paper. I think these stories always have kernels of truth, if not lots of kernels that make a bowl of popcorn.
Sometimes the thrust of it gets people more amped up than is helpful. And if you catch yourself getting alarmed, ask your guidance counselor. If you're on a campus, raise your hand in the info session and ask the admission officer, "Hey, I read this, and now fill in the blank about college admissions. What's the scoop?" And we'll be happy to share our point of view. This has been one of those topics that I think we could have gone on another hour, but next week we'll be back for another episode of Admissions Beat. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.